Category: Brian Browne

The more you look at something, the more
you see yourself in it

s in the domestic arena, Obama’ s soaring rhetoric concerning foreign policy dwarfed his actual feats.  His actions were pedestrian, lacking the depth of vision or appreciation for the complexity of world affairs during this era of gathering tensions. Afraid to place his hands in any effort that might not succeed, he did not oppose the political forces in America that sought global domination and in the process, that jerked the world closer to major war. This Nobel Prize Winner accommodated the advice of the warmongers more than he rejected it. He choose to be one of them. Not because it was right but because it was the easier way to go. When he entered office, America  was engaged in two wars. By the time he left, the American military had engaged in significant military or aerial campaigns in five additional countries. Obama spoke peace but performed war. That he deployed mostly drone and other aerial attacks meant no blood on his hands but it would spill rivulets of innocent blood on the ground; thus, his conduct amounted to brutal war nevertheless.

Most charitably, his foreign policy approach can be described as pragmatic. This is but a euphemism for a perspective that,  lacking any reformist strategic element, was all to happy to compromise with the evil that it met in the halls of power.  The closest thing he had to a guiding principle was his aversion to loss. This trait was not so much a function of caution but one born to vanity. He did not want his name tainted by military setback. Thus, his was a foreign policy of focusing on what could be attained absent the threat of major defeat. His obsession with avoiding military failure would make diplomatic failure inevitable. No human is completely prescient.  Only after we walk into the forest, do we know if the beast will challenge our advance. If dread of the feral charge exceeds the value of the gain being sought, it is best not to venture into the thicket in the first instance. Obama would be cajoled by his war establishment to walk into situations like Syria, only to find the road tougher and longer than first imagined. He would ultimately retreat from his aggressive opinion to avoid confrontation. This waffling would prevent escalation of war but would also leave friend and foe perplexed as to how such a smart man could make such acute miscalculations.  It was because he was torn between two conflicting ideals he could never reconcile: his aversion to risk and the perpetual advance of the American war machine.

Obama’s disappointing foreign policy legacy confirms the strength of a dangerous agency at play in the affairs of nations. American foreign policy is now dominated by the military machine which includes the phalanx of well-paid politicians and intellectuals who have attached themselves to it. The American Department of Defense is a misnomer. More accurate is the original nomenclature: Department of War. The military establishment is a massive organism comprised of the most powerful armed force ever assembled and the legion of private corporations and contractors that service this machine. This complex needs to be amply and always fed just to maintain itself. Sadly, the driving impulse of this enterprise is not to stay as is. Like any other large business it seeks to expand market share and maximize profits.

The application of these expansionary business impulses to the war machine has but lethal consequence. The quest for profit means the machine has to be put to use in order to justify ever increasing budget request. For the denizens of this martial world, the pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of war. They seek a condition of perpetual conflict where money ceaselessly flows into the machine and misery flows out, being poured upon those recalcitrant nations that have been tardy in accepting American global dominance as a fait accompli.

Entering office, Obama entered into a fateful choice. If change was truly in the offing, he would confront this soulless machine. The damage it has done to the world and to sanctity of America’s democracy is of weighty measure. Democracy at home is weakened by war abroad. The continuous application of men and materiel in foreign war is a sure way to defeat your own democratic self. America is now a less open and free society in actual practice than forty years ago. It is also more a militarized nation. This is no coincidence. Confronting this trend would have been the most principled thing to do. Massive political costs would have been the immediate dividend. It would have forever estranged the first black president from the conservative power base that has dictated the shape of things in Washington since Obama was born. Being the first black man to occupy the White House would have become exponentially more lonely and difficult.

Adverse to tough fights that might be lost, Obama cast his lot with the war establishment that had barely countenanced his election. He would be tolerated by them because he surrendered unto them though not fully. He would go their way because he believed their myths of American greatness and righteousness in large part. He would do so also because he dared not fight these tougher fighters unless he had no other option. Yet, he would recoil when their adventurism placed him in a bind where the outcome risked a war too large and uncertain for his skittish political biology to stomach.

To be fair, Obama had few role models for the confrontational approach. After the scandalous Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, President Kennedy showed signs of an independent streak. He was taken from the scene before we could see if that streak might take full bloom and whether it might halt the militarization of American foreign policy. All presidents after Kennedy encouraged the growing juggernaut. Obama joined the blind parade. It would have been a monument to exceptional courage and principle for Obama to stand against the weight and blast of the war machine. After all, he was merely the Commander-in-Chief.

A survey of Obama’s foreign policy reveals the easy resort to force and intimidation against the small and weak but of waffling in the face of the unexpected resistance by Russia against American intrusion into the former’s traditional sphere of geopolitical influence.

America’s treatment of weak nations on its doorstep was an exhibition of malign interference.  Haiti  clearly displayed the ugly handiwork of American statecraft. During the 2011 presidential election, America’s favorite candidate and Clinton boot-lick, Michelle Martelly, didn’t even make the runoff. However, there is nothing that American power and pressure cannot alter. Secretary of State was dispatched to correct what the people’s will had done in error. She scowled, hectored and wagged her finger at every Haitian official in eyesight. The message was quickly understood.

