Matt Stoller’s provocative piece “
The Progressive Case Against Obama”
is a passionate, well-reasoned argument as to why “progressives,” even
in swing states, should refuse to vote for President Obama. While I do
not have Stoller’s political bona fides, I, like him, have spent a
lifetime in “radical” and progressive politics, and served for eight
years under Jerry Brown when he was governor of California — in other
words, I possess some real-world political experience. I also have about
40 years of age on Stoller, and would like to offer the value of that
perspective in refuting what I believe to be several distortions in this
piece, which, if taken literally, could conceivably throw the election
to Mitt Romney with more disastrous consequences than Stoller may have
considered.
Stoller argues, and for the record, I agree, that
under President Obama’s administration economic inequity in America has
grown to staggering proportions. He holds Obama personally responsible
for turning down a deal from Hank Paulson where, in return for rapid
distribution of the second round of TARP funds, Paulson would press the
banks to write down mortgages and save millions of foreclosures.
According to Rep. Barney Frank and Stoller, the president nixed this
deal, saved the banks and screwed homeowners. This is a damning charge,
and I’m embarrassed to say that I believe it is true. It is one among a
number of charges against the president that discourage and offend me:
his reversal of single-payer healthcare, extra-judicial killings; the
extension of imperial presidential powers and extensions of needless
secrecy and attacks against whistle-blowers, the reliance on predator
drones and death lists, to name a few.
Stoller presses us to
consider President Obama responsible for all the above, and demands that
we ask, “What kind of America has he [President Obama] actually
delivered,” and this is where his argument begins to get wonky.
The
drive toward corporate dominance of our political life (literal
Fascism) began in earnest after Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 when
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hired soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice
Lewis Powell to write a white paper on threats to the American way of
life. Justice Powell identified two dominant enemies — consumer
activists (particularly Ralph Nader) and environmentalists — as sources
of major concern for the future. His report went on to create the
blueprint of think tanks, publishing houses, social strategies and media
assault that right-wing millionaires and billionaires, like the Coors,
the Kochs and others, have generously funded for more than 40 years,
transforming the American political vocabulary and framing of ideas
about government and freedom in the process.
In
so doing, their concentrated wealth and leverage of the media have
conscripted presidents of both parties, and the entire Congress, as a
concierge for their interests. If Ronald Reagan had not snipped the
words “fair and balanced” from FCC-enabling legislation we would not
have hate radio and Fox News today. If President Clinton had not
overseen the demise of Glass-Steagall we would not have witnessed the
rampant Wall Street speculation, fraud and collapse of our financial
system that President Obama inherited. If Clinton had not signed the
Telecommunications Act, delivering the public’s airwaves to a few major
corporations, or GATT/NAFTA, bankrupting millions of Mexican farmers (no
standing on our street corners seeking work) and shipping jobs to the
Third World, we would be inhabiting a very different America today, one
with a far more open and less biased public discourse.
I mention
this, because there is an unsettling “personal” quality to Stoller’s
assault on the president; an imbalanced, somewhat adolescent tenor to
his outrage at the fact that the president could have once used illegal
drugs but is currently the titular head of the War on Drugs. By making
him single-handedly responsible for having “delivered” all current
afflictions to America, Stoller simultaneously demonizes the president
and makes him more powerful than virtually any figure in our political
history.
President Obama was not the architect of these policies.
He may be the tip of the iceberg, which we can identify dead ahead of
our Ship of State, but capital and its minions have been working
carefully and closely behind the scenes for decades, disenfranchising
workers, voters, women and minorities. Like frogs resting comfortably in
gradually heating water, we are just now apparently noticing how close
to boiling our environment is. While Democrats have concentrated on a
plethora of issues, the corporatists have worked unremittingly to gain
power over the entire financial sector of the Nation.
It is
impossible to imagine any candidate running for office that did not have
the imprimatur of the American corporate sector. They own the 18 inches
of counter and the cash register. They fan out their products as if
they were all available for consumer choice –. and they are. Would you
prefer a cool, slender, brilliant black attorney who looks like he
stepped out of a Colors of Benetton ad or a strong-jawed white man who
reminds us of the “good old ’50s” when white people could do whatever
the hell they wanted? A Bible-thumping Baptist? They’ve got them all,
and we mistake our “freedom” to choose among them as liberty. The media
colludes with the candidates in repeating their narratives and faux
populist roles until the entire spectacle of elections appears
indistinguishable from a reality show.
Despite raising
unprecedented amounts of money from “the little people,” 60 percent of
Obama’s first presidential campaign was funded by big donors. He was
Wall Street’s darling, and his payback to them was junking his campaign
financial advisers and putting Timothy Geithner in charge to ensure that
Wall Street’s interests were met. Is this surprising? This is how the
politics of capital works. This is why the Commission on Presidential
Debates forced the League of Women Voters out of managing the debates so
that they could control the narrative and exclude third-party
candidates. Did Mr. Stoller actually ever assume that a single man would
be able to rein in the military-industrial complex and Wall Street?
That would have been delusional, and whatever the president’s real
strategies may have been, he was not helped by the defection of most of
his supporters, who after the election returned to the Internet and
blogging, while public spaces became colonized by Tea Party wing-nuts.
Mr.
Obama is an astute student of power and he navigates his presidency
between its shoals. He does what he can at the margins, and perhaps as a
young father with children, he might be forgiven nervousness at the
many unveiled threats leveled against him: audience members showing up
at his speeches carrying arms; unvetted guests slipping through White
House security to get close enough for a handshake. These are rough
games, and who can fault a family man for wanting to stay alive?
