Weekend with Cockburn

[Felix The Assassin]

From my favorite internet author:

The Fall of Obama
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s an impossible hand to play. Obama is close to being finished.

The nation’s first black president promised change at the precise moment when no single man, even if endowed with the communicative powers of Franklin Roosevelt, the politic mastery of Lyndon Johnson, the brazen agility of Bill Clinton, could turn the tide that has been carrying America to disaster for 30 years.

This summer many Americans are frightened. Over 100,000 of them file for bankruptcy every month. Three million homeowners face foreclosure this year. Add them to the 2.8 million who were foreclosed in 2009, Obama’s first year in office. Nearly seven million have been without jobs in the last year for six months or longer. By the time you tot up the people who have given up looking for work and the people on part-time, the total is heading toward 20 million.

Fearful people are irrational. So are racists. Obama is the target of insane charges. A hefty percentage of Americans believe that he is a socialist – a charge as ludicrous as accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of being a closet Druid. Obama reveres the capitalist system. He admires the apex predators of Wall Street who showered his campaign treasury with millions of dollars. The frightful catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico stemmed directly from the green light he and his Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, gave to BP.

It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years America’s policy – under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton – has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here, in the homeland, and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

No stimulus program, giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the federal interstate highway system, is going to bring those jobs back. Highly trained tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping hamburgers – at best – for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the “free trade” lobby.

It is not Obama’s fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the 1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires. It’s not his fault that every tax break, every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was the neoliberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid 1970s.

But it is Obama’s fault that he did not understand this, that always, from the getgo, he flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would face if he really fought against the prevailing arrangements that were destroying America. He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see that the promise was empty.

It’s Obama’s fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the nation from its fears. From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends at Harvard and his later corporate patrons. Self-control was his passport to the guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore America’s credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.

So, now Americans in increasing numbers have lost confidence in him. For the first time in the polls negative assessments outnumber the positive. He no longer commands trust. His support is drifting down to 40 per cent. The straddle that allowed him to flatter corporate chieftains at the same time as blue-collar workers now seems like the most vapid opportunism. The casual campaign pledge to wipe out al-Quaida in Afghanistan is now being cashed out in a disastrous campaign viewed with dismay by a majority of Americans.

The polls portend disaster. It now looks as though the Republicans may well recapture not only the House but, conceivably, the Senate as well. The public mood is so contrarian that, even though polls show that voters think the Democrats may well have better solutions on the economy than Republicans, they will vote against incumbent Democrats in the midterm elections next fall. They just want to throw the bums out.

Obama has sought out Bill Clinton to advise him in this desperate hour. If Clinton is frank, he will remind Obama that his own hopes for a progressive first term were destroyed by the failure of his health reform in the spring of 1993. By August of that year, he was importing a Republican, David Gergen, to run the White House.

Obama had his window of opportunity last year, when he could have made jobs and financial reform his prime objectives. That’s what Americans hoped for. Mesmerized by economic advisers who were creatures of the banks, he instead plunged into the Sargasso Sea of “health reform,” wasted the better part of a year, and ended up with something that pleases no one.

What can save Obama now? It’s hard even to identify a straw he can grasp at. It’s awfully early in the game to say it, but, as Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, “your future is all used up.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07162010.html

[SpiritWarrior]

Weekend with what?

[Gabrielles blades]

what a truly unfortunate last name to have.

and as for obama, i think i like the health care bill. Hopefully after its been fully implemented the next president can patch it up to work better.

It is too bad the economy wont ever get fixed though; in order to fix it we basically need to change how americans live and work at their most basic level which has been set in stone since well before this last century. The rich will always be rich because of the poor and middle class. And when the poor/middle classes no longer have any money to spend on anything but the basics the rich will become an endangered class since no one but the rich will have any money to frivolously spend.

[Timber Loftis]

Originally Posted by Gabrielles blades It is too bad the economy wont ever get fixed though; in order to fix it we basically need to change how americans live and work at their most basic level which has been set in stone since well before this last century.

It's actually not that hard to get the basic fixes going. Undo the 1997 repeal of Glass-Steagal. This will again forbid firms from being both banks and investment houses. Undo all of the favors Wall Street got since then -- e.g., immunity from regulation by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, ability to count their shares of commodities the same as farmer's shares (allowing them to uncap the market and print commodities), etc.

The fixes aren't that hard, you just have to focus on redoing all of the legal limitations that were put in place after the banks caused the Great Depression, and that for some reason were all undone under Clinton and Bush, mostly at the behest of Greenspan and Lautner.

Edited to note: The recent "financial reform" legislation fell far short of any of these simple goals. It didn't undo much of what was done wrong between 1997 and now, and it created yet a new bureaucracy to manage financial futures when the CFTC would have been fine. I'm sure in 10 or 20 years we'll find this new agency so captured by Wall Street that it will look like MMS where the regulators were busily doing hookers & blow with the drilling companies they were supposed to be regulating.

[Hindsight]

..though you were talking about "Bruce". Which would have been very cool!

[Hivetyrant]

Originally Posted by Gabrielles blades what a truly unfortunate last name to have.

True that, we have a guy at work with that last name, which I mentioned.

He was VERY quick to correct me.. Apparently it should be pronounced "co-burn"