No Guts, No Second Term
The Tea Party could have been a tiny afterthought, ridiculed or ignored by the many Republicans who switched to supporting Barack Obama.
President Obama could have been riding high on approval ratings that virtually guaranteed his re-election in 2012.
These two things would have been logical sequelae to his brilliant first term if his first term had featured serious political courage instead of mere charismatic speechmaking. Barack Obama, so far, is a coward, unfortunately, and unfit to really lead. He might have made a fine president in an easy era of prosperity and fat surpluses, but he is a poor choice when it comes to choosing a champion, someone who will fight for the people instead of caving in to the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and the other crackers. Indeed, Barack Obama could have shown the world how to eclipse the job growth rate of Texas under Rick Perry only by making the environment cleaner, not dirty like Perry, and by improving health care, not making it inaccessible like Perry, and by strengthening education rather than cutting it and dumbing it like Perry.
How? How could our first black president have possibly achieved all those things in the aftermath of a Bush warmaking spending spree that wasted so much of the gas from the tank?
Well, he would have needed to come in swinging, ready to fight, politically, for the people, instead of ready to compromise. I teach in the field of Conflict Resolution and the basic negotiating lesson here is that you always compromise on those items which can be shifted around until everyone gets a fair deal, but you never compromise on basic ethical principle. Barack Obama could have had the principle that the welfare of the people comes before the welfare of the owner class. He could have assembled a scrappy team that knew how to frame legislation that would be radical in its shifts toward benefiting average working people. There are historical precedents, of course, and he could have used them and improved them.
Barack Obama inherited a major economic mess, created for the most part by the Bush regime. When Franklin Roosevelt inherited a disastrous economy created by Republican lack of governmental regulation, he made bold new policy that put millions to work building infrastructure still enjoyed by all Americans and everyone who visits, from park lodges and trails to beautiful bridges. Roosevelt didn’t do that by turning over $ trillions to the same financiers who had created the Great Depression. He created government programs that put people to work, making the most of the skills they already had and teaching skills to young ones.
The Civilian Conservation Corps operated from 1933-1942 and focused on providing work for some 2.5 million young unmarried men, on projects that conserved and developed natural resources on public lands. The Works Progress Administration operated from 1935-1943 and provided about eight million jobs, focusing on the goal of one job per family where they had been unemployed for a long period. Updating these sorts of programs to reflect our current gender mores, population growth, and infrastructure needs would be a hard sell to a Republican Congress. But Barack Obama is going to to have a harder sell to the vastly hurting and disappointed America electorate if he can’t make those sorts of hard sells to other politicians.
Roosevelt gave folks what they needed. His base was so huge he couldn’t lose, even though corporate officials dreamt of his ouster. His radical executive moves provide a blueprint and that blueprint has so far been ignored by Obama. His paradigm is closer to Rumsfeldian–privatize everything that the government does in order to massively enrich the owner class–than Rooseveltian, which angered the owner class and saved working families.
Can Obama grow a backbone and save anything at his late date? Stranger things have happened, but so far all his moves have been classic cave-ins to bullies. We usually elect people who will stand up to bullies. We thought he would and, so far, we have been wrong. We’ll see how this plays, starting with his upcoming speech. It will either be a revolutionary departure from his corporate bailout model or it will fall flat in failure, and his fate will be sealed.
Tom H. Hastings (pcwtom@gmail.com) teaches in the graduate program of Conflict Resolution at Portland State University and offers his personal views here.
Spreading War Instead Of Democracy
Spreading War: Kerry’s Gift To Syria
We spent much of the 19th century spreading US hegemony in several directions, starting with owning slaves and stealing both native lands and Mexican lands, and, toward the end, invading and overthrowing governments in Central America. We only invaded Canada once.
We spent much of the 20th century making the world safe for democracy whoops US corporations. Mostly, we won–got rid of some threats to US interests who happened to be elected by their people but who were unfriendly to predatory capitalism. Mohammed Mossaddegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Salvador Allende in Chile come to mind. These are the sorts of cases that make the world somewhat suspicious and of course the illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq based on two Big Lies feed into that mistrust.
Why, then, would the Obama administration, in the person of John Kerry, offer to assist the Free Syrian Army? It looks like it fits the pattern, the Yes-he’s-a-son-of-a-bitch-but-he’s-our-son-of-a-bitch routine, where we pick an armed thug or a bunch of them, give them weapons and training, and expect them to be US-corporate-friendly at the end of the day, plus providing war profiteers upfront profits immediately by grabbing US taxpayer money, shoveling it into the accounts of corporations. Which corporations? All corporations. Seriously.
Just a tiny example, only a couple of brief notes from just one day of Pentagon contracts, from Friday, March 1, only a select few:
There were more, of course. I mean, when you are tasked with spending a half a $trillion each year, you need to keep it flowing out and flowing heavy in many directions. You’ll hear nothing but dire threat complaining from the military about their budget, of course–if a general fails to kvetch they can find another who will. Really, however, when will it finally become poor form to talk poor mouth with their mouths full?
Creating conflict, nurturing threat, all requires violence capacity-building, and John Kerry is fitting right into that groove right away. The results will be fabulous, no doubt. The contracts for more non lethal military aid to the Free Syrian Army will begin to appear in the DOD daily contract listings and already, just on the great news of Kerry’s support, the FSA is promising to widen the war into Lebanon and, while they are at it, Iraq! Nice going, John! We’ve done so so much to help inflame hatred and violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq and now you’ve helped spread that more assuredly and now violently into Syria and Lebanon–and doubling back on Iraq yet again. What a Secretary of State.
President Obama, are you paying any attention to John? There are Syrians who still believe in nonviolence, know how to wage a nonviolent campaign, and every time we pay attention and pay money to the violent rebels we make it all worse. You thought it couldn’t get worse? It’s about to, thanks to US help. State Department should be about spreading real democracy, about enlightenment, about reason and rational discourse and indigenous decision, not about military aid to the least worst armed bunch.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings directs PeaceVoice.