Dixon
11-07-2008, 01:08 PM
Though I voted for a REAL progressive ticket, the Green Party's Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente (thus giving me the dubious pleasure of saying "I told you so" when starry-eyed Obamamania gradually yields to ugly reality), I confess to feeling slightly pleased that Obama, the lesser evil, won. However, it's not too soon to share with you all this excerpt from "Some Thoughts on Obama" by the excellent topical folk singer/songwriter David Rovics:
...Obama might actually follow through with his campaign promises
and send more troops to Afghanistan. And then over the past few days,
the news gets more and more grim. Rahm Emanuel, a zealous supporter of
Israeli Apartheid for Secretary of State. Larry Summers, Clinton's
chief advocate for the World Trade Organization and deregulation of
the financial sector, is being suggested as an economic advisor. Joe
Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, is already his VP.
Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's
administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting
his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending
was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with
nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign
in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands
of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it.
NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's
blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party
supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty
and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of
years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell
during the Clinton years.
Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly
did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the
process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican
sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But
he embraced all of that, and much, much more.
On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different.
Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the
free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their
value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon.
Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending
in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the
time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other
such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the
budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the
administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending
increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican
administrations, social spending has decreased.
There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed
Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower
was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and
Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon
did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was
overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the
population, but among the elite who rule it.
Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of
the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics
and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In
one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked.
I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on
par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration
did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:
It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over
from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which
country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major
contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to
leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and
techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in
comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls
due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And
it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's
still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social
policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I
just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the
current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.
If Obama wins the election, he might very well be a fine negotiator
for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as
enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire.
Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and
encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without
a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its
customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to
lend money for us to do so.
Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way,
I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder
to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a
lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present
crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking
seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could
be ironic.
The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the
Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has
mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to
send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own
man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking
and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in
community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the
realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy --
those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be
changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people,
of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his
campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign
machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small
donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world,
and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.
But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the
insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are
expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it
already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever
that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions and neoliberal
economic reforms.
Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were
under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe
we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above
$100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to
what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is
talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to
Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military
spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away
with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and
sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk
about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless
walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city?
Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free
education through graduate school like they have in most European
countries?
No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope
defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between
"conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them
important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people,
I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps
we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've
done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on
our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison
population will not get much smaller.
I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be
serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the
world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people
calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the
empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on.
Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many
of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of
popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to
become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth redistributor
his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support
just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges
who dominate both parties in the Congress.
And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign
promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries
of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade
agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have
in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like
Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages
and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.
David Rovics is a singer/songwriter and unashamed socialist based in
Portland, Oregon.
...Obama might actually follow through with his campaign promises
and send more troops to Afghanistan. And then over the past few days,
the news gets more and more grim. Rahm Emanuel, a zealous supporter of
Israeli Apartheid for Secretary of State. Larry Summers, Clinton's
chief advocate for the World Trade Organization and deregulation of
the financial sector, is being suggested as an economic advisor. Joe
Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, is already his VP.
Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's
administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting
his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending
was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with
nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign
in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands
of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it.
NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's
blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party
supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty
and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of
years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell
during the Clinton years.
Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly
did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the
process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican
sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But
he embraced all of that, and much, much more.
On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different.
Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the
free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their
value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon.
Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending
in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the
time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other
such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the
budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the
administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending
increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican
administrations, social spending has decreased.
There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed
Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower
was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and
Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon
did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was
overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the
population, but among the elite who rule it.
Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of
the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics
and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In
one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked.
I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on
par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration
did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:
It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over
from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which
country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major
contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to
leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and
techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in
comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls
due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And
it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's
still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social
policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I
just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the
current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.
If Obama wins the election, he might very well be a fine negotiator
for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as
enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire.
Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and
encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without
a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its
customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to
lend money for us to do so.
Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way,
I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder
to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a
lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present
crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking
seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could
be ironic.
The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the
Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has
mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to
send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own
man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking
and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in
community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the
realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy --
those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be
changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people,
of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his
campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign
machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small
donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world,
and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.
But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the
insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are
expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it
already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever
that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions and neoliberal
economic reforms.
Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were
under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe
we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above
$100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to
what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is
talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to
Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military
spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away
with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and
sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk
about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless
walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city?
Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free
education through graduate school like they have in most European
countries?
No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope
defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between
"conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them
important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people,
I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps
we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've
done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on
our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison
population will not get much smaller.
I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be
serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the
world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people
calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the
empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on.
Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many
of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of
popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to
become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth redistributor
his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support
just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges
who dominate both parties in the Congress.
And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign
promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries
of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade
agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have
in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like
Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages
and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.
David Rovics is a singer/songwriter and unashamed socialist based in
Portland, Oregon.