t r u t h o u t | Can Obama See the Grand Canyon? - The Diigo Meta page

• 23 Oct 08
  

  Travis Swicegood
  • Out in the stucco deserts of Limbaughland, moreover, fear is already being
    distilled into a good ol' boy version of the "stab in the back" myth
    that rallied the ruined German petite bourgeoisie to the swastika
  • Although I've been studying Marxist crisis theory for decades, I
    never believed I'd actually live to see financial capitalism commit suicide.
    Or hear the International Monetary Fund warn of imminent "systemic meltdown."
  • 16 more annotations...
  • •  But the real culprits, of course, are not being trundled off to the guillotine;
      they're gently floating to earth in golden parachutes. The rest of us may be
      trapped on the burning plane without a pilot, but the despicable Richard Fuld,
      who used Lehman Brothers to loot pension funds and retirement accounts, merely
      sulks on his yacht.
    • with the American way of life in sudden freefall, the
      specter of star-spangled fascism doesn't seem quite so far-fetched.
    • The Right
      may lose the election, but it already possesses a sinister, historically-proven
      blueprint for rapid recovery.
    •    In addition, both Obama and his vice presidential partner Joe Biden, in their
      support for Secretary of the Treasury Paulson's plan, avoid any discussion of
      the inevitable result of cataclysmic restructuring and government bailouts:
      not "socialism," but ultra-capitalism -- one that is likely to concentrate
      control of credit in a few leviathan banks, controlled in large part by sovereign
      wealth funds but subsidized by generations of public debt and domestic austerity.
    •   If we are especially concerned about the fate of the poor or unemployed, we
      are left to read between the lines, with no help from his talking points that
      espouse clean coal technology, nuclear power, and a bigger military, but elide
      the urgency of a renewed war on poverty as championed by John Edwards in his
      tragically self-destructed primary campaign. But perhaps inside the cautious
      candidate is a man whose humane passions transcend his own nearsighted centrist
      campaign. As a close friend, exasperated by my chronic pessimism, chided me
      the other day, "don't be so unfair. FDR didn't have a nuts and bolts program
      either in 1933. Nobody did."
    • In 1930, the factories may have been shuttered but
      the machinery was still intact; it hadn't been auctioned off at five cents on
      the dollar to China.
    • Casino capitalism has proven its mettle by transmitting the deadly
      virus of Wall Street at unprecedented velocity to every financial center on
      the planet. What took three years at the beginning of the 1930s -- that is,
      the full globalization of the crisis -- has taken only three weeks this time
      around.
    • More importantly, the
      New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the
      White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New
      Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement
      in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political
      landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual
      life.
    • Even in the new military (largely a hereditary caste
      of poor whites, blacks, and Latinos) demoralization is reaching the stage of
      active discontent and opening up new spaces for alternative ideas.
    • an intensified war in Afghanistan, that will enlarge the military-industrial
      complex, none of this will replenish the supply of decent jobs nor prime a broken
      national pump.
    • However, in the midst of a deep slump, what a huge military budget
      can do is obliterate the modest but essential reforms that make up Obama's plans
      for healthcare, alternative energy, and education.
    •     It's worth asking, for instance, what in the actual substance of his foreign
      policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy
      of the Bush Doctrine? Yes, he would close Guantanamo, talk to the Iranians,
      and thrill hearts in Europe. He also promises to renew the Global War on Terror
      (in much the same way that Bush senior and Clinton sustained the core policies
      of Reaganism, albeit with a "more human face").
    • the Democratic
      candidate has chained himself, come hell or high water, to a global strategy
      in which "victory" in the Middle East (and Central Asia) remains the
      chief premise of foreign policy, with the Iraqi-style nation-building hubris
      of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz repackaged as a "realist" faith
      in global "stabilization."
    •  Under huge pressure from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats alike to cut the
      budget and reduce the exponential increase in the national debt, what choices
      would President Obama be forced to make early in his administration? More than
      likely comprehensive health-care will be whittled down to a barebones plan,
      "alternative energy" will simply mean the fraud of "clean coal,"
      and anything that remains in the Treasury, after Wall Street's finished its
      looting spree, will buy bombs to pulverize more Pashtun villages, ensuring yet
      more generations of embittered mujahideen and jihadis.
    •  Am I unduly cynical? Perhaps, but I lived through the Lyndon Johnson years
      and watched the War on Poverty, the last true New Deal program, destroyed to
      pay for slaughter in Vietnam.
    •    It is bitterly ironic, but, I suppose, historically predictable that a presidential
      campaign millions of voters have supported for its promise to end the war in
      Iraq has now mortgaged itself to a "tougher than McCain" escalation
      of a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal frontier. In
      the best of outcomes, the Democrats will merely trade one brutal, losing war
      for another. In the worst case, their failed policies may set the stage for
      the return of Cheney and Rove, or their even more sinister avatars.

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