5 Ways President Obama Has Doubled Down on Bush's Most Tragic Mistakes

Civil Liberties  

AlterNet / By Alex Kane

5 Ways President Obama Has Doubled Down on Bush's Most Tragic Mistakes

Obama has kept the U.S. on a permanent war footing, from drone strikes and proxy detentions to warrantless wiretapping and the continued operation of Guantanamo.

January 8, 2013  |  

 

Photo Credit: AFP

 

 

 

 

On President Barack Obama's second full day in the Oval Office in 2009, he signed important executive orders that signaled a clear break with the excesses of George W. Bush's “war on terror.” Obama decreed that the Guantanamo Bay prison camp would be closed in a year and that the United States would no longer perpetrate torture. No longer would men, some of them innocent, languish without charges in what has been described as an American gulag by Amnesty International. No longer would men be subjected to brutal interrogation tactics that clearly amounted to torture, like water boarding.
The orders would “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism,” said Obama.

Fast-forward to today. Guantanamo remains open, warrantless wiretapping continues, and drone strikes have accelerated, leading to the deaths of innocent civilians and a burst in support for anti-American forces in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Instead of breaking with the Bush era, Obama has codified and permanently institutionalized the “war on terror” framework that has characterized American foreign policy since the September 11, 2001 attacks. And they have done all of this largely in secret, refusing to open up about how drone strikes are decided on. So while torture has been thrown out of the American playbook, other black marks remain. Obama has done everything but restore “core constitutional values” to how the U.S. conducts itself around the world.

Perhaps the most potent symbol of Obama's willingness to institutionalize Bush-era frameworks for dealing with terrorism is his January 2013 appointment of John Brennan as new Central Intelligence Agency director. Brennan was a key supporter of many Bush-favored tactics used by the CIA, including torture and extraordinary rendition. When Obama first contemplated appointing Brennan in his first term to the post he's been appointed to now, the outcry was swift and Brennan pulled out from consideration. Now, the reaction has been meek—a symbol of how Bush-era military and intelligence tactics have become normalized to the extent that nobody bats an eye when a man with a sordid record at the CIA is appointed to head up the entire agency.
Obama has kept the U.S. on a permanent war footing with no end in sight through a variety of methods. Here are five ways the Obama administration has institutionalized the never-ending war on terror.

1. Drones

The image of the gray, pilotless aircraft flying through the sky to eventually rain hellfire down will be indelibly tied to Obama. His administration has made drone strikes in countries like Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan the weapon of choice when it comes to dealing with suspected militants. You have to look at the numbers of drone strikes under the Bush and Obama administrations to truly appreciate how Obama has taken this Bush tool and increased its use exponentially.

The first drone strike in U.S. history occurred in 2002, when a CIA-operated drone fired on three men in Afghanistan. The drone strikes have since migrated over to battlefields away from U.S.-declared wars. In Pakistan, the Bush administration carried out a total of 52 strikes, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which closely tracks drone strikes. That led to the deaths of an estimated 438 people, including 182 civilians and 112 children. But the Obama administration has ordered at least 300 drone strikes in Pakistan—and Obama's second term has yet to begun. Those strikes have killed about 2,152 people, including 290 civilians, of whom 64 were children.
The drone strikes also have a devastating impact beyond the deaths reported. As a New York University/Stanford University study on drone strikes stated, the constant buzzing of drones in the sky “terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.”

Instead of looking forward to how this permanent drone war might end, the Obama administration has decided to institutionalize the process. In October 2012, the Washington Post revealed that the administration had undertaken a two-year long strategy to institutionalize what has become known as the “kill list,” or the list of suspected terrorists the Obama administration unilaterally decides to kill by drone strikes. The administration calls it the “disposition matrix,” which refers to the different plans the administration has to “dispose” of suspected militants. The Post described the “matrix” as part of “the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”

2. Warrantless Wiretapping

One of the enduring scandals of the George W. Bush years was that administration's practice of wiretapping American citizens with no warrant in order to spy on suspected terrorists. TheNew York Times, which broke the story in 2005, reported that “months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.” The move raised concerns that the Bush administration was crossing constitutional limits on wiretapping Americans.

But the outcry from those concerned with civil liberties has largely been muted in the Obama era. In late December 2012, President Obama signed an extension of a law that allows the U.S. to “eavesdrop on communications and review email without following an open and public warrant process,” as NPR summed it up. The law was an extension of the 2008 law that legalized the Bush administration's wiretapping of American citizens.

As national security blogger Marcy Wheeler notes in a recent piece for the Nation, the president's signature on the new bill on wiretapping means that the U.S. “has nearly unrestrained authority to eavesdrop on those who communicate with people outside the country. The government doesn’t even need to show that these foreign targets are terrorists or that the conversations center around a plot. This means any international communication may be subject to wiretapping.”

3. Proxy Detentions

Under the Bush administration, the process of “extraordinary rendition” involved abducting people accused of terrorism and shipping them off to another country where they were interrogated and tortured. The Obama administration has continued to use foreign countries to detain and interrogate suspects, but the details of how they do it are changed from the Bush era. Still, the overall practice of using other security forces to do your dirty work remains in place.
The Washington Postreported on January 1 that “the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” While the Post used the term “rendition,” the more accurate term would be “proxy detention,” as Mother Jones pointed out.

The most recent iterations of the practice of using other countries to detain suspects the U.S. wants to interrogate have been in countries like Dijibouti and Nigeria. The Post reported on one December 2011 case in which an man from Eritrea “revealed that he had been questioned in a Ni­ger­ian jail by what a U.S. interrogator described as a 'dirty' team of American agents who ignored the suspect’s right to remain silent or have a lawyer, according to court proceedings.”