The erstwhile musician known as Sweet Micky was included in the runoff; the deserving candidate was summarily removed. The conclusion was foregone. Sweet Micky became President Martelly. The new job would only reinforce his penchant for dancing to America’s tune. He would give America, particularly the Clinton family, the keys to his nation. When poor Haitians sought legislation raising the minimum wage, Secretary Clinton vetoed the progressive move; it would increase the costs of American manufacturers seeking to locate there. Haitians came to icily refer to Bill Clinton as “the Governor General.”  He pranced about the country, facilitating the corporate takeover of vast tracts of important real estate and making sure an unqualified family member got the most lucrative contract to mine the nation’s gold reserves.

Obama still would finish with the forlorn nation. During the 2015 presidential election, the Haitian electoral commission and the populace rejected the exercise as cast in fraud. The commission canceled the travesty and  called for new elections that would be free and fair. America vehemently objected to the Haitian desire to improve their democracy. Washington had concluded that the exercise was fair enough. The reason was obvious. Its chosen candidate had won even though that person and his party were unpopular.

Imagine that! America the self-described bastion of democracy was telling the second oldest republic in the western hemisphere that it should not aspire to credible elections. Because of the Haitian show of independence, the American government suspended technical assistance to the electoral commission. American assistance to its favored candidate would increase. This was not America showing respect for the democratic hopes of another people. It was a naked display of power, dismissive of the will of a nation simply because that nation was small and poor.

Haiti seems a land accursed to many people. The spiritual realm is beyond my range of clear sight yet I doubt such a conclusion. Haiti is a land too long and too heavily put upon. Haiti should stand as a testament to the Black race and our perseverance unto freedom despite the most odious slavery and odds. The Haitian revolution was more remarkable than the American.  It was the only instance in recorded history of mankind where an enslave population defeated a standing army of a great empire to gain freedom and fashion a new nation. Instead of being chronicled as a giant advance in the progress of liberty, Haiti has been punished for two centuries by economic boycotts, outrageous war reparation payments to France and armed invasion. This century that punishment has taken the form of blatant political interference and the wholesale diversion of humanitarian assistance. Had the nation been allowed to develop normal  trade and commerce as a nation equal to any other, it would not be in the present decrepit state.

Strong earthquakes and hurricanes have shaken other nations. But none suffered the fatalities that befell Haiti. Haitian death tolls were not caused by supernatural curse. The proximate cause of the deaths is man’s own hand. Racism, compounded by the dastardly national leadership that racism helped produce, led directly to the chronic deterioration of the nation’s moral and physical infrastructure. In such conditions, when the wind blows and the ground trembles, many people lose their lives.

The cerebral Obama is aware of this sordid history. Yet, he did not lift a finger to help the nation because this history meant nothing to him. Haiti was unimportant and its people mere human effluent. Instead of standing by the small nation when such a stand would have cost him little political capital, he placed his foot on it then gave it over to the Clintons and to the cold mercy of their larcenous grabbing.

Obama’s normalization with Cuba was a positive step on balance. The move was long in coming. It also came with some political costs. However, the majority of Americans favored it. There was no chance of Washington suffering injury from detente with Havana. Cuba poses no threat. The more the Cuban economy is pried open, the more America regains control of adjacent market that had been artificially closed. Castro’s revolution will eventually be drowned in a sea of dollars and the inevitable dying of the old guard in Havana. The opening to Cuba became more a priority because of the wasteland Haiti has become.

The elite had visions of turning northern Haiti into a tropical playground redolent of Cuba prior to Castro. With Haiti in such a sad state, the surer way to relive the glamour of old Cuba was to return to Cuba itself. Nothing is as it seems. With regard to the powerful, everything done for obvious good is also done for hidden wrong.

Obama’s years have seen an escalation of violence and instability in the Middle East and Near Asia. His decision to follow, instead of to restrain, the American war machine abetted the turmoil. By his own admission, his intervention in Libya was gross error. It was also cruelty multiplied. A direct consequence of the intervention was to fuel superfluous death and terror along an arc stretching from northern Nigeria to western Iraq. America and its allies formed the air support and informal welcoming committee to jihadists from across the Maghreb whom Qaddafi had kept at bay.  On the even of the Western intervention, Qaddafi was on the cusp of decisive victory. He would have ended the rebellion with dispatch, within two weeks most likely. Qaddafi was not a threat to the West and had been helpful against terror networks. Yet America and its friends decided to align with terror to oust the mercurial leader. Qaddafi was a strange, imperfect force, a despot prone to ruthlessness. Yet his nation enjoyed one of the continent’s highest standards of living. The arbitrary decision, unhinged from any calculation of the true costs and benefits, was made that it was his time to go and even terrorists would become Washington’s allies in removing him.

