( abridged )
The word that immediately rolled off of every tongue after the presidential election was "historic." And rightly so. A Black family in the White House is truly a momentous event.
There were some surprises. One was that the election was not over after the Democratic convention. By usual indicators, the opposition party should have had a landslide victory during a severe economic crisis, after eight years of disastrous policies on all fronts including the worst record on job growth of any post-war president and a rare decline in median wealth, an incumbent so unpopular that his own party had to disavow him, and a dramatic collapse in US standing in world opinion. The Democrats did win, barely. If the financial crisis had been slightly delayed, they might not have.
A good question is why the margin of victory for the opposition party was so small, given the circumstances. One possibility is that neither party reflected public opinion at a time when 80% think the country is going in the wrong direction and that the government is run by "a few big interests looking out for themselves," not for the people, and a stunning 94% object that government does not attend to public opinion. As many studies show, both parties are well to the right of the population on many major issues, domestic and international.
It could be argued that no party speaking for the public would be viable in a society that is business-run to an unusual extent. Evidence for that is substantial. At a very general level, evidence is provided by the predictive success of political economist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory" of politics, which holds that policies tend to reflect the wishes of the powerful blocs that invest every four years to control the state. More specific illustrations are numerous. To mention just one, for 60 years the US has failed to ratify the core principle of international labor law, which guarantees freedom of association. Legal analysts call it "the untouchable treaty in American politics," and observe that there has never even been any debate about the matter...
The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama "Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008," easily beating out Apple. The industry's prime task is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices, thus undermining market theories. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy the same way...
In the liberal Boston Globe, the headline of the lead story observed that Obama's "grass-roots strategy leaves few debts to interest groups": labor unions, women, minorities, or other "traditional Democratic constituencies." That is only partially right, because massive funding by concentrated sectors of capital is ignored. But leaving that detail aside, the report is correct in saying that Obama's hands are not tied, because his only debt is to "a grass-roots army of millions" - who took instructions, but contributed essentially nothing to formulating his program...
Obama's organizers regard the network they constructed "as a mass movement with unprecedented potential to influence voters," the Los Angeles Times reported. The movement, organized around the "Obama brand" can pressure Congress to "hew to the Obama agenda." But they are not to develop ideas and programs and call on their representatives to implement them. These would be among the "old ways of doing politics" from which the new "idealists" are "breaking free."
Turning to the future, what can we realistically expect of an Obama administration? We have two sources of information: actions and rhetoric.
The most important actions to date are selection of staff. The first selection was for vice-President: Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion among Senate Democrats, a long-time Washington insider, who consistently votes with his fellow Democrats but not always, as when he supported a measure to make it harder for individuals to erase debt by declaring bankruptcy.
The first post-election appointment was for the crucial position of chief of staff: Rahm Emanuel, one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion among House Democrats and like Biden, a long-term Washington insider. Emanuel is also one of the biggest recipients of Wall Street campaign contributions, the Center for Responsive Politics reports. He "was the top House recipient in the 2008 election cycle of contributions from hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry." Since being elected to Congress in 2002, he "has received more money from individuals and PACs in the securities and investment business than any other industry"; these are also among Obama's top donors. His task is to oversee Obama's approach to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, for which his and Obama's funders share ample responsibility.
In an interview with an editor of the Wall Street Journal, Emanuel was asked what the Obama administration would do about "the Democratic congressional leadership, which is brimming with left-wing barons who have their own agenda," such as slashing defense spending (in accord with the will of the majority of the population) and "angling for steep energy taxes to combat global warming," not to speak of the outright lunatics in Congress who toy with slavery reparations and even sympathize with Europeans who want to indict Bush administration war criminals for war crimes. "Barack Obama can stand up to them," Emanuel assured the editor. The administration will be "pragmatic," fending off left extremists.
The business press reviewed the records of Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, which met on November 7 to determine how to deal with the financial crisis. In Bloomberg News, Jonathan Weil concluded that "Many of them should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses right about now, not places in Obama's inner circle." About half "have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both." Is it really plausible that "they won't mistake the nation's needs for their own corporate interests?" He also pointed out that chief of staff Emanuel "was a director at Freddie Mac in 2000 and 2001 while it was committing accounting fraud..."
A majority of the public has long favored a national health care system, which should be far less expensive and more effective, comparative evidence indicates (along with many studies). As recently as 2004, any government intervention in the health care system was described in the press as "politically impossible" and "lacking political support" - meaning: opposed by the insurance industry, pharmaceutical corporations, and others who count. In 2008, however, first Edwards, then Obama and Clinton, advanced proposals that approach what the public has long preferred. These ideas now have "political support." What has changed? Not public opinion, which remains much as before. But by 2008, major sectors of power, primarily manufacturing industry, had come to recognize that they are being severely damaged by the privatized health care system. Hence the public will is coming to have "political support." There is a long way to go, but the shift tells us something about dysfunctional democracy...