Other cases have been publicized by Mother Jones. The magazine reported on the case of Yonas Fikre, a Muslim-American from Oregon who was detained in the United Arab Emirates. There, Fikre and his lawyers claim, he was beaten and held in stress positions. He claims there was cooperation between the FBI and UAE security forces. So the FBI was using the UAE forces to detain people the U.S. wanted to interrogate.

4. Guantanamo

Although the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay camp is hardly the sole fault of President Obama, it does symbolize the abject failure to reject the Bush administration's approach to terrorism.

While it's important to note that the Republican Party has blocked Obama's desire to close Guantanamo, he has not expended political capital on closing the prison and has signed bills that restrict his ability to do so. The most recent bill concerning Guantanamo Bay crossed his desk at the beginning of the year.
Despite threatening to veto the bill because it restricted the executive branch's authority, Obama signed it, and curtailed his own ability to move ahead on closing the infamous camp, where people have languished without charge for years on end. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, where the Guantanamo provisions are included, restricts “the transfer of detainees into the United States for any purpose, including trials in federal court. It also requires the defense secretary to meet rigorous conditions before any detainee can be returned to his own country or resettled in a third country,” according to the Washington Post.

Human rights activists blasted the move. “Indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo is illegal, unsustainable and against U.S. national security interests, and it needs to end,” Human Rights Watch's Andrea Prasow told the Post. “The administration should not continue to just blame Congress. President Obama should follow through on his earlier commitments and make the effort to overcome the transfer restrictions.”

5. Indefinite Detention

This issue, over all the others, says loud and clear that the Obama administration is preparing for an endless war on terror.

Domestically, indefinite detention reared its ugly head back in December 2011, when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, a defense funding bill. Included in the bill was a provision allowing for indefinite military detention without charge or trial. Despite concerns raised by civil liberties activists, Obama signed the bill into law, although an executive signing statement vowed that the president would “not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”

That has not allayed the concerns of civil liberties groups. The American Civil Liberties Union states: “The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield....Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.”

While no American citizens have been detained under the law yet, indefinite detention has been a hallmark of the war in Afghanistan. Thousands of detainees have remained in Bagram Air Field, including non-Afghan detainees. Picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, they have been held for years without charge or trial.

“Since 2002, the U.S. government has detained indefinitely thousands of people there in harsh conditions and without charge, without access to lawyers, without access to courts, and without a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention,” the ACLU notes.

So as the Obama administration fills out its cabinet posts and prepares for another four years, the permanent war on terror will stay with us. From drones to proxy detentions to indefinite detention, the constitutional lawyer in the Oval Office has institutionalized and expanded some of the worst hallmarks of the lawless Bush era.

Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Obama and the Transformation Illusion

Published on Monday, January 7, 2013 by Al-Jazeera

Obama and the Transformation Illusion

The US president's floundering overshadows himself when the real problems seem to be avoided

by Paul Rosenberg

 

 

Everyone has an ideology, whether they know it or not. But when your ideology has you - that's when you're an ideologue. It's not a matter of "extremism" but of rigidity and blindness - detachment from reality. Which is why Barack Obama is one of the most ideological presidents we've ever had. And being imprisoned in his "pragmatist" ideology is key to his numerous pragmatic train wrecks, as well his less-noted failures to even take on several really big, really significant problems.


 

Obama is what some political theorists would describe as a "preemptive president". (Photo: AFP)


It's not a matter of intelligence. Barack Obama is clearly one of the smartest men to ever occupy the Oval Office. President of the Harvard Law Review, four years from state senator to President of the United States. First black president. These are not the accomplishments of a stupid, or even just a reasonably competent man.

Unfortunately, however, smart people can often be quite dumb - not just do dumb things, but do them over and over and over again. And while Obama's rapid rise to power was a tale that highlighted his intelligence, his time in office - now at its half-way point - has been a tale that highlights the limits of that intelligence. Those limits are deeply implicated in his ideology - a fanatical belief in compromise, no matter what - that has served him admirably on a personal level in his rapid climb to power, but that fundamentally cripples him in the exercise of that power once it is in his hands.

The contrast between Obama's brilliance most of the time and its utter absence when the chips are down has once again been revivified by the sharp transition from his crisp, decisive re-election campaign to his tortured "fiscal cliff" negotiations with Congressional Republicans, particularly House Speaker Boehner.

Boehner's own incompetence is legendary - he couldn't even get all his members sworn in on their first day in office - which helps to distract attention from the fact that Obama has been floundering as well. Obama's floundering is further obscured by the political mainstream's inability to diagnose and contextualise its own limited vision of untapped possibilities and unacknowledged costs and consequences.

Soros' prophecies 

It's not just that Obama was still negotiating with himself, rewarding Boehner's incompetence with a series of ill-conceived and fruitless concessions, which only weakened him; it's that the entire enterprise is supremely idiotic, on at least three counts: First because it's an invented political problem, not a real world problem. Second, because the larger goal of the process - budget balancing - is a fool's errand for Democrats, in light of how quickly (and gleefully) Republicans undid that very same accomplishment under Bill Clinton, as soon as they got back into power. Third, because America does have very serious real-world problems that need dealing with, which are not just being neglected in the "fiscal cliff" drama, but are being made even worse.

Obama's root problem is his deep unwillingness to engage in hegemonic struggle, to face his adversaries' failures, call them out by name, and show how we can do better. 

Two in particular are worth noting. The first is persistent mass unemployment, still affecting tens of millions of families, which translates directly into economic underperformance, a primary root cause of the budget problems, which the "fiscal cliff" drama purports to be about. The second is global warming. It's also worth noting that these two seemingly separate problems are really both just halves of a single solution, as was pointed out by George Soros just weeks after the financial crisis exploded in 2008.

