On Being Disappointed in Barack Obama
In the past few months, I’ve had a lot of friends (particularly DC policy wonks) ask me how I can be disappointed with President Obama when he’s accomplished so much! I’ve answered that the accomplishments didn’t DO enough, that if passing bills doesn’t bring change it doesn’t matter, that his administration has betrayed labor, that they’ve been too hard on teachers in trying to push for education reform–probably because they don’t really understand the problems that beset education and teachers, that he’s been too willing to compromise on the things that we never should have compromised on, that he squandered his goodwill too early. But my disappointment – as one of the earliest Obama supporters, I’ve believed in his ability to bring change for so long so it hurts all the more now – has made me inarticulate and incoherent on the subject.
Luckily, I have a very articulate, much-smarter friend and colleague who has summed up the reasons for disappointment in a sharp, spot-on piece on his blog. Jason Lefkowitz, speaking for me and for many, many other disappointed progressives:
In the final analysis, the measure of a President is not how many programs he passes, or how sweeping those programs are. It’s how those initiatives impact the lives of the American people. The bills and the programs are not the ball game; they are merely the ball.
And while it is true that the Obama agenda has been legislatively ambitious, it has also been, in practical terms, invisible to people outside Washington, D.C. A stimulus was passed, true; but it was so severely gimped that it barely dented the unemployment rate. Health reform was passed, true; but the parts that will touch most peoples’ lives won’t take effect until 2014. Financial reform was passed, true; but the “too big to fail” banks that dragged us into financial crisis managed to pull most of its teeth. And so forth.
Plenty of bills have been passed, in other words; but for the average American, very little has changed in their daily lives. They still live in fear of losing their job or their health insurance. They still struggle under the burden of crushing credit card interest and deceptive fees from their banks. They still see their government run with greater concern for the tender sensibilities of hedge fund billionaires than for the future of the middle class.
They voted for change, but when they look around, there is precious little change to be seen.
In Washington, the wonks doth protest too much. “He’s passed bills! Look! Legislation! See!” But when I talk to my parents, my friends, my loved ones back home in the Midwest, they don’t focus on those legislative accomplishments. They still like Obama and they give him credit for the health care bill and other achievements–but they don’t see the change. They still see friends losing jobs. They still have family members who can’t afford health care. They still see the down economy, see growth continuing to lag, can easily imagine it tanking again. They wonder where the change is that that voted for. They wonder whose champion Obama really is. They don’t believe he’s bad for the country, or wrong for America, but they don’t see things getting better. So what do legislative accomplishments matter to them?
Jason’s whole piece is here. And it’s well-worth reading.
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When it’s bad, it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse. Most people just don’t get that banking is the GOSPLAN to capitalism’s communism. If you accept a system of market valuations for assets, you’re going to have loans. When you have bunches of loans and other contracts out there creating passive income, you’re going to get loans and insurance off those loans. And loans and insurance off those loans. That’s just the new reality w/ computers. This info can be tracked. Americans aren’t ready to throw out capitalism, even if they don’t understand that this is what they get with it; so Obama made the best compromise he could have.
What did he preserve? Why, the very military-petro political economy that won WW2. Americans don’t want to give that up. And that’s where this all comes from. You fight an enemy, you become your enemy. The government procurement system resembles that of fascist states all over Europe and I get sick of people saying that fascism’s only trait was its anti-communism: it’s simply a political economy. Now it just so happens, it’s the political economy of choice for those who like to keep their industry up to date with the very latest in killing machines and systems–and anti-communism may have been a stated trait, but it’s not the essential trait. The essential trait is the collusion of government procurement with large industries & the infiltration of the elite business circles with espionage agents.
So when you measure Obama, do so with that context in mind. This system almost crashed. There is no ideological alternative at the moment, except 19th century capitalism, which generated lower rates of GDP growth & living standards. I am sick of hearing people whine about Obama fixing a system they barely understand–almost as much as I am hearing communists in disguise pretending that there is a capitalist solution to the capitalist disease.
So we are left with compromise. In that regard, he’s brilliant. Despite all odds, he prevented an asset collapse which would have ruined all those little financial products I mentioned in the first paragraph. People like your buddy don’t get this. I grow tired of hearing this objection. Give me a better method of generating a value signal than with price and I’m all yours. Barring that, I don’t want to hear disingenuous or ignorant criticisms of a statesman who’s up there with Metternich.
Anyhow, I published a map of what the economy would do in case of US capitulation w/ the Chinese market in the eXile a few years back, but I think everybody thinks Ames really wrote that. Banking is war by other means and it has a proven record as WMD. Why the fuck would Obama let that weapon implode?