It was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear–and needed to hear–but he didn’t tell it.
–Drew Westen, “What Happened to Obama?” 79
And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said, this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, “That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.” Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.
–Cornel West, who appeared on stage with Obama sixty-five times in 2008
At 78 rounds of golf playing an average of 4 hours per round, the President has been on the golf course a total of 312 hours during his term. That’s 13 twenty-four hour days. That’s nearly two full weeks of time on the links.
–Wizbang blog, August 21, 201180
Give Obama a chance, demanded his shills.
Not me. Long before Inauguration Day 2009 I’d sized up him, his advisors, and their plans, and already found them sorely wanting. I guessed that it wouldn’t take long before Obama’s failures proved the foolishness of most Americans’ blind trust in him. Obama isn’t our FDR. He’s our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable in unreasonable times.
Some Democratic dead-enders still defend Obama. They justify his shattered promises by blaming the Republican majority in Congress, the media, anything but the man, his party, his politics or, for that matter, the system itself.
Back in 2009, however, there was no Republican majority. Obama might not have been able to do anything he wished, but he had more clout than previous presidents who accomplished far more. Facing little opposition and enjoying massive support, Obama chose not to act.
Feeling fat and ugly? Call yourself ugly and fat and everyone will say no, no, it isn’t so.
Dave Eggers preceded his bestselling memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with a section titled “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book.” It was a brilliant ploy, disarming the reader and preempting criticism. Among its warnings, in reference to chapter four: “The book thereafter is kind of uneven.”81
Like Eggers, Obama knew how to manage expectations. Over-promise to win. Underpromise after winning. Hope that no one notices.
“There will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations and disappointments,” Obama said shortly after arriving in Washington. “I will make some mistakes.”82
For example, sitting on his hands–for years!–as the world’s biggest economy swirled down the shitter.
Mistake? Forgetting to feed a parking meter is a mistake.
Obama was a total colossal fuck-up. Trusting him was our fuck-up. Trusting him and the system at a time when everything–our savings (if we had any), our standard of living, our hopes for a better future, our country’s international status–hung in the balance … that’s a catastrophe, one to include in an updated edition of Barbara Tuchman’s classic 1985 book The March of Folly alongside such other avoidable clusterfucks as the Vietnam War and the sixteenth-century breakup of the Holy See.
Ten weeks after the roaring crowds at Chicago’s Grant Park–Yes we can! Yes we can! –the airy tone of the campaign was no more, the dour new reality signaled by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo-Yo Ma at the inaugural ceremony. Obama’s million-dollar smile was in little evidence as he took the oath of office. Hope and Change? Gone. Obama’s new cry was reminiscent of the CEO who urged his employees to underpromise and overdeliver: Patience.
In the beginning, setting the bar low worked. “Most respondents [to a mid-January 2009, New York Times/CBS News poll] said they thought it would take Mr. Obama two years or more to deliver on campaign promises to improve the economy, expand healthcare coverage and end the war in Iraq,” reported the paper of record.83 At the same time, 79 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the next four years under Obama.
Sad, pathetic Americans! Like a dog that had been beaten eight long years, they were so psyched that their new master didn’t drool and spoke coherent English that they’d follow him anywhere. The media was in love with the One and so, therefore, was the public. No one questioned him.
But that would change. All you had to do was read that poll: the voters were optimists, and they planned to give the new president two years to make good. They were patient. They didn’t expect big changes right away. But they did expect them.
“Protesters, a fixture of every inauguration since President Nixon’s in 19 73, were few and scattered on Tuesday as Barack Obama assumed the presidency,” reported the Times. 84
Antiwar activists had thrown away their signs. There were no demonstrators in the streets. No reporters asking tough questions. Hadn’t we learned anything from 9/11, when 90 percent of Americans–and the media, and Congress–issued George W. Bush a similar blank check?
The week of the inauguration Paul Krugman calculated that there was at least a $2.1 trillion hole in the American economy–an “output gap” between production capacity and consumers’ ability to buy goods. Filling that hole would require direct investment (for example, a sweeping public works proposal) of at least $1.5 trillion. But Obama proposed just $355 billion, of which only $136 billion would be spent within the next two years. It was better than nothing, but not by much. (Try offering your waiter $13.60 to settle a $150 dinner check.) You can’t plug a gushing artery with a Band-Aid one-tenth the size of the wound.
It seemed churlish to predict that Obama’s approach wouldn’t/couldn’t work. But it happened to be true. Even Obama admitted that his plan wouldn’t/couldn’t fix the economy.