Eighty years have passed since the last time America and the world faced such an extreme economic challenge, and the key to ending the Great Depression was massive government spending, which we did not get on the scale that was needed until the advent of World War II. Only then would conservatives get on board for the scale of spending that was absolutely necessary to get the economy back on track.

This time around, the urgent need to combat global warming represented a similar possibility, as Soros noted to Bill Moyers on October 10, 2008, just weeks after the crisis hit:

For the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he's been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It's finished. It's run out of - can't continue. You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.

Soros' words have proven prophetic - but only in the counterfactual sense of a road not taken. The economy as a whole quickly pulled out of recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP), much as FDR was able to quickly get GDP growing again upon taking office. But unemployment and underemployment remain dramatically high, and those who do have jobs are paying off debts - deleveraging - rather than than spending freely on new consumer goods, the motor that Soros warned was switched off. Lack of demand is why corporations are sitting on record profits, rather than reinvesting them, particularly in hiring more workers.

Meanwhile, one form of extreme weather after another - topped off by Hurricane Sandy - underscores how the cost of doing nothing about global warming is turning out to be higher than expected, and to be coming due much faster than expected. All of which means that Soros was even more correct than he seemed to be at the time.

What Soros was pointing to was simple common sense. But common sense is no match for cultural hegemony, what political theorist Antonio Gramsci essentially described as ideology in drag as common sense. Obama's root problem is his deep unwillingness to engage in hegemonic struggle, to face his adversaries' failures, call them out by name, and show how we can do better. This ought to be easy. Under George W Bush, conservatives controlled the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court for the first time since the 1920s, and just like the 1920s, the result of their dominance was unmitigated disaster. Yet, instead of challenging everything they stand for, Obama has repeatedly sought common ground with them - which they've responded to by becoming even more extreme.
The pattern is easy enough to see. The stimulus was roughly 1/3 tax cuts, and half the size it needed to be, but still barely got any support from Senate Republicans, and no support at all from Republicans in the House. Healthcare reform was based on the blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, and implemented on the state level by Mitt Romney, but it was even more fiercely opposed by Republicans than the stimulus was.
Even on budget-balancing, Republican Senators withdrew their support for a deficit-reduction commission once Obama agreed to it, leading him to create a presidential commission instead of a congressional one. Then Republicans on that panel - lead by Romney's VP choice, Paul Ryan - voted against its recommendations, demanding even more extreme measures.

So, seeing the problem is easy. But how to explain it? For this, we turn to a pair of articles at the Atlantic by Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin on the eve of the election, one considering what a Romney election would mean, the other doing the same for Obama. The latter was titled, "What It Will Take for Barack Obama to Become the Next FDR". It was not Balkin's view that Obama was a shoe-in to become "the next FDR", but that it was at least possible, and he wanted to clarify what that would mean, and how it could happen. Both articles drew on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek on presidential leadership.

Balkin began his Obama article by noting:

Ever since Barack Obama's election in 2008, people have debated whether he might be for the Democratic Party what Ronald Reagan was for the Republicans - a transformational president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who changes the basic assumptions of national politics for a generation or more.

Skowronek's work on presidential leadership distinguishes different types, based on where they fall within what he calls "political time", and transformational - or what Skowroneck calls "reconstructive" - presidents are the ones who take on the biggest tasks, simply by virtue of their place in time and what that means. He describes US history in terms of successive governing policy regimes, each with a life-cycle that determines the sort of presidential possibilities and challenges that exist. Reconstructive presidents initiate new regimes, when the previous one falls into decay. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR are classic examples.
Regimes continued by affiliate presidents like Madison, Grant, Truman and Kennedy, and their demise is presided over by disjunctive presidents like John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. There are also presidents elected by the party opposed to the dominant regime of an era, whom he calls "pre-emptive presidents", such as Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, or Richard Nixon.

The preemptive model

"Preemptive presidents are the most interesting type in Skowronek's theory," Balkin wrote, "In a political age dominated by the other party; they must continually navigate upstream against fierce political currents. Their political legitimacy is always in question. The regime's dominant party continually casts doubt on their right to rule, and their own party often seems too weak to defend them."

America's political donor class has not experienced regime failure in any meaningful sense at all. They are perfectly content to have a preemptive president making minor adjustments here and there for them - and that's precisely what Obama is delivering.

Although I find Skowronek's approach clarifying, commonsensical and compelling, there are a few obvious problems here. For one thing, this description is much more fitting for Clinton and Obama than it is for Eisenhower and Nixon. Eisenhower's legitimacy was never questioned (except, of course, by the Birchers), while Nixon only lost his legitimacy as a result of his own paranoid scheming blowing up in his face.

What this says to me is that the New Deal regime was not entirely typical, but what came afterwards was even less so. Clinton and Obama both seem like prime exemplars of the preemptive type of president - far more hounded by their opponents than Eisenhower or Nixon were from the very beginning, despite the fact that both were elected with solid majorities in both houses of Congress, while Eisenhower enjoyed just two short years with the narrowest of congressional majorities, and Nixon faced solid opposing majorities throughout his term. Moreover, Skowronek identifies Ronald Reagan as one of his reconstructive presidents, but Reagan never came close to a Republican majority in the House. All other reconstructive presidents were elected along with two consecutive House wave elections, establishing unmistakable majorities supporting them.

I do not see these facts as invalidating Skowronek's basic insight. But they do point to other factors being involved as well. Three different books shed light on what's going on. First, as Tom Ferguson and Joel Rogers argued in Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics Reagan's election reflected a shift in elite thinking, which had little if anything to do with mass public opinion. This shift was reflected in Jimmy Carter as well as Ronald Reagan.