The intervention turned Libya into lawlessness.  America gave the jihadists shopping spree at Libya’s vast weapons armory. With Western aid, weapons would be funneled to support the rebellion in Syria. Syria is now a wasteland. Its people dispersed, economy made destitute and ancient historic legacy turned to rumble by madmen partially equipped by the world’s leading democracies. Weapons would also be transported southward into Mali and Nigeria, making Boko Haram a more potent force that would kill thousands and turn millions of Nigerians homeless. This darkness is Obama’s legacy. He went into Libya not caring if the effort was right or wrong. He did so because Secretary Clinton and the war machine of which she is a charter member pressured him. He relented not because he was later convinced of the propriety of the undertaking. He succumbed because he did not want to alienate the warriors in his midst over something so trivial as Libya.

The Nobel Prize winner let the bombs fly simply because he could not be bothered to oppose those in his midst who championed the wanton destruction of an inconsequential if troublesome nation. He would couch the effort as a struggle for freedom and to protect innocents. The jihadists he supported would willfully depopulate the city of Tawargha inhabited by black Libyans, slaughtering many innocent people in the process. Obama shed neither a tear nor lifted a finger the halt the carnage. In effect, he had agreed to bomb Qaddafi so that jihadists could traipse the land engaging in gratuitous, lethal racism in their wanderings.

Russia raised no objection to the Libya incursion. Qaddafi was not beloved and Libya was of no strategic import to Moscow. America misread Russian situational acquiescence to be sign of perpetual surrender. America was stunned when Russia opposed similar adventurism in Syria. Had Obama a finer understanding of geopolitics, he would have anticipated Moscow’s hardening. Russia had invested much in Syria. It had a strategic naval base there. The base protected Russia’s back door into the Black Sea and allowed Russian to project into the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, America suborned the Al Qaeda affiliated extremists in Syria not for love of democracy. A lucrative gas pipeline had been planned from Saudi Arabia to Europe. The project must traverse Syria. The financiers  need a pliant government in Damascus. Thus, the Western funding of those who would have Assad’s head. This was but a war inside a war, just this time gas had replaced oil as the reason for ruin.

When Putin stood firm, Obama waffled. He did not want to be dragged into costly war that could well be lost. Defeat would bear his name and he could not bear that. Because Putin pushed back, Obama pushed against his war establishment clamoring for a hot fight with Russia. He was smart and scared enough not to risk it. In effect, he ceded Syria to Russia and kept the peace.

Stumbling into the peace through the backdoor may be his greatest foreign policy achievement.

Angered at Russian impudence over Syria, the war party would push America and NATO to punch into Russia’s sphere of influence in eastern Europe. Ukraine became the focal point. America helped fund the overthrow of a pro-Russian elected government. Russia reacted as a power does when its vital interests are threatened. Protecting to vital interests and its strategy of having buffer states to repel an incursion from the west, Russia engineered the secession of Crimea and its return to Russia as well as funded separatists in eastern Ukraine. Obama performed an even more nuanced dance here.  He went along with the American war machine to a degree. He funded the Ukrainian military lavishly,  pushed for economic sanctions and approved silly war exercises along the Russian front. He joined the American press in demonizing Putin. However, he resisted the call for more direct American intervention. While America has cast Putin as the outlaw and most of the world accepts the verdict, the opposite is true.  Putin is adhering to the principles governing the relations between great powers that evolved from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. America’s insistence that neither Russia nor any other nation except America can define national spheres of influence is a revolutionary and reckless departure from the maxims practiced for over four centuries. Again, this has been a victory of sorts for Obama. He juggled and danced between Putin and his own war party until his tenure expired. He resolved nothing but did keep his own political skin out of the fire of hot war.

The Iranian nuclear deal was of the same stop-gap nature. Iran posed no threat. It has not attacked another country in centuries while America seems to engage a new foe on a yearly basis. Obama made the Iran deal to steal time. The deal is essentially a ten year grace period wherein both sides agree not to cross the point of no return. In this way, Obama again diverted the domestic chorus for war against Iran. The deal also preempted the contumacious Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu from taking action that might have pulled Obama into a major fight not of his choosing.

While sidestepping major war, Obama fed the martial beast a steady menu of minor conflicts. During his term, America has engaged in major operations in seven countries, outpacing George Bush in this regard. The former president ordered so many aerial raids that America’s inventory of bombs neared depletion levels last year. Thousands of innocent people have been killed. Yet after one drone strike, Obama is reported to have quipped that he is getting pretty good at this “killing thing.” Such a quote should be etched on the nonsensical Nobel Peace Prize he was given. This diet of nasty little wars that have no end and pose no genuine threat to America is a boon to the war establishment. These conflicts ensure that  politicians and public will be sufficiently frightened to increase military budgets in order to buy  the next generation of weapons and to surrender their civil liberties so that the national security state may better protect them from imagined threats. So frightened they have become that they think not of who shall protect them from the excesses of the national security apparatus.