Upon taking office Obama promised to create four million new jobs in two years. At the time, the United States was losing four million jobs every five months. Even if Obama had delivered on his pledge, twenty-five million more Americans would be out of work by 2011. (The math differential is due to the fact that population growth increases the workforce by 2.8 million jobs annually.)
The economic crisis was global. Unlike the United States, most nations took it seriously. French president Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, worried aloud to his ministers in December 2008: “We don’t want a European May ‘68 [revolution] in the middle of Christmas.”85 He shelved plans for deregulation and privatization. The French thought America’s laissez-faire attitudes were dangerously destabilizing. Arnaud Lagardère, CEO of the Lagardère Group, told the financial daily Les Echos: “We’re seeing, in renewed form, the most debatable aspects of Anglo-Saxon capitalism called into question.”86
As Obama dithered with plans he knew wouldn’t work–as we common citizens watched passively, slack jawed, allowing him to fuck around–the collapse continued. Misery spread.
On January 24, 2009, Betty Lipply of East Palestine, Ohio, got a bank foreclosure notice after falling prey to a predatory lending scheme on the house her husband had built. She hung herself from a beam in the garage using an electrical cord.87
After Ervin and Ana Lupoe lost their jobs as medical technicians at Kaiser Permanente hospital in West Los Angeles, they discussed what to do. They knew there was no chance of finding new jobs or keeping their family together. “Why leave the children to a stranger?” Ana asked. So, on January 23, 2009, the Lupoes took a cue from the boss who had fired them. He had suggested that they blow their brains out. Ervin shot to death Ana and their five children–their eight-year-old daughter, a five-year-old pair of twin girls, and a two-year-old pair of twin boys.88
Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa reacted: “A man who recently lost his job allowed the despair to put him over the edge. Unfortunately, this has been an all-too-common story in the last few months. But that does not and should not lead people to resort to desperate measures.”
What other options did they have? The government didn’t give a shit about them.
A study by Texas A&M and Loyola Universities found that layoffs led to two spikes in suicide rates. First, after the layoff. The second batch of suicides occurred six months later, after unemployment benefits ran out.89
Had the primaries taken place in 2009, John Edwards might have had little trouble convincing Democratic voters–Republican ones too–that there were two Americas.
The other America–privileged elites who can always count on getting their phone calls to Obama and members of Congress returned–was raking in record profits in the midst of the apocalypse. “In 1980, according to a Forbes magazine study, executive compensation was 40 times the average worker’s pay; by 2007, that had soared to more than 400 times,” CBS News reported in February 2009.90
Obama’s early endorsement of TARP identified him so closely with the policies of the outgoing administration that people began to believe it was his idea. By late 2011 only a third of Americans knew that TARP was a Bush-era program.91
Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, told USA Today that there was $1.4 trillion in bad mortgage debt as of Election Day 2008. The federal government could easily have come up with money to prevent the huge problems this debt was going to bring about, since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were projected to cost at least $2.4 trillion through the next decade–not including Obama’s 2009-2011 Afghan surge. Pulling out immediately and cutting the $515 billion-a-year Defense Department appropriations budget would have paid off the cost of the mortgage meltdown. Obama never seriously considered immediate withdrawal.
As the two parties dithered, the misery ground on. Less than a month before the election, an unemployed man worried about losing his home in a California gated community shot his wife, kids, and mother-in-law before turning his gun on himself. “We believe this individual had become despondent recently over his financial dealings and the financial situation of his household,” Los Angeles police said.92 One of Karthik Rajaram’s sons, age nineteen, was a Fulbright scholar.
One week earlier, a ninety-year-old Ohio woman tried to commit suicide when cops showed up to evict her from her foreclosed house. Fortunately, the gunshot wound wasn’t fatal.93
The United States needed a big idea. A big program. Several big programs. What we had was a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama. All McCain had to offer was the same tired litany of help-the-rich reductions of capital gains and dividend taxes Republicans have been pushing forever. Memo to GOP: people getting evicted for defaulting on their mortgages don’t have capital gains or dividends to tax.
Obama wasn’t much better. He proposed a ninety-day moratorium on evictions. What would happen after that? Even if this wasn’t full-fledged economic collapse, even if it had just been another cyclical recession, it wasn’t like the economy was going to recover and begin creating jobs in three months.
Millions were losing everything. And no one was helping.
On October 14, 2008, Wanda Dunn was scheduled to be evicted from her foreclosed home in Pasadena, California. The fifty-three-year-old woman set the house on fire, went to her bedroom, and blew her brains out.94
As bank executives used federal bailout money to give themselves raises and renovate their private suites, Americans began demanding that government attempt to address the dual problem of rising income inequality and bankers’ greed. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, grandstanded ferociously, vowing to use “every possible legal means to recoup the $ 18.4 billion in Wall Street bonuses” that had been paid out with federal tax dollars in late 2008.95 It never happened.