After all, it was Carter who began the proxy Afghan War against the Soviet Union, and Carter's projected military build-up was almost as massive as Reagan's. Second, as I've argued previously, August Cochrane III's book Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie shows how the system of divided government which has dominated since 1968 is tremendously empowering for elite special interests who are particularly adept at getting their way in "quiet rooms" as Mitt Romney so eloquently put it, far away from the open contest of public, democratic debate.

Since Reagan's election, the 1 percent has seen its income share roughly triple, while the income of the 99 percent has stayed relatively flat. This basic fact speaks volumes about the nature, priorities, and power-distribution of the political regime of the past 30 years, which has been more detached than ever from the fairy-tale version of a competitive two-party democracy. Two separate empirical studies by political scientists Larry Bartels [PDF] and Martin Gilens [PDF] show that middle-income voters have only modest political impact on how Senators vote, and low-income voters have none at all.

Behind all this lies the arc of decline of American power, which erstwhile Republican policy guru Kevin Phillips described in his 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, where he drew parallels to similar patterns of declining power in Spain, Holland and Great Britain - the three sea-faring dominant world powers that preceded the US. Phillips argued that in each of these cases prosperity was broadly shared in the period of ascendance, until power peaked unexpectedly, marked by a sharp defeat, much as the US experienced in Vietnam.

What followed was a period of roughly two generations of reactionary politics, during which elites did better than ever, while the broad mass of people suffered stagnant incomes, and withered hopes, until a turning point signaling a renewal of broadly communal values. Those former world powers never regained their stature in the world, but their citizens lives did improve remarkably - enough so that it no longer seemed important where their nation stood in terms of global power.

However, Phillips' schema is only half the story. It explains the anomaly of the Reagan era, by bringing into play larger historical forces operating on a larger time-scale than Skowroneck's regimes, and explaining the salience of bipartisan reactionary elite politics. But it does not explain Obama's failure to perform according to the pattern Phillips describes. After all, Obama's election in 2008 seemed to promise renewal and a reaffirmation of shared values and equal participation. But it's precisely Obama's failure to deliver that we're challenged to understand.

The reason why the US doesn't fit the pattern Phillips' described appears to be based - at least in part - on the exhaustion of capitalism. This is not to say that "Communist" China won't have a good go at reinventing the basic framework and keeping it alive in some new form. But it is to say that the ideological constraints of capitalist ideology are just too stifling for America - and possibly for the rest of the Western developed world. The "exhaustion of capitalism" thesis is not the sort of thing one can expect to get rationally considered amongst America's elites - but that's just the problem: Only problems that can be formulated and analysed can be solved.

And this brings us back to the subject of Obama's brilliance and its limitations, and his place in Skowronek's schema. Obama has done well at solving certain sorts of problems, but they almost entirely "housekeeping" sorts of problems, matters of "tidying up" the messes created by the existing political regime. Even his adoption of conservative healthcare reform - using a template first developed by the Heritage Foundation, and applied at state level by Mitt Romney - fits under this description. This is precisely the sort of thing that preemptive presidents do best. As Balkin goes on to describe them, they respond to the adverse political environment around them strategically:

This predicament drives preemptive presidents to be pragmatic, compromising, non-ideological, and unorthodox. They triangulate in order to survive. As a result, preemptive presidents often deeply disappoint their own party faithful, who crave greater ideological purity and stronger principled stands. To members of their own party, it sometimes seems as if preemptive presidents never stand up for their principles; instead, they are always temporizing, compromising, and letting their political opponents push them around.

As I said before, these descriptions are much better fits for Clinton and Obama than for Eisenhower and Nixon in the previous era. But contrast them with what Skowronek himself said about reconstructive presidents:

The president as regime builder grapples with the fundamentals of political regeneration - institutional reconstruction and party building... destroying residual institutional support for opposition interests, restructuring institutional relations between state and society and securing the dominant position of a new political coalition.

None of this sounds remotely like Barack Obama. Rather, he acts as one completely engulfed in the mindset of the old order, doing everything possible not to disturb it, constantly reminding folks of just how incremental his sought-for changes are. Remember, his criticism of the Clintons was that they erred by fighting against that old order, rather than seeking accommodation. The repeated failure of his own efforts at accommodation has done nothing to alter his fundamental orientation. He may be relatively young as national politicians (much less presidents) go, but his mindset is profoundly ossified, firmly locked into the reignite past.

One explanation for why Obama remains so thoroughly stuck in the preemptive presidential mode, is that the system has not failed for America's elites. Rather, it has worked like a charm. Thousands of them could have and should have gone to jail, much like what happened following the S&L scandal of the 1980s. Instead, they kept getting their massive bonuses, paid for by US taxpayers. In 2010, according to IRS data compiled by Emmanuel Saez, the top 1 percent captured 93 percent of the income gain in the recovery. More specifically, the bottom 90 percent lost $127 on average, the bottom 99 percent gained $80 on average, and the top 1 percent gained an average of $105,637. Thus, America's political donor class has not experienced regime failure in any meaningful sense at all. They are perfectly content to have a preemptive president making minor adjustments here and there for them - and that's precisely what Obama is delivering.

And thus, the republic slips ever more deeply into darkness.

© 2012 Al-Jazeera

 

Paul Rosenberg was a frontpage blogger for OpenLeft.org and is now Senior Editor for Random Lengths News, an alternative bi-weekly in the Los Angeles Harbor Area, where he specializes in labor, community and environmental justice issues.

Playing to Lose? Obama’s Just Another Chicago Player Throwing the Game

Playing to Lose?

