[R-G] A Look Under the Hood of an Obama Administration - Joshua Frank

[tchilds at resist.ca]

While the new 'president elect' has brought euphoria in his victory to
take the helm of empire, (and I have surely felt that euphoria) I will not
drop my guard or abandon work for the progressive left.
Neo-liberalism/conservatism lurks under all the euphoria of the Obama
presidency to be, and it will be as necessary as ever to continue to
resist the empire's penchant to promote war, disregard the health of the
planet, turn aside social justice and the notion of the common good for
all.   Meantime, progressive activism will have to remain the
order-of-the-day.
No doubt.
Regards, TC
nowpolling.ca
                                  "There's no way to delay that trouble
comin' everyday."
                                                                -- Frank
Zappa
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http://www.counterpunch.org/frank11062008.html
It Could be a Long, Hard Struggle

A Look Under the Hood of an Obama Administration

By JOSHUA FRANK

Tuesday’s celebration hangovers have finally started to wear off, and the
pieces are beginning to fall into place. Change will be coming to
Washington in January, but it is difficult to decipher what form it will
take. Early clues, however, suggest that Barack Obama’s administration
will prove unlikely to alter the fundamental political machinery that has
led us into war and economic turmoil. Below is a brief summary of Obama’s
potential choices for a few key roles in his administration.

Chief of Staff

Obama’s key White House position will go to Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois.
While Emanuel knows his way around the corridors of Washington, qualifying
him in the traditional sense, this alone doesn’t mean he’s the guy you
want drawing up Obama’s policy papers day after day.

For starters, Emanuel is a shameless neoliberal with close ties to the
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), even co-authoring a strategy book
with DLC president Bruce Reed. Without Emanuel, Bill Clinton would not
have been able to thrust NAFTA down the throats of environmentalists and
labor in the mid-1990s. Over the course of his career, Emanuel’s made it a
point to cozy up to big business, making him one of the most effective
corporate fundraisers in the Democratic Party. He’s also a staunch
advocate of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

Emanuel’s shinning moment came in 2006 as he helped funnel money and
poured ground support into the offices of dozens of conservative
Democrats, expanding his party’s control of the House of Representatives.
Emanuel, who supports the War on Terror, and expanding our presence in
Afghanistan, worked hard to ensure that a Democratic House majority would
not alter the course of US military objectives in the Middle East.

In short, Rahm Emanuel is not only a poor choice for Obama’s Chief of
Staff; he’s one of the least progressive picks he could have made. While
he may have decent views on abortion, tax policy, and social security,
Emanuel’s broader vision is more of the same: war and corporate dominance.

Treasury Secretary

For arguably the most important position Obama will be appointing, the
President-Elect may pick well-regarded economist Paul Volcker, former
chairman of the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Volker is one of Obama’s closest economic advisors and is thought to be
the top-choice for the position of Treasury Secretary.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Volker, in an attempt to cut
inflation, dramatically raised interest rates, which helped the elite
maintain value in their assets but strangled the working class as credit
dried up.

In his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey writes that
Volker personified one of the key facets of the neoliberal era.

“[Volker] engineered a draconian shift in U.S. monetary policy. The
long-standing commitment in the U.S. liberal democratic state to the
principles of the New Deal, which meant broadly Keynesian fiscal and
monetary policies with full employment as a key objective, was abandoned
in favour of a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the
consequences might be for employment. The real rate of interest, which had
often been negative during the double-digit inflationary surge of the
1970s, was rendered positive by fiat of the Federal Reserve. The nominal
rate of interest was raised overnight 
 Thus began ‘a long deep recession
that would empty factories and break unions in the U.S. and drive detour
countries to the brink of insolvency, beginning a long-era of structural
insolvency’. The Volker shock, as it has since come to be known, has to be
interpreted as a necessary but not sufficient condition of neoliberalism.”

In supporting Henry Paulson’s bailout package, Volker would not
re-regulate the banks nor provide more power to shareholders, he’s simply
carry on one facet of neoliberalism:  tightening federal budgets which
inevitably will put great budgetary pressure on federal agencies.

Another potential pick for the post is Robert Rubin, who served under
Clinton in the same position and is currently Director and Senior
Counselor of Citigroup. Rubin played a key role in abetting another
neoliberal objective: deregulation. Where Volker was hung up on economic
austerity, Rubin pushed for more deregulatory policies that ended up
shifting jobs, and entire industries, overseas.