Obama did nothing for Africa.  His electrification program for Africa was a pretense, a fiction that has yet to see the light. It was a public relations announcement and nothing more. Some will apologize for him,  claiming he refrained from action because he did not want to be tagged as favoring blacks. That apology is wanting but even that is too generous. The reason backing his inaction is more ominous. He did nothing simply because he did not want to do anything for Africa.

He sees his blackness as a social construct and a political reality that must be worked to his advantage and never to his discomfort. Psychologically, he is in equal parts repelled by and attracted to other black people. He loves his blackness as an abstract concept.  But he holds no true brotherly affection for most black people. He sees the pathologies and contradictions among whites as excusable human frailties; he sees those of black people as rendering us an inferior product in the aggregate. White society’s struggle with its demons marks the path of human progress for him. Black society struggling with its demons is nothing but two brothers fighting to determine which is the worst. He is an extraordinary amalgam of deep love of self commingled with a perplexed ambivalence to his race at large.

CONCLUSION

Obama personifies leadership in this era. He is not a maker of history. He is what history has made. Obama is a confluence of the shallow idealism of the Baby Boomer generation and of the virtual reality of the 21st century Millennials.  The idealism of the Boomers has the longevity of a Hollywood movie. They think grand and profound thoughts. When reality demonstrates how long and hard it will be to effect those ideas, the Boomer quickly jettisons the idea and rejoins the mainstream so that he can get on with his private advancement.  Thus, people like Obama and the Clintons have even confessed to “feeling Democratic but thinking Republican.” This is code for surrendering principle to the cause of personal ambition. As a politician of the computer age, Obama also understands the world of virtual reality.  If you say, write or text something, that is as good as doing the thing. The expression of intent, whether genuine or not, is more important than conduct. If it exists on the screen or in print, then it is. Thus, in his closing speech Obama actually took credit for simply wanting to close the Guantanamo holding facility although he did nothing concrete to close it and had the unilateral power to do so.

In the end, Obama was neither hero nor villain. He was but a cog in the machine. He was a phlegmatic, risk adverse manager of a cold-hearted martial enterprise. He is gone. The machine rolls on.

For those in need of symbolism, the Obama years have been good. He has proven that a Black American can be as coldly efficient and do the bidding of the elite as well as any good white politician. For some, I guess that is progress. For those of us who already knew this, Obama’s tenure is a disappointment. Obama’s presidency exacted a hidden cost that will be borne by the Black American tradition of progressive politics. Due to Obama, black politicians will no longer be seen as defined by a moral clarity and an urge toward justice and peace based on our history of being on the wrong end of injustice and racial violence.  To advance his career and smooth his time in high office, Obama obliterated in eight years what took centuries of pain and heartache to build. A black politician is just a white one in darker skin. This is a strong price to pay just to fulfill one man’s fleeting ambitions.  Now, who shall hold America’s moral compass up to the face of power and privilege?

Next week: We begin the era of Trump.

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The vain ruler harks more to the applause of the rich than the cries of the poor.