Obama’s Just Another Chicago Player Throwing the Game

by Dave Lindorff / December 20th, 2012

If President Obama had been the commander of Allied forces during the invasion of Normandy 1944, he would have cut a deal with the Nazis when they launched the counter-offensive called the Battle of the Bulge, and WWII would have ended in Europe with a divided France and a still-extant Third Reich into the 1950s. If he had been president in 1965, we wouldn’t have Medicare today. If he had been Rosa Parks, black people might still be riding at the back of the bus.

The current president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, commander in chief of the most awesome military the world has ever known, is the most pathetic negotiator in the history of modern politics. Either that or he wants to lose.

During his first term, we watched him inexplicably water down his health reform program before it even got started, removing the option of a Canadian-style state-run insurance program known as “single-payer” from consideration, and then cutting deals with the insurance industry, the hospital industry and the pharmaceutical industry, before going to Congress with a plan that ended up being a gift to all three.

We watched him cave early on in negotiations over a crisis economic stimulus plan in 2009, giving Republicans a $425-billion tax cut that did nothing to boost jobs in return for getting a measly $425-billion in stimulus funding approved. He caved quickly too on the plan to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the newly created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. The list of Obama premature cave-ins is long and ugly.
Now, when he is almost by accident in an unassailable position to have the hugely unfair and damaging Bush tax cuts for the rich finally expire on December 31, leaving Republicans stuck in January with having to pass Democratic legislation restoring tax cuts for just the middle class, he is giving it away, offering gratis an undermining of Social Security benefits for all Americans by way of a subtle change in the way inflation adjustments are made in future benefits.

For years, Social Security payments have been adjusted on an annual basis in accordance with the Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ Consumer Price Index. Now Obama is proposing, in an offer to Republicans, that this adjustment be made not based on the CPI, which looks at a typical market basket of goods and services commonly purchased by ordinary people, but on something called a “chained CPI.” In the chained CPI methodology, assumptions are made that when prices rise, ordinary people switch to alternative, cheaper goods and services, so the chained CPI switches what’s in its basket to substitute those. For example, if car prices rise, it is assumed people will buy Fit instead of Civic sedans. If the price of hamburger rises, it is assumed people will switch to chicken or turkey burgers (or if they get too expensive, to beans or dog food). If the cost of beer goes up, is is assumed people will switch from Heineken to Bud.

Set aside the reality that for the elderly and disabled on Social Security, the chained CPI probably doesn’t really work, since their major expenses tend to be for things like medical care and drugs, which actually see faster inflation than most goods and services, or for rent or mortgage payments, which do not lend themselves to substitution easily (old and disabled people have a difficult time moving when rents or interest rates rise). The real question is why Obama would give in on this issue when he already has a winning hand by just letting the December 31 deadline on the Bush tax cuts pass.

There is, as the president surely knows, no real crisis in letting the country go “over” the so-called fiscal cliff. Every expert and every politician knows that when that happens, it is not, despite what the scare-mongering talking heads in the media say, going to raise everyone’s taxes. No politician in Washington would dare to let that happen. They will simply pass a tax bill restoring the Bush tax cuts for people with incomes under $250,000.

The difference is that with the old law, which favored the rich, no longer in existence after New Year’s, restoring tax cuts for the middle class and the lower class would require a majority vote in Congress, and that will be easy to obtain. There would be no majority vote for restoring tax cuts for the rich, though, which have been costing the US Treasury over $70 billion a year for the past decade — an amount of revenue more than enough, if applied to the Social Security program, to keep it fully funded into the indefinite future.
As strong as the president’s bargaining position is today, it would be ten times stronger after December 31 because Republicans could no longer hold middle class tax cuts hostage in order to cut taxes for the rich.
And yet, here, once again, we see President Obama surrendering his position before serious bargaining has even begun.

It seems like the only place where this president ever stands his ground is in his insistence on killing lots of innocent people with armed drones in countries around the world that the US is not at war with (Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc.), and on threatening Iran with attack over its nuclear power program.

It would be nice to imagine that President Obama is playing Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” game of suckering his opponent before clocking him, but I’m afraid it’s not that at all. His behavior in this case looks a lot more like that of Arnold “Chick” Gandil, the notorious mob-linked Chicago first baseman who orchestrated the throwing of the 1919 World Series by his Chicago White Sox team.

Dave Lindorff writes for ThisCantBeHappening!, the independent Project Censored award-winning online alternative newspaper where this article first appeared. Read other articles by Dave.

This article was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012 at 7:59am and is filed under Obama, Social Security. 

Economy  

AlterNet / By Les Leopold

The 6 Economic Facts of Life in America That Allow the Rich to Run off with Our Wealth

Do you ever wonder why it takes the average family 47 years to make as much as a hedge fund honcho makes in one hour?

December 5, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

 

 

 

 

Do you ever wonder why it takes the average family 47 years to make as much as a hedge fund honcho makes in one HOUR?

Does it bother you that in 2010, after the crash, the top 25 hedge fund chiefs made as much as 685,000 teachers who educate 13 million children?

Are you worried that cutting government debt means raising your social security eligibility age and cost of living adjustment, so that you have to work longer and receive lower retirement benefits?

Have no fear. The super-rich are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to sell you their economic fabrications. Why so much inequality? They say because the rich have the most important skills and you don't. Why so much unemployment? They say it's because our skimpy unemployment insurance keeps people from looking for work. Why so much government debt? They say it's because you have too many "entitlements." Why the Wall Street crash? They blame poor people for buying homes they couldn't afford.

In short, the super-rich want us to believe that any effort to tax them a bit more or control Wall Street will only kill more jobs and harm our economic well-being. And most of all they don't want us to know the six economics facts of life that explain how the super-rich are running away with our nation's wealth.