However,
Stoller suggests a Machiavellian, hidden subterfuge to Obama’s
ascendancy, as if he assumes that (just like a Colors of Benetton ad)
race were confused with liberal politics. He cites as evidence of
Obama’s conservative agenda, Mr. Obama’s early control of the House and
Senate, but never analyzes that control closely. Obama was plagued with a
razor-thin majority and the threatened defection of mutinous Blue-Dog
democrats. He had no hope of passing a number of key legislative
programs that might have kept his promises and still had clearly before
him President Clinton’s own healthcare debacle as a reminder against
acting rashly. Singling him out as the evil genius who has
single-handedly produced the alarming state of 21st century America is a
reductionism that is not helpful and certainly takes voters and others
off the hook.
The Gordian knot of our current corrupt political
system is money! Public financing of elections; free airtime for
qualified candidates; disenfranchising corporations from spending their
treasure to influence public policy are three steps that could radically
transform the American political landscape. People understand them.
They are not abstract and could be the basis for real radical
organizing. It is how European elections are run, over a two- to
three-month period, where people are not bludgeoned into catatonia by
trivia and the opinions of pundits discussing everything but the issues.
Candidates can be seen on every channel, in open, unstructured debates,
and people get a fair chance to make up their minds between a host of
philosophies and attitudes that make America’s two-party system look
like a fixed three-card monte game.
“The best moment for change is
actually a crisis.” Stoller’s assertion sounds good, but is it true? In
my youth, young radicals refused Hubert Humphrey’s compromised
liberalism and wound up with Vietnam scarring the nation for the next
decade. We made the perfect the enemy of the good. The real crises upon
us are global warming and extreme environmental degradation and the
implications are profound and life-threatening. It should be clear to
most observers that the conflict between individual self-interest and
the commons is leading directly to our mutual destruction. As long as
millions of people “work” in industries like coal, nuclear, petroleum
and hydrocarbons, their self-interest at maintaining employment works
directly against solutions for the good of the race. If the nation needs
to take drastic action to save the planet, we will have to consider how
we will distribute national wealth when “jobs” have to be sacrificed.
That is an idea that no candidate has had the courage to address and
neither have any on the left, to my knowledge. What paucity of spirit
concludes that begging for a job is a form of dignity, without
considering what circumstances have left men and women so bereft of
common wealth that they have nothing but their labor to offer?
No
one will lay down and die (or abandon their families) for an abstact
goal. But unless we can guarantee livelihood to the millions who are
currently engaged in destructive planetary practices, we are out of
luck. Exacerbating that dilemma by provoking a political crisis is a
guarantee of wasting another 10 years while reactionary forces and
stopgap measures take short-term dominance over common sense and common
need. Doing it in a country awash with guns, anxiety, fears or rapid
social change is a recipe to re-create the streets of Syria and Lebanon
at home.
Many of Obama’s constitutional violations that disturb
Stoller and myself are barely known and understood by the general
populace. It will take decades of education to build understanding of
their importance and constituencies for them. However, education,
carbon, global warming, nuclear issues, the rights of women, immigrants,
minorities, etc., are immediate and pressing. In triage terms, an Obama
presidency will allow time to work on these issues without sentencing
another decade to the negative consequences of panic, despair and chaos.
I
applaud Stoller’s concerns and his passion, but I think he
underestimates how long political change actually takes. I certainly did
as a young man, when I was calling for revolution and stockpiling
weapons. My father was a wealthy man in the ’50s and early ’60s, a
big-time Wall Street broker. His last words to me in 1970, when he was
visiting the commune I lived on, remain prophetic and true. “You think
America’s going down in five years, son; it’ll take 50 and you better be
prepared to hang in for the long haul. There are huge historical forces
at work, and the sons of bitches running things will do whatever they
can to make sure they get theirs out of it before they die.”
A
simple walk through any European streets will reveal plaques on the
walls commemorating where neighbors were dragged from their homes and
shot by partisans, by fascists, by communists, by falangists. True
social upheaval is horrifying, it is being danced before our eyes on TV
and in print every day. While in the abstract it may “cleanse” the
political body or other comforting nostrums, for the dead, the wounded,
the maimed and the millions who continue to suffer, those are the
slogans of a removed, detached leadership. It is obvious that Stoller
considers himself among them. “We need to put ourselves into the
position of being able to run the government,” he says with no apparent
irony, as if he and his friends were obviously “good” people and if the
world were left in their hands, only good would come of it.
As a
Zen Buddhist priest in my seventh decade, I know better. I know that
each of us carries within us the capacity of all humanity for positive
and negative behavior; we can be Hitler or Mother Teresa. We leak anger,
jealousy, competitiveness on a daily basis and if we are not careful
and do not monitor ourselves, our best intentions become murderous to
others. (Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican
Republic, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam.) Were the millions upon millions of
deaths we caused in those places done only by “bad” people or a mistake?
That’s a delusion.
I would suggest that the lesser of two evils
is “less evil.” Sometimes in the real, impure world the bad man and the
good are indivisible and morph from one to the other. It makes fixed
judgments difficult. You take what you can get, and you organize to
protect yourself. To deliberately create a political crisis as an
organizing tool sounds remarkably like the old Marxist saw of
“heightening the contradiction.” Been there, done that. It’s tough being
human. Picking one’s way through reality moment by moment requires
delicacy and finesse. Instead of preparing to ‘rule,’ I would be
interested in learning more about Stoller’s desires to “serve.” In the
meantime, I can only cling to the hope that his advice to vote against
the president in swing states is not widely observed.
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