Last week, we reviewed how the cynical political strategy of Bill Clinton transformed the liberal Democratic party into a gossamer of itself; in many ways, it would become a replica of the Republican Party of the early 1970s. Clinton’s policies were of the harsh variety that did blacks and the working class whites little good. However, he spoke in a folksy idiom that disguised his elitist intent. Despite the damage generated by his policies, Clinton would remain a compelling figure in the political firmament. He made himself the reigning grand master of the political bait-and-switch, the shiniest mountebank in a galaxy of noticeably inferior emanations of the art of political deception.
If there was anything of permanence to his term in office it was to place a target on the back of working class people. Poverty would well know where to shoot its arrows once economic crisis came. Such crisis was rendered inevitable by the policies Clinton fabricated while in office. Those who loved him the most, where those he most neglected. In this age of information, he showed misdirection was attainable for those who had the talent and vacancy of scruples for sordid undertaking. He proved that he could hoodwink most of the people enough of the time to be elected, reelected and even adored by the very people in whose face he flicked the mud from his boot. This brings to mind a principle of human nature: The more a person can deceive you, the less that person will respect you. He will relegate you to the floor of lowest contempt. As Clinton had done with the people, so too would Obama.
Barack Obama disliked Clinton as a person. However, as political model to follow, Clinton became the Obama bible. As irony would have it, Obama would become the leading apostle and practitioner of Clintonian politics. In doing so, he outflanked dear Hillary for the 2008 presidential nomination. He “out-Clintoned” the Clintons. What Bill had mastered, Obama would subtly perfect. His black skin and the progressive stance that it connoted to many people would better mask the conservative menu he embraced.
The 2008 election was deeply educative moment for me. I supported Obama without reservation and without sufficient thought as the pedigree of my decision. Like many, I was enticed by the slogans “Yes We Can” and “Change.” To me and millions of others, they signaled things that we would later discover where never in the Obama realm of action. He knew this; but would not move to negate these wrong perceptions because needed them to win. The corrections would come later: after he had benefited from our confusion to acquire the keys to the White House.
Obama bantered in the language of a progressive. But his mind and objectives were dedicated to the Clintonian worldview. In other words, his personal ambition was vast and breathtaking. However, his vision for the actual reform was underwhelming. Yes, we can vote him into office; but no we cannot reform this nation so the poor and working class have a better chance and a weakening middle class is made once again secure. We can change the color of the face of the leadership but we will do no such thing with the color of our policies at home and abroad. Those policies would remain darkly elitist and menacingly imperial.
On election day 2008, I remember standing among hopeful black faces waiting to cast votes with a sense of historic fulfillment rarely encountered. The feeling repeated itself as I watched with my mother as Obama gave his victory speech to an adoring crowd. My mother was born with the Great Depression and spent the majority of her life in a land ruled by the black codes, the American system of legalized racism. For her to see the advent of a black president was seven dreams come true. Tears of joy and pride streamed down her face. As I watched her and thought of the road of her years, I failed to resist the high emotion of the extraordinary moment.
Within three months of Obama’s inauguration, I realized I had been a mark in a confidence game of epic dimension. Obama was not what he had hoped we believed him to be. I had dismissed troubling signs in his scant political record and in his waffling on key issues during the campaign. The symbolism was so powerful and picturesque to be shorted by the more unpleasant, obscured reality. His rise seem the perfect tableau of what modern America was meant to become. Like so many American political stories, the tale was more fabrication than fact.
I had failed to heed Martin Luther King’s admonition. I had allowed Obama’s race to replace an objective evaluation of his character and the policies. Had I not disobeyed King, I would have more deeply questioned Obama’s meteoric rise. I would have been as uneasy with him as I was with John McCain, the Republican candidate. I would not have voted for either. I find no great utility in being presided over by a black man who sees me as a fool to use as opposed to a white man who uses me because he hates me. The difference between the two is so thin as to be nonexistent. In their policies toward me, they would significantly differ but once in one thousand.
An overview of the eight Obama years shows his first as the most consequential and revealing one. From the churlish President Bush II, he inherited the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. To his credit, Obama acted to prevent the 2008 recession from becoming another depression. However, we should not overrate the achievement. Faced with the looming calamity, only the most conservative ideologue would have stood idly to allow the dynamics of the market take its merciless toll on the financial system. Obama basically fine-tuned and expanded some of the things Bush had rushed into place before his exit.
While Obama saved the financial system, he did little to reform it in such a manner that the excesses which caused the crisis would not be repeated. Instead, he pumped over 15 trillion dollars in various ways into the large banks to insulate them from their own reckless speculation. The banks had made a hash of the residential housing and mortgage sectors. Because of the gorging by the banks, millions of homeowners lost their homes. Obama barely twitched his little finger to help the homeowner in trouble. The financial aid to the banks would be the largest transfer of public funds into private hands in the history of humankind. By contrast, the programs established to assist troubled homeowners were minuscule and rigid. They were cast so that only a small percentage of people would qualify for the aid. Those who did, found the amounts were small and long in coming. Obama could then tout he had designed a program to help the average man. But it was a program only in name. In reality, it was a mean shadow, a mirage of false assistance that mocked the pain and loss of the aggrieved homeowner.
Obama energetically worked to salvage the banks that caused the fall but he placed on perpetual hold the average person. He let them sink underwater without as much as tossing a lifeline. If he had really earmarked 50-100 billion dollars to liberally aid the broken American, a mere fraction of what he shoveled the banks, millions of people could have refinanced and kept their homes. The economic landscape would have been made much less brutal and the economic recovery more vibrant. Instead, he allowed people to go homeless and jobless because he cared not enough. After all, the banks and big corporations contributed more to his political success than had these poor fellows.
No large financial crisis occurs outside the company of widespread fraud and crime within the financial industry. Obama was aware of this. The FBI had showed him its findings. He ignored them. Obama instituted a policy that no banks or bankers would be prosecuted for known criminal wrongdoing. During this period, Obama met the nation’s most powerful bankers. He told them he was the only thing keeping the public from revolting and demanding the bankers be punished. His was a telling statement. Obama recognized the public outcry. He did not say it was illegitimate. Even he knew it was grounded in fact. Still, he choose to side with the bankers. He would ally with the banks against the public interest because his mind was set on protecting the elite and letting the common man swim for himself.