1. The super-rich are stealing our fair share of productivity. The U.S. economy is enormously productive. Since 1947, the amount of goods and services we produce per hour of labor has risen by nearly 300 percent. That's because as a nation, we blend together a potent mix of effort, skills, technology and organizational capacities. Our enormous productivity is why we are the richest nation on earth.

Yet, why don't we feel that rich? Why are we told we must tighten our belts?

Until the mid-1970s, the more productivity increased, the higher the real wages of the average working person (after taking out the impact of inflation). As a result, our standard of living doubled in 25 years. But, as you can see from the chart below, after the mid-1970s, productivity (the red line) continued to boom, but the average wage stalled.

Click to enlarge.

It wasn't an accident, or market forces, or an act of God. It was a result of human polices designed by and for the rich. Tax cuts for the rich, financial deregulation, support for moving jobs overseas and union-busting combined to give the super-rich more and more of our economy's productivity gains. In 1970, the top 100 average corporate executive earned $45 for every $1 earned by the average worker. By 2006 it had jumped to a whopping $1,723 to $1. That's the very definition of greed run wild.

Click to enlarge.

Think about this: If the average wage had continued to rise along with productivity as it did after WWII, your real wage today (after inflation) would be twice as high!

We've been had.

2. Americans really want a wealth distribution more like Sweden's. Here's a nightmare fact of life the super-rich don't want you to know. Two researchers recently tried to find out just how much economic inequality Americans were comfortable with. Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University conducted a nationwide poll with more than 5,000 respondents to see how Americans saw our current level of equality, and what level they wanted to see. (“Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time”)

The results were startling. First, virtually all Americans greatly underestimated the degree of inequality in our economy today. They had no idea how extreme the U.S. wealth distribution really is -- which goes to show you what a good job the super-rich have done in mis-educating us.

Second, when asked to construct an ideal distribution of income, 92 percent of Americans preferred radically more equality – on a par with the social democratic state of Sweden! What’s more, it didn’t matter whether the respondent was a Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Everyone wanted more economic fairness.

Imagine that! Americans, even Republicans who voted for Romney and Ryan, would rather live with the Scandinavian distribution of wealth. Little wonder that the super-rich and their minions do all they can to belittle so-called "Euro-socialism." They don't want us to know that maybe we are hard-wired for fairness instead of the staggering inequality that helps no one but the super-elites.

3. Everything we hear about government debt is wrong. Right now, the biggest target of public mis-education is the government debt debate. And the biggest spender on the mis-education of the American public is billionaire Pete Peterson (who personally has added to the government's debt by dodging hundreds of million in taxes through the 15 percent "carried interest" loophole that blessed his private equity fund). Having no sense of shame, he and other super-elites want to convince us that government spending and debt will ruin us all. Unfortunately, very little of what they claim is true:

• China owns our all our debt? Wrong! There's a chilling ad put out by a Peterson front group that features a Chinese lecturer in the year 2030 addressing (with English subtitles) a packed audience of Chinese students about the rise and decline of the U.S. The confident, smirking teacher describes how the U.S. abandoned its principles as it "tried to spend and tax its way out of a great recession" and then crumbled beneath its "crushing debt." He then provides the kicker: "Of course we owned most of their debt...ha ha ha, and now they work us," he says to the raucous laughter of the students. The ad is a complete Peterson lie. China owns only 8 percent of our debt. Most of our debt is actually owned by our own quasi governmental agencies like the Federal Reserve and Social Security.

• Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bankrupting the country? Wrong! The current deficits are the result of two unfunded wars, the Bust tax cuts for the super-rich and the Wall Street crash of the economy that killed 8 million jobs, and led directly to the ensuing bailouts, lost tax revenues and increases in unemployment insurance payments.

• We will become like Greece if we don't balance our budget? Wrong! Greece can't print money to pay back its debt because it no longer has its own currency (and neither does Mississippi). The United States does. Also, our economy is more than 50 times larger that Greece's. The chances of the US ending up in a Greek debt crisis are about the same as finding a Martian in your bathtub.

• We have to solve the "debt crisis" right now or the economy will crash? Wrong! We have an unemployment crisis, not a debt crisis. Interest rates are at all-time lows because the world wants to park its money here in dollars. In fact, this is the time to borrow more to put our people back to work by rebuilding our crumbling, fossil fuel-dependent infrastructure and educating our children. If our people go back to work, the economy grows, unemployment costs go down, tax revenues rise, and the debt ratio shrinks without paying back one penny of it.

Why so many lies? Because financial elites like Peterson don't want to pay their fair share of taxes. They don't believe in funding a safety net for all Americans. They don't want to the government to help put Americans back to work. Instead, they want an economy by and for the elites.

4. We are under-taxed, not over-taxed. The super-rich want us to believe that taxes are too high and that those taxes are harming job creation and economic growth. It's a fabrication. First of all, taxes for most Americans have declined, according to a recent New York Times analysis:

..... most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

Second, we have much lower tax rates that our chief European competitors. For example, Germany, an economic powerhouse, has an average tax rate of 40.6 percent while the U.S. rate is only 26.9 percent. Germany uses that money to rebuild its infrastructure, invest in education and find creative ways to nearly eliminate unemployment.

Third, the super-rich use a sleight of hand to make middle-class taxpayers believe that lower-income people are moochers. Like Mitt Romney, they are found of saying that 47 percent of Americans don't pay income taxes and that the rich pay most of those taxes. But income taxes are but a small portion of the tax bite on lower-income people who pay through payroll tax deductions, sales taxes and property taxes.