Rubin even pushed for Clinton’s dismantling of Glass-Steagall, testifying
that deregulating the banking industry would be good for capital gains, as
well as Main Street. “[The] banking industry is fundamentally different
from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933," Rubin testified
before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services in May of
1995.

“[Glass-Steagall could] conceivably impede safety and soundness by
limiting revenue diversification,” Rubin argued.

While the industry saw much deregulation over the years preceding these
events, the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act of 1999, which eliminated
Glass-Steagall, extended and ratified changes that had been enacted with
previous legislation. Ultimately, the repeal of the New Deal era
protection allowed commercial lenders like Rubin’s Citigroup to underwrite
and trade instruments like mortgage backed securities along with
collateralized debt and established structured investment vehicles (SIVs),
which purchased these securities. In short, as the lines were blurred
among investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies, when one
industry fell, others could too.

Robert Rubin is in part responsible for supporting the policies that
pushed us to the brink of a great recession. When the subprime mortgage
crisis hit, instability and collapse spread across numerous industries.

Defense Secretary

While Obama’s choice for this important role is speculative, quite a few
fingers are pointing to Richard Holbrooke.

After Gerald Ford's loss and Jimmy Carter's ascendance into the White
House in 1976, Indonesia, which invaded East Timor and slaughtered 200,000
indigenous Timorese years earlier, requested additional arms to continue
its brutal occupation, even though there was a supposed ban on arms trades
to Suharto's government. It was Carter's appointee to the Department of
State's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Holbrooke, who
authorized additional arms shipments to Indonesia during this supposed
blockade. Many scholars have noted that this was the period when the
Indonesian suppression of the Timorese reached genocidal levels.

During his testimony before Congress in February 1978, Benedict Anderson
of Cornell University cited a report that proved there never was a United
States arms ban, and that during the period of the alleged ban; the US
initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesians at
Holbrooke’s request.

Over the years Holbrooke, who is philosophically aligned with Paul
Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives, has worked vigorously to keep his
bloody campaign silent. Holbrooke described the motivations behind his
support of Indonesia's genocidal actions:

"The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important
concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population
of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a
moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer
-- which plays a moderate role within OPEC -- and occupies a strategic
position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans ...
We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia."

Other foreign policy advisors may also include the likes of Madeline
Albright, the great supporter of Iraq sanctions, which killed hundreds of
thousands of innocent people. Madeline Albright, when asked by Leslie
Stahl of 60 Minutes about the deaths caused by U.N. sanctions, infamously
condoned the deaths. “I think this is a very hard choice,” she said. “But
the price--we think the price is worth it.”

Samantha Power, that great cheerleader for humanitarian intervention, also
has Obama’s ear and may even entice him to put U.S. forces in Darfur.

“With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single
lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop
the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so
it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally.
That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha of Power’s book, A
Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong
lesson,” writes author Mahmood Mamdani in the London Review of Books.

As Mamdani continues: “What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to
see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy 
 Instead of
using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to
the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the
parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was
part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda 

Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that
Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military
intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and
reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a
prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a
Rwanda.”

The Next Step

While the election of Barack Obama is a blow to George W.
Bush-Republicanism and a gain for racial equality in this country, it is
in many ways only a symbolic victory. The future of the U.S.’s foreign and
economic agenda will continue to be saturated with ideologies and
individuals that are directly responsible for our current predicament,
both in the Middle East and domestically.

Celebrating the end of the ugly Bush era is one thing. Celebrating the
continuation of their policies with a different administration in the
White House is quite another. With these prospective appointments, Obama
seems to be moving backwards to Clintontime. This may be sufficient change
for some, but it far from a progressive push toward social, economic, and
environmental justice.

For significant change to happen, the kind that is needed in order to mend
the wounds of the Bush years, we have to put down our Obama signs and
force Congress and the new administration to end the wars in the Middle
East, and push for regulating the financial industry while providing true
universal health-care and economic safety-nets for all Americans.

Given the make up of his potential advisors, we're in for a long uphill
battle. So let's drop our illusions and start organizing, beginning with a
discussion of what “organizing” even means in today’s political climate.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How
Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and
along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the brand new book Red State
Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK
Press in July 2008. He can be reached at: brickburner at gmail.com