Obama made his greatest mistake in fiscal policy during that first year. With the economy descending into recession, a large fiscal stimulus was needed. Empirical evidence pointed to around 1.5 trillion dollars as sufficient to spur a decent recovery. The progressive thinkers in his economic council advocated expenditure of this magnitude. Conservatives balked at the figure even though their own economic models showed this was condign. They put objectivity aside in order to hold fast to their faith in the free market that was imploding before their eyes. They advocated a stimulus of 200-300 billion dollars. Obama knew the better course of action. However, he could not no bring himself to go against his conservative advisers. Thus, he cut he baby in half, moving for a stimulus of roughly 790 billion.
Because of this middling approach, the economy would not recover quickly or firmly. A double-dip recession was barely avoided. Almost ten years after, the so-called recovery is the weakest in American history. All but the smallest fraction of GDP growth during the post-recession period has gone to the richest one percent of the population. Eighty percent of the people are worst off now then before the 2008 recession.
Obama touted that his policy lowered unemployment. This is true but misleading. Unemployment was lowered not so much by his polices but by statutory definitions. The American jobless rate does not include those who have gotten so frustrated that they cease looking for work. Under Obama, those who dropped out of the job market reached its highest percent on record. If you include these people in the effective unemployment rate, the rate remains high and troubling. Obama’s boast rings but the tone is hollow not heartening.
During his first year, he also advanced the foundation of his legacy, the Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare. This insurance scheme did not originate with Obama. He borrowed it from a Republican think tank, the Heritage Foundation. He figured he would win points with the Republicans by delivering unto them their own creation. While Obamacare had some benign inclusions such as prohibiting insurers from rejecting people with preexisting illnesses, the measure is fatally flawed. When it was first proposed, I observed that its cost controls were too weak, too much of the cost burden would fall on the middle class and that the behemoth insurance companies would manipulate the labyrinthine system to their benefit in ways the solitary individual seeking insurance could not possibly match. These fears materialized with vengeance.
Last year, insurance premiums rose nearly 25 percent nationwide. Incomes remain static. Two more years of like increases would mean a doubling of premiums from 2015 to 2018. The Affordable Health Care Act is swiftly becoming a misnomer vulnerable to sarcastic derision. Out of the 50 million then uninsured, the act covers 20 million. But a large bulk of the 20 million have bought policies fraught with numerous conditions and caveats indecipherable to normal beings. These people will find that their policies remain in good standing so long as they do not use it for any significant expense. If crisis comes, they will find the policy to be illusory just when they most need it.
Obama’s two most significant domestic policy successes were actually failures. For the entirety of his tenure, Obama pursued a fiscal “grand bargain” with Republicans. He wanted to scale back social security and medicare, with a view to eventually privatizing both. This would have been the public execution of the New Deal, the bedrock of the Democratic party’s compact with the American electorate. This would have completed the transformation of the Democrats into Republicans on all economic policies of any deep consequence. He would have achieved what Bill Clinton could only dream. He would have sundered the social safety net for the elderly and poor, placing the people’s welfare in the hands of the very Wall Street profiteers that had just bled the financial system dry. This policy makes no sense except that the Wall Street gang stood to make additional tens of billions of dollars yearly if this took hold. Barack knows on which side his bread is butter and who owns the biggest knife and the most butter.
Thankfully, the Republican Congress was full of racial animus. Racism blinded them to the fact that Obama was giving them what they most desired. They simply could not stomach agreeing with their own black servant because they were affronted that he sought to act as their leader. They rebuked his gift. The people’s New Deal benefits were sacrificed by their purported black champion only to be saved from his mercenary designs by racism itself. The Divine truly has a sense of humor.
Failing to learn the lesson underlying the grand bargain impasse, Obama pirouetted to champion the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement until his last day on the job. The TPP was more than a trade compact. It was an unprecedented shift of national sovereignty into the clutch of a global financial and corporate network. The agreement established a special private judicial system wherein foreign corporations could sue governments for enacting laws or regulations that affected the corporation’s existing investment in a country. If a nation decided to pass labor and environmental rules prohibiting a foreign company from continuing to bury toxic waste at a site, that company could sue the government for costs and lost profits resulting from the protective measures.
The private court would be staffed by judges selected by the business sector. The outcome of any suits would be foregone. This provision alone would make major labor and environmental reform legislation prohibitive. Afraid of being sued, governments would be handcuffed in making companies perform as good citizens. Representative government and progressive policies would have become casualties of the TPP. Governmental sovereignty as we know it would have been forfeited in order to maximize global corporate profits. Companies would form foreign subsidiaries that would return to their home country to perform the work of the parent company, thus taking advantage of this provision. Nominally foreign companies and investment would proliferate while governmental regulation for the public good would diminish in proportion. Such a provision actually would give firms an incentive to invest in the cheapest, most labor and environmentally adverse ways then dare governments to pass laws to make them cure the wrongs.
Based on this provision alone, there is no way that a person who truly cares more for people than for profit could support the TPP except out of mistake or ignorance. Obama’s could not claim ignorance. The treaty bore his mark. Where he wavered on helping the poor and working class, his support for the TPP was steadfast despite the strong opposition of most average Americans, particularly progressive Democrats. For him to support such a caustic device means his heart is not with the general welfare but with the special interests that populate the corporate boardrooms in tony office buildings. To support the TPP unabashedly, shows an Obama that had given himself over to the global elite completely, There is no other plausible explanation for such behavior so unfitting the progressive and Democratic cause. He again was lucky that the 2016 election came before he could realize this dream. It would have written his name in infamy.
Next week we shall conclude with an analysis of Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