Finally, because our taxes are declining, it means that our public services are decaying as well. This creates a downward spiral the super-rich want to encourage: the more services decline, the less we want to pay in taxes, the more services decline. If you're really wealthy you don't care about public services since your life is entombed in private services -- private schools, private airports, private planes, private gated villas and so on.

5. Government jobs are just as good as private sector jobs. Another major con job concerns the attack on public employees. The greedy rich are trying to pit public and private sector workers against each other in large part because public employees still seem to have benefits the rest of us have lost (and they have unions and vote mostly Democratic). Corporate greed demands that we snuff out those benefits so workers won't demand them in the private sector. To further denigrate government, elites want us to believe that a private sector job is somehow more righteous that a public one -- that public employment is sort of like being on the dole because government workers are immune to the rough and tumble of competitive pressures that drives the private sector.

It's another hoax.

The truth is that some jobs are better done by government on behalf of the public. We learned almost 200 years ago that it didn't make sense to have competing fire and police departments. We also learned that if we wanted the average person to go to school, we needed public school systems, and not just private ones. Most countries (but not ours) have learned that much of the healthcare system runs better when it's publicly financed and controlled -- that for-profit hospitals and clinics do not provide the best care. In short, every modern economy is a combination of private and public sector jobs that are valuable to our society.

6. Wall Street needs to be shrunk (until we can drown it in a bathtub). The function of finance is simple: moving our savings into productive investments. By doing so, money supposedly moves to where it will do the most good for our economy. This function is considered so simple that most economics textbooks ignore Wall Street entirely.

However, when Wall Street is left to its own devices, it tends to create vast casinos that dramatically increase financial profits at the expense of the real economy. Worse still, as the speculative casinos grow and grow, the economy as a whole is endangered. Wall Street's grew rapidly just before the great crash of 1929 and just before the Great Recession of 2008-'09. It was stock manipulation during the 1920s and it was the housing casino over the last two decades. But in both cases it happened because Wall Street was deregulated and got too damn big. As the chart below shows, Wall Street is gobbling up more and more of our country's profits.

Click to enlarge.

We learned after 1929 that economic stability required severe financial regulation. We sat on Wall Street for nearly 50 years and it worked beautifully, especially between WWII and the 1970s. There were virtually no financial crashes anywhere in the world. But once we deregulated finance again, all hell broke loose as the world suffered through more than 150 smaller financial crashes. Finance grew and grew until it took down the entire U.S. economy. 

Along the way, Wall Street offered the easiest path to great riches for the few.

The simplest solution is the one hated by the super-rich: a small sales tax on each and every financial transaction involving stocks, bonds and every kind of derivative. By taxing the casino, we shrink its size and make it less dangerous to the rest of the economy. We also create new revenues for our economy, nearly all of it coming from the top fraction of the top 1 percent. No wonder they don't want us to know that.

Is Knowledge Power?

It's not enough for the greedy rich to buy politicians. They also need to buy our minds. That's why they pay for all this misleading economic education. But if we master the basic economic facts of life, we won't get conned. And we will have a much better chance at building a more just and healthy economy.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

A Sign That Obama Will Repeat Economic Mistakes

Published on Friday, December 7, 2012 by TruthDig.com

A Sign That Obama Will Repeat Economic Mistakes

by Robert Scheer

 

Please don’t tell me that these reports in the business press touting Sallie Krawcheck as a front-runner for chairman of the SEC or even a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary are true. Who is she? Oh, just another former Citigroup CFO, and therefore a prime participant in the great banking hustle that has savaged the world’s economy. Krawcheck was paid $11 million in 2005 while her bank contributed to the toxic mortgage crisis that would cost millions their jobs and homes. 

Sallie Krawcheck. (AP/Mark Lennihan)

Not that you would know that sordid history from reading the recent glowing references to Krawcheck in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News that stress her pioneering role as a leading female banker—a working mother no less—but manage to avoid her role in a bank that led the way in destroying the lives of so many women, men and their children. Nor did her financial finagling end with Citigroup, as Krawcheck added a troubling stint in the leadership at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America to her résumé. 

A woman who would be an excellent choice as the most experienced as well as principled candidate to head the SEC or Treasury is Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC, who labored to protect consumers rather than undermine them. Indeed, her outstanding book “Bull by the Horns,” chronicling her fight in the last two administrations to hold the banksters accountable, should be required reading for the president and those who are advising him on selecting his new economic team. 

The SEC is supposed to supervise the banks rather than abet them in their chicanery. And although the Treasury Department has been a captive of Wall Street lobbyists for most of the modern era, one would expect something better from the second coming of Barack Obama. Those are key appointments in determining whether the president can turn around the still-moribund economy by channeling the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Or will he continue to plod along on the course set by George W. Bush, bailing out the banks while ignoring beleaguered homeowners and the many other victims of this banking-engineered crisis? 

Obama was given a pass on the economy by voters only because Mitt Romney was an even more craven enabler of Wall Street greed. But the outlines of the Bush Wall Street payoff remain in place, with the Federal Reserve continuing to bail out the banks with virtually free money and the purchase of $40 billion in toxic mortgage-based bonds every month to add to the more than trillion dollars in that junk that the Fed previously had taken off the banks’ books.

The money printing by the Fed is at the heart of the massive debt crisis. But it has been great for the bankers, with compensation at the 32 largest banks slated to hit an all-time high of $207 billion this year, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate. This reward for ripping off the public is almost three times the amount the federal government spends on education. Once again the bankers are blessed for their failures, receiving such wildly excessive compensation despite the fact that banking revenue is down 7.2 percent over the last two years. 

