[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Beware of Obama's Groundhog Day

[Bill Totten]

'Groundhog Day', the black comedy about time repeating itself, might be
a parable for the Age of Obama - as the president-elect's major
appointments turn out to be almost totally retro, without a single
figure representing those who voted for him.

by John Pilger

New Statesman (December 11 2008)


One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill
Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first
he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same
circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false
hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and
escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama?

Having campaigned with "Change you can believe in", President-elect
Barack Obama has named his A-team. They include Hillary Clinton, who
voted to attack Iraq without reading the intelligence assessment and has
since threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran on behalf of a foreign
power, Israel. During his primary campaign, Obama referred repeatedly to
Clinton's lies about her political record. When he appointed her
secretary of state, he called her "my dear friend".

Obama's slogan is now "continuity". His secretary of defence will be
Robert Gates, who serves the lawless, blood-soaked Bush regime as
secretary of defence, which means secretary of war (America last had to
defend itself when the British invaded in 1812). Gates wants no date set
for an Iraq withdrawal and "well north of 20,000" troops to be sent to
Afghanistan. He also wants America to build a completely new nuclear
arsenal, including "tactical" nuclear weapons that blur the distinction
with conventional weapons.

Another product of "continuity" is Obama's first choice for CIA chief,
John Brennan, who shares responsibility for the systematic kidnapping
and torturing of people, known as "extraordinary rendition". Obama has
assigned Madeleine Albright to report on how to "strengthen US
leadership in responding to genocide". Albright, as secretary of state,
was largely responsible for the siege of Iraq in the 1990s, described by
the UN's Denis Halliday as genocide.

There is more continuity in Obama's appointment of officials who will
deal with the economic piracy that brought down Wall Street and
impoverished millions. As in Bill Murray's nightmare, they are the same
officials who caused it. For example, Lawrence Summers will run the
National Economic Council. As treasury secretary, according to the New
York Times, he "championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the ...
instruments - aka toxic assets - that have spread financial losses [and]
refused to heed critics who warned of dangers to come".

There is logic here. Contrary to myth, Obama's campaign was funded
largely by rapacious capital, such as Citigroup and others responsible
for the sub-prime mortgage scandal, whose victims were mostly African
Americans and other poor people.

Is this a grand betrayal? Obama has never hidden his record as a man of
a system described by Martin Luther King as "the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today". Obama's dalliance as a soft critic of the
disaster in Iraq was in line with most Establishment opinion that it was
"dumb". His fans include the war criminals Tony Blair, who has "hailed"
his appointments, and Henry Kissinger, who describes the appointment of
Hillary Clinton as "outstanding". One of John McCain's principal
advisers, Max Boot, who is on the Republican Party's far right, said: "I
am "gobsmacked by these appointments. [They] could just as easily have
come from a President McCain."

Obama's victory is historic, not only because he will be the first black
president, but because he tapped in to a great popular movement among
America's minorities and the young outside the Democratic Party. In 2006
Latinos, the country's largest minority, took America by surprise when
they poured into the cities to protest against George W Bush's draconian
immigration laws. They chanted: "Si, se puede!" ("Yes we can!"), a
slogan Obama later claimed as his own. His secretary for homeland
security is Janet Napolitano who, as governor of Arizona, made her name
by stoking hostility against Latino immigrants. She has militarised her
state's border with Mexico and supported the building of a hideous wall,
similar to the one dividing occupied Palestine.

On election eve, reported Gallup, most Obama supporters were "engaged"
but "deeply pessimistic about the country's future direction". My guess
is that many people knew what was coming, but hoped for the best. In
exploiting this hope, Obama has all but neutered the anti-war movement
that is historically allied to the Democrats. After all, who can argue
with the symbol of the first black president in this country of slavery,
regardless of whether he is a warmonger? As Noam Chomsky has pointed
out, Obama is a "brand" like none other, having won the highest
advertising campaign accolade and attracted unprecedented sums of money.
The brand will sell for a while. He will close Guantanamo Bay, whose
inmates represent less than one per cent of America's 27,000 "ghost
prisoners". He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches,
but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the
latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral
power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen
Walt, an Obama adviser, said: "They have nowhere else to go".

Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated
wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose
enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to
power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of
"continuity"? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans
have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of
handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes.
It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And
history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the
epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened.
As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers
are removed, anything is possible.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=515


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