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How sad when the reflection bears more substance than that which is reflected.

This article will be unpopular in the main. That is reason enough to compel its writing. Popular acceptance should never be a pursuit for a commentator on the political economy who seeks to do so with a modicum of integrity to his beliefs.  For me, popularity is mostly an assured bygone but at times an incidental byproduct of the quest to adhere to the finer truths among the rush of what is said and written for public consumption. Much of what passes as news analyses and information is like the fast food that entices us along every main street and avenue of every modern city. It fills but does not nourish. The taste is good but is of scant benefit. Consuming it prevents you from that which is better for you. I am sure some who read this will attach this negative description to what I am about to say.

My pen leans left. I try not to disguise it or apologize for it. It is from that perspective that I make this case. So be it.

The near veneration of former President Obama is a sad testament to how far black people have been led down the primrose path that leads away from our better future. We have been led to believe we move forward; but what I coming is a replay of bleak aspects of both our remote and immediate pasts. The path we now tread also betrays our tradition of progressive politics which has been an ethical, if not always effective, counterbalance to the American establishment’s attempt to control the known world while keeping us subservient at home. We always stood against the conservative establishment’s penchant to throttle the poor at home and to pillory recalcitrant but nonthreatening nations as the hallmark of an imperial foreign policy that exploits ideals such as democracy and humanitarian intervention to mask more pecuniary aims.

President Obama is not the creator or the harbinger of a new and better age. He is a creature of his era.  He does not define our times; the times define him. He adroitly took advantage of what had been laid out before him.  Thus, you cannot understand the elevation of Barack Obama without first understanding the impact of Bill Clinton. There is no Obama without Clinton just as there is no Clinton without Reagan. Therefore, we must delve into history before we treat the Obama administration in earnest.

A mercenary compromise was performed by black politicians thirty years ago.  In exchange for greater access to the establishment and its lucre, many blacks aspiring toward high profile political careers relinquished their predecessor’s roles as the foremost guardians of modern progressive politics in America.  While black politicians were lining up and crowding the doorway to tender their half of this Faustian deal, the Democratic Party was undergoing its own cynical transformation. The party began to tear from its liberal moorings. The Rooseveltian New Deal –  social security, public works, public assistance to the poor – had been the hallmark of the party for half a century. This served the party well.

But the social-economic forces that begot the Reagan election changed things. Conservatism had regrouped to overturn the public order of things and with it, change the moral foundation of public policy and discourse. A more selfish, materialistic worldview would ascend. Ambitious young Democrats desired to be elected into office more than they wanted to champion programs for the poor and vulnerable. They formed groups such as the New Democrats and the disingenuously named Progressive Policy Institute, for progressive it was not. They co-opted the label “progressive,”  redefining its use in the American political lexicon to mean what it was not. By this subterfuge, they would dupe many naive souls into believing this group of Democrats wanted to safeguard the Rooseveltian legacy when their aim was to purge it.

New Democrats warred against the New Deal.  As Reagan jerked the nation rightward, New Democrats were only too eager to follow his direction.  The New Democrats would also form the Democratic Leadership Conference. Bill Clinton was its head.  Black politicians who wanted to join the exclusive club to partake of the bounty given only to the elite not only checked their coats and hats at the door. They checked their consciences as well. As Reagan pulled white Democrats to the right, black Democrats ran after the white ones.  (Only after he was elected into the White House would Obama show his true inclinations.  During a meeting with Democrats, he exclaimed that he was a “New Democrat.”  He dared not say it while on the campaign trail; it would have undermined his false progressive posturing. But once in office, he suffered no such inhibitions. He could then boast that he had chosen to be a slave on the very ship he was to captain.)

For a few pieces-of-eight, these black politicians sold their right to think independently and forfeited their position as the most left-leaning force in American electoral politics. Blindly following Clinton’s course, black politicians were in effect legitimizing Reagan. This is why President Obama could list Reagan as among his heroes even though Reagan launched his presidential campaign in the Mississippi birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and never did anything during his years in office to atone for the obvious racism he came to represent. To this day, no mainstream black politician has the fortitude to call Reagan a racist when he so obviously was.

For these black politicians the movement for fairer black political and economic rights had ended. As long as fellow blacks had the right to vote for them that was all these politicians cared for.  Their mission was no longer a collective one but a personal one. For them, politics was simply a game of thrones, not one of moral themes.

Because of the campaign money and political structures he commanded, Clinton had black politicians swarming around him like fleas to an open honey jar. With this phalanx of black hirelings, Clinton maintained the loyalty of black America due to his gifted tongue and his knowledge of black cultural sensibilities because of growing up near the wrong side of the railroad tracks in the South.  However, the Clinton years laid the foundations for a diminution that black America is still suffering. Yet, Clinton’s words were sweet to the ear. He explained everything in terms that fooled most people into believing he was doing the bidding of the common man. He told people what he knew they wanted to hear. That he did the opposite had no great bearing on his conscience. His mission was to deceive not to lead.