Internationally, there is not much of substance on the largely blank slate. What there is gives little reason to expect much a change from Bush's second term, which stepped back from the radical ultranationalism and aggressive posture of the first term, also discarding some of the extreme hawks and opponents of democracy (in action, that is, not soothing words), like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz... The immediate issues have to do mostly with the Middle East. On Israel-Palestine, rumors are circulating that Obama might depart from the US rejectionism that has blocked a political settlement for over 30 years, with rare exceptions, notably for a few days in January 2001 before promising negotiations were called off prematurely by Israel. The record, however, provides no basis for taking the rumors seriously.
On Iraq, Obama has frequently been praised for his "principled opposition" to the war. In reality, as he has made clear, his opposition has been entirely unprincipled throughout. The war, he said, is a "strategic blunder..." Presumably, Obama also accepts the more expansive Bush doctrine that the US not only has the right to invade countries as it chooses (unless it is a "blunder," too costly to us), but also to attack others that Washington claims are supporting resistance to its aggression. In particular, Obama has, it seems, not criticized the raids by Predator drones that have killed many civilians in Pakistan.
For Iran, Obama supports tough direct diplomacy "without preconditions" in order "to pressure Iran directly to change their troubling behavior," namely pursuing a nuclear program and supporting terrorism (presumably referring to support for Hamas and Hezbollah). If Iran abandons its troubling behavior, the US might move towards normal diplomatic and economic relations. "If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation." And as Obama informed the Israeli Lobby (AIPAC), "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon" - up to nuclear war, if he meant what he said...
The final mention of Iran is in the context of Obama's strong support for Israel's "Right to Self Defense" and its "right to protect its citizens." This commitment is demonstrated by Obama's co-sponsorship of "a Senate resolution against Iran and Syria's involvement in the war, and insisting that Israel should not be pressured into a ceasefire that did not deal with the threat of Hezbollah missiles." The reference is to Israel's US-backed invasion of Lebanon in 2006, with pretexts that are hardly credible in light of Israel's regular practices. This invasion, Israel's fifth, killed over 1000 Lebanese and once again destroyed much of southern Lebanon as well as parts of Beirut. This is the sole mention of Lebanon among foreign policy issues on Obama's website. Evidently, Lebanon has no right of self defense. In fact who could possibly have a right of self defense against the US or its clients?
Nor does Iran have such rights. Among specialists, even rational hawks, it is well understood that if Iran is pursuing a weapons program, it is for deterrence. In the conservative National Interest, former CIA weapons inspector David Kay speculates that Iran might be moving towards "nuclear weapons capability," with the "strategic goal" of countering a US threat that "is real in Teheran's eyes," for good reasons that he reviews. He notes further that "Perhaps the biggest agitator of all in this is the United States, with its abbreviated historical memory and diplomatic ADD..."
The leading neoconservative expert on Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht, formerly in the CIA Middle East division, wrote in 2000 that:
Tehran certainly wants nuclear weapons; and its reasoning is not illogical. Iran was gassed into surrender in the first Persian Gulf War; Pakistan, Iran's ever more radicalized Sunni neighbor to the southeast, has nuclear weapons... and Israel could, of course blow the Islamic Republic to bits. Having been vanquished by a technologically superior Iraq at a cost of at least a half-million men, Iran knows very well the consequences of having insufficient deterrence. And the Iranians possess the essential factor to make deterrence work: sanity. Tehran or Isfahan in ashes would destroy the Persian soul, about which even the most hard-line cleric cares deeply. As long as the Iranians believe that either the U.S. or Israel or somebody else in the region might retaliate with nuclear weapons, they won't do something stupid.
Gerecht also understands very well the real "security problem" posed by Iranian nuclear weapons, should it acquire them:
A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would of course check, if not checkmate, the United States' maneuvering room in the Persian Gulf. We would no doubt think several times about responding to Iranian terrorism or military action if Tehran had the bomb and a missile to deliver it... For the "left" and the "right," this weaponry is the ultimate guarantee of Iran's defense, its revolution, and its independence as a regional great power.
While as usual ignored as irrelevant to policy formation, American public opinion is close to that of serious analysts and also to world opinion. Large majorities oppose threats against Iran, thus rejecting the Bush-Obama position that the US must be an outlaw state, violating the UN Charter, which bars the threat of force. The public also joins the majority of the world's states in endorsing Iran's right, as a signer of the NPT, to enrich uranium for nuclear energy (the position endorsed also by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kissinger and others when Iran was ruled by the tyrant imposed by US-UK subversion). Most important, the public favors establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East, which would mitigate and perhaps eliminate this highly threatening issue.
These observations suggest an interesting thought experiment. What would be the content of the "Obama brand" if the public were to become "participants" rather than mere "spectators in action"? It is an experiment well worth undertaking, and there is good reason to suppose that the results might point the way to a saner and more decent world. // chomsky, 11.25.08, znet
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