Obama Needs Our Help-Now!

When Barack Obama arrives in office he will do so with an unprecedented burden of responsibility and expectation.

        The American presidency is said to be the most powerful political office in the world but it is also a captive position. It is reassuring that Obama appears to have the talent and intelligence to be a very good and even great president. One man though cannot change the course of American politics and that is what is going to be required to save his country and overhaul a hopelessly corrupt financial system. Obama will do well just by beginning reforms that subsequent presidents must add to and follow through on. A mess that came about over decades of pathetic political leadership is going to take an equal amount of time to undo-if we are lucky.

Obama will be boxed by a vicious status quo that will fight any reforms and try to get away with mere cosmetics and thwart any real change to the free market unregulated capitalism which goes to the very heart of defining  America. Even now the clueless George Bush laments such terms as socialism, nationalization of banks, and reregulation but these are only some of the very first steps that must be taken- nothing to do with ideology just common sense.

We are seeing now what happens when the fox is left in charge of the hen house-one very bloody mess.

Obama’s own party, the Democrats are part of the problem.  They allowed themselves to be co-opted. They voted for war when they should not have. They condoned irresponsible spending. They turned a blind eye to rampant constitutional abuse, torture, flagrant abuses of international  and domestic law and they failed to impeach. Not only does a huge burden fall on the shoulders of Obama so too on the Democratic Party. If they are unwilling to cleanse their sins of omission and act in concert with a reform minded president all is lost.            

 America for its own sake and the sake of others is going to have to go from unbounded arrogance to humble contrition. As the world’s leading hegemonic power, both financial and militarily, it has been very aggressively minding everybody else’s business; now everybody else must mind theirs.  Because we live in a globalized economy and because of America’s hegemonic power we all become shareholders in how this crisis is resolved.  America’s allies can no longer be lapdogs to its imperial ambitions or victims of economic models that are catastrophically flawed and corrupt.

The U.S. has always practiced a peculiar sort of multilateralism simply defined as: Multilateralism when convenient and unilateralism as necessary. Unfortunately, it  most often opts for the latter. Obama claims to be committed to multilateralist values and this crisis will quickly take the measure of his commitment. If he and his country continue to insist on an arrogant unilateralism it will only seal his country’s fate as a declining economic power, eclipsed by the emerging economies of China, India  and South America.              

In a Fox News interview with anchor Shepard Smith, presidential candidate Ralph Nader suggested only time will tell if  Barack Obama is going to be an “Uncle Sam for the people of  this country, or an Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.”  By this statement Nader bluntly identifies one of the most momentous issues of the Obama presidency. In other terms he is posing the question: Is the country going to be run in the interests of greedy self-serving corporations or in the interests of average Americans, and indeed people around the world?  This crisis is not only financial but political. It is a failure of leadership going back to the time of Reagan, Thatcher, includes the Clinton Democrats, and America’s Western cheerleaders(Canada prominent among them) who were such willing victims.

The “giant corporations” thrive where they can co-opt government and keep it dysfunctional.  One of the fundamental reasons this crisis came about is because governments and politicians of every stripe were all too willing to abdicate their responsibility to their societies at large- leaving the fox in charge. Governments everywhere were all too willing, especially in America, to collapse the social welfare state in favor of the corporate welfare state. We are truly waging class warfare where the public good competes with the corporate good for the favor of our political elites.  So far the public good has been no more than spectator as it is pillaged by corporate greed and political ineptitude. There is a balance to be corrected.

One of the most astounding revelations resulting from the crisis is that governments, with the wink of an eye, can lay their hands on trillions of dollars to bail out incompetent bankers and neoliberal swindlers; but when it comes to laying their hands on a few billion more for social programs they plead poverty. The social welfare state is a bargain compared to the freeloading corporate welfare state.

Millions of Americans lack basic health care coverage and 22,000 a year die because of no coverage- more than the number of homicides. Canadians who do have universal medical are going to have to be wary that our Medicare does not fall victim to government cost cutting using the crisis as an excuse to do so.

Canadians and Americans alike should be sending our respective governments the message loud and clear that cost cuts where necessary are directed at military spending. This is especially true in the US where military spending is out of control and needs to be reigned in. The hundreds of billions of dollars the US is spending abroad on military adventurism now needs to be spent at home rebuilding the financially gutted homeland. 

Where the US refused to harvest a peace dividend with the collapse of the USSR it is now a matter of economic necessity.  Nor should America’s allies allow themselves to be coerced into further military spending for the sake of conflicts that are too often the result of corrupted and unenlightened foreign policy and inflated to justify hegemonic ambitions.

The immediate cancellation of Missile Defense would go a very long way to rehabilitating America’s tattered international reputation and open the door to reconciliation with its overblown enemies.    

America has a wealth of very talented economists and capable administrators. Even so retreads from the Clinton administration are being stuffed into their old positions. One has to wonder why new talent is not being tapped for the top jobs. One very obvious candidate is Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, easily one of the country’s most talented economists and one relatively free of ideology.

Bill Clinton was often accused of being, “The best Republican president the Democrats ever elected.”  Obama cannot fall into this trap. If he is to have any success he must distance himself not only from his own voting record, many of his campaign positions and the Clinton Democrats. His regime must have his stamp and that means bringing in new fresh talent and Americans should insist on this. Obama has to create a new mindset in Washington and this will not be achieved by re-deploying the ideologues of past administrations who were complicit in the present crisis.

The Obama presidency cannot be allowed to fall victim to an intransigent status quo. His success as president will require grassroot proactivism on the part of reform minded Americans to offset the powerful influence corporations and Right-wing think tanks have on government policy; to say nothing of an utterly hopeless mainstream media. Also,  America’s allies must be both supportive and critical agents.