A prime example is Krawcheck’s old bank, Citigroup, whose new CEO this week announced that the company has been forced to engage in a major retrenchment, eliminating 11,000 jobs and closing 84 branches. The bank has been deeply troubled ever since the housing meltdown it helped trigger first began, and it was saved from bankruptcy only by a direct infusion of $45 billion in taxpayer money and a commitment of an additional $300 billion in underwriting of Citigroup’s bad paper.

The ugly tale of America’s Great Recession is inextricably entwined with the deplorable practices of Citigroup, the too-big-to-fail bank made legal by Bill Clinton’s signing off on reversing the Glass-Steagall law that prevented the merger of investment and commercial banks. The first beneficiary of the revised law was the newly created Citigroup, saved from bankruptcy a decade later by the taxpayers. 

I shouldn’t be surprised that Krawcheck would be considered a viable nominee for a central position in managing our economy. After all, her colleague in the top ranks at Citigroup during the years of financial depravity, Robert Rubin, is considered a significant adviser to the Obama administration, and his protégés, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, are still directing policy. It was Rubin who pushed through the reversal of Glass-Steagall, an act of betrayal of the public interest that was rewarded with obscene amounts of money when he ultimately took the job of leading the bank he made legal.

The very fact that these folks remain influential, as witnessed by Krawcheck being considered to head the SEC rather than being the subject of one of its much-needed investigations, gives further evidence of the enduring but ultimately terminal illness of crony capitalism.

© 2012 TruthDig.com

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Reappraising Obama

By Bob Burnett (about the author)     Permalink      
OpEdNews Op Eds 11/23/2012 at 08:18:30

In the last one hundred years, only four Democrats have twice been elected President: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.  Obama's reelection was doubly remarkable considering the sluggish economy, the $2 billion plus spent to defeat him, and the fact that at the beginning of his campaign many Democrats were unenthusiastic.  Obviously voters reappraised the President.

At the beginning of 2012, many Democratic stalwarts were less than thrilled by the prospect of a second Obama term.  While their reasons varied, there was a common theme, "Obama hasn't kept his promises to my constituency."  There were lingering complaints that 2009's stimulus package should have been bigger and a communal whine, "Obama should have listened to us."  Nonetheless, by the end of the Democratic convention on September 6th most Dems had come around.  They gave money, made phone calls, and traveled to swing states.  As a result Obama got a higher percentage of Democratic votes than he did in 2008.

In part, this transformation occurred because from January to September Dems scrutinized Mitt Romney and were horrified by what they saw.  In January some muttered, "There's no difference between Obama and Romney," but nine months later none believed that.  While many Democrats were not thrilled by Obama's first-term performance, they saw him as preferable to Romney on a wide range of issues.

Six factors affected voters' reappraisal of the President:

1. He's a politician.  Before the 2008 election, many Dems saw Obama as a Washington outsider, someone who could rise above politics and "bring us all together."  Four years later, Democrats acknowledged he is a politician.  Barack's not pure; he's not the second coming.  But he is a bright guy, a terrific organizer, a powerful speaker, and most important, he's on our side. 

2. He accomplished a lot in his first term.  Because Romney promised, "If elected, I will repeal Obamacare on day one," Democrats wondered what other Obama accomplishments Romney would repeal and uncovered a long list: Wall Street reform, Don't Ask Don't Tell, winding down the war in Afghanistan, support for reproductive health, protecting the environment, and on and on.  Dems realized the President had accomplished more than they thought. 

3. He became a populist.  In his "State-of-the-Union" address Obama said, "The defining issue of our time is how to keep that [economic] promise alive" We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules."  Obama kept hammering at this theme and it resonated with voters. Exit polls indicated that on the attribute, "a candidate who cares about people like me," the President overwhelmed Romney.

4. He's a pragmatist.   In 2009, Obama got a bad rap from some Dems because they believed he did not fight hard enough for the fiscal stimulus and affordable healthcare. In March of 2011, veteran Washington columnist, Elizabeth Drew, described Obama as "a somewhat left-of-center pragmatist, and a man who has avoided fixed positions for most of his life. Even his health care proposal--denounced by the right as a "government takeover' and "socialism'--was essentially moderate or centrist. When he cut a deal on the tax bill, announced on December 7, he pragmatically concluded that he did not have the votes to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest, and in exchange for giving in on that he got significant concessions from the Republicans, such as a fairly lengthy extension of unemployment insurance and the cut in payroll taxes. Making this deal also left him time to achieve other things--ratification of the START treaty, the repeal of don't ask, don't tell."[Emphasis added.]

5. He's an inconsistent communicator.  Obama's poor performance in the first Presidential debate made public what many Dems had been whispering for four years, "the Great Communicator doesn't always communicate effectively."  The President has a history of making a terrific speech, kicking off an initiative, and then disappearing.  Fortunately, that didn't happen after the October 3^rd debate; Obama realized that he had to get it together or Romney was going to kick his ass and the President rose to the challenge.

6. He's biracial.  Much has been made of Obama being America's first black President, but he's our first biracial president -- his mother was European-American and his father African.  To be precise, Obama is our first President who is not a member of the "non-Hispanic white" category.  That's particularly significant because non-Hispanic whites are now a minority of US births and, in thirty years they will be a minority of the electorate.  Republicans see this coming and it's driving them crazy.

President Barack Obama isn't perfect but his election moves America forward.  He's a harbinger of a time when white men will no longer dominate American politics.

 

The progressive case for Obama

SALON

Monday, Oct 29, 2012 07:30 PM EDT

The progressive case for Obama

Drones, the drug war and income inequality are important. But a vote against Obama only makes other issues worse

By Peter Coyote

Topics: 2012 Elections, Barack Obama, Progressives, Politics News

 

 
President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks at a campaign event at George Mason University, Friday, Oct. 5, 2012, in Fairfax, Va. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

 

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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