A clear look at Clinton’s major goals show how successful he deluded working class and black America into believing he was for them when he was actually undermining their core economic interests. First, he repealed New Deal financial regulation. This caused a boom of predatory lending that would bust a decade later, causing legions of black people to lose the only significant wealth asset they had, their homes. Thanks Bill. Second, he passed a crime bill highly discriminatory to black nonviolent drug users. This massively increased the black prison population without a like increase in white prisoners although white drug use is higher per capita than black. Strange how that happened. Thanks again Bill for loving black people so much that you want to keep more of us under lock and key.

Third, his gutting of social welfare added to the suffering and destitution of millions who, through no fault of their own, had fallen through the cracks and had no real chance at employment. He expanded the cracks to make it a bigger hole that would be easier to fail down. In desperation, many of these people would resort to crime. Also, because of Bill, people with criminal records even for minor drug offenses could not receive in public assistance or live in public housing. Again, with no place to stay, little to eat and nowhere that would hire them to work, many had no alternative but to resort to even worse crime. Thank God, Clinton’s crime bill had been enacted to handle them. The private prisons Clinton championed were more than happy to take the influx. It meant greater profits. Fourth, Clinton would cut social services to balance the budget. As a result of this so-called prudence, the nation slank into mild recession. Without government running a deficit, the private sector is prone to contract. That is a cardinal lesson of empirical economics but not the conservative dogma to which Clinton affixed the fate of the nation.

Clinton executed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  This accelerated the exit of factory jobs from American industrial cities. Clinton was shutting the door that was the traditional entry of blacks and other minorities into the working and middle classes. Bill wanted to privatize Social Security which would have decimated the pockets of the elderly poor. However, his tryst with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment trial gave old people a reprieve. Bill was no better at foreign policy. He watched and forbade strong UN action as the massacre slowly unfolded in Rwanda. He made a mash of Haitian democracy and still is meddling there to this day. Unknown to most, Haiti has significant untapped gold and oil reserves and picturesque land that would make for beach resorts. Bill wants a chunk of it all. His reckless policy of NATO’s eastward expanding is the parent of today’s trouble with Russian over the Ukraine. Clinton set in motion a dynamic that has brought the world closer to war much in the same way the series of competing blocs and alliances facilitated WWI.

This is the man whom Black people loved although his track record suggests that his vocation is to spite us. Black apologists will claim the economy grew under his watch. True but inaccurate. The GDP grew but most of that growth was based on a boom in debt. Lending went on a spree that would ultimately kill or maim those who participated in it. Wages stagnated because of Clinton’s embrace of Republican anti-union and labor policies. However, financial deregulation allowed banks to lend money at rates that the previous generation of Americans would have recoiled against as being usurious. People borrowed to the hilt. This was fake affluence. GDP growth was a mirage. It was vinegar at the bottom of the champagne glass. The bottom would come years later in the 2008 financial crisis. President Bush II would bear much blame for the crisis and rightly so. Clinton would get off free in the public mind; in truth, he was more responsible for it than Bush.  When it comes to our economic well-being, Clinton was as much an enemy of black people as any Republican of his era.

In short, during the 1980-90’s, a wretched transformation had occurred. The Republican party was becoming a throwback to the 19th century Democratic party that controlled the southern United States during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. The party of Lincoln was turning into a party that would have expelled Lincoln had he the misfortune being alive for the politics of today. The New Democrats meanwhile were turning their party into the Old Republicans of the Eisenhower-Rockefeller-Nixon type.  Black politicians would be more influenced by the ideology of Reagan than that of Roosevelt.

The stage had been set. Obama would climb it. He was among those black politicians who decided to ride the train where all the gravy and money were stored.  There was little allure in remaining a local community activist when he obviously had the talent for a much larger role. He had studied Clinton well. He would mimic man from Arkansas. In fact, there could be no Obama without there first being a Clinton to pave the way and set the mold.

To his credit, Clinton was an innovative political mind. At the height of his political prowess, Clinton had the intuitive ability to see things before they took shape.  Obama lacked this uncanny gift.

Obama was president eight years; yet, there is not one important original thought or idea attributable to him. The signature health care law that bears his name was actually developed in Republican policy laboratories and was first implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican rival in the 2012 election. While Obama’s persona may be original, his policy ideas are a rehash of a rehash. This is a remarkable lapse. However, he has compensated for this absence of originality by being a most brilliant imitator. He is smart, vain and disciplined. Thus, he studied carefully how to make the ascent to high office and how to proceed once there. Clinton was more glib and convivial but prone to scandal and excess. Obama would be a study of rectitude and measured tones. He would not go off script or let his guard down. He would be free of personal scandal. What Clinton had created Obama would perfect: the triad of a liberal tongue, a conservative mind and a calculating heart.  As with Clinton, the people would love the show without even knowing the reason why and without ample evidence from his policies that the show-master even cared for them.

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