If corporations had paid the workers the raises they deserved over the past forty years–raises commensurate with increases in efficiency and productivity–people would have saved more and borrowed less. The real estate and credit bubbles wouldn’t have grown as big. After the bubbles burst, people would have had savings to fall back on. We are broke, unemployed, and maxed out not because we bought too much stuff, but because our bosses paid themselves instead of us–the people who do the work.
Like his one-tenth of an economic stimulus plan, Obama’s attempt to address out-of-control executive pay was laughable: a $500,000 income cap on top corporate executives.
The first problem was that Obama’s salary limit didn’t affect 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies–only those receiving federal bailout cash. Firms like Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and AIG, which got the first round of TARP moolah and had carried out millions of illegal foreclosures, weren’t affected. Only a handful of companies were touched, and only technically, because salary is a relatively low portion of CEO pay. Most CEO compensation comes in the form of bonuses and stock options, which weren’t part of Obama’s cap. And even then, all CEOs had to do to avoid that minor inconvenience was to ask their companies’ shareholders for their usual rubber-stamp approval.
Another problem was that “[Obama’s income cap] excludes the midlevel execs who also received some of those Wall Street bonuses and who in many cases made the risky bets that sparked the crisis,” reported Politico.96 There were other loopholes, so many you could drive a gold-plated Hummer through it if you could afford the gas.
“America needs to understand that this is cosmetic, that this is to appease taxpayer ire,” said Naked Capitalism blogger Yves Smith.97
Why didn’t the president push to do something big about the economic disaster? He certainly could have.
It’s not like he didn’t have enough popular support. A March 3, 2009, MSNBC poll tells the story. Obama’s job approval rating was 68 percent, 98 his all-time high: “According to the poll, part of the reason why Obama’s numbers remain high despite these economic concerns is that the public doesn’t blame the president for the current state of the economy. Eighty-four percent say this is an economy Obama inherited, and two-thirds of those people think he has at least a year before he’s responsible for it.”99
Obama also enjoyed a press honeymoon. He didn’t face aggressive questioning at a presidential news conference for two months.100 His party was powerful. The Republican Party, dragged down by Bush, had been decimated in the 2008 elections. It’s hard to remember now, but conservative commentators were wringing their hands. Right-wingers wondered whether Republicanism was doomed. In the same poll only 26 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of the GOP compared to 49 percent for the Democrats.
Obama’s control of Congress was close to absolute. Democrats held a 257-197 majority in the House of Representatives (up 21 seats) and a 5 9-41 (1 vote away from filibuster-proof) majority in the Senate (up 8 seats). By most standards he enjoyed a more sweeping mandate than Ronald Reagan in 1980, which Reagan used to push through sweeping changes.101
Obama had tremendous, virtually unprecedented levels of political capital during 2009. Why didn’t he use it?
First, Obama underestimated the severity of the economic crisis. More accurately, his advisors did. He got bad advice. Which was the inevitable result of limiting his cabinet to corporate insiders whose center-right ideologies didn’t allow them to understand and analyze what was really going on: an existential threat to the American system in particular and global capitalism in general.
As Ron Suskind would later write, Obama responded to a big problem by appointing little men and women. It was the perverse logic of pragmatism: the “bold visions of the campaign season had meanwhile resolved into the serious, often risk-averse business of actually governing. In the midst of a battering economic storm, it no longer seemed like the right time to be making waves,” according to Suskind.102
Second, he overestimated the patience of the electorate. Considering how bad things were, it’s remarkable that they didn’t get seriously pissed off at Obama’s inaction until 2010, when they gave Democrats a drubbing in the midterm Congressional elections. Obama’s pollsters, not feeling the heat, pressed ahead with healthcare reform instead of big plans to end foreclosures and increase employment.
Third, despite his bully pulpit, Obama felt politically constrained. Jonathan Chait of the crypto-right New Republic –probably the closest ideological marker to the president–explained his thinking in late 2011: “The most common hallmark of the left’s magical thinking is a failure to recognize that Congress is a separate, coequal branch of government consisting of members whose goals may differ from the president’s. Congressional Republicans pursued a strategy of denying Obama support for any major element of his agenda, on the correct assumption that this would make it less popular and help the party win the 2010 elections. Only for roughly four months during Obama’s term did Democrats have the sixty Senate votes they needed to overcome a filibuster.”103
So how did George W. Bush ram through so many radical right-wing agenda items with a 50-49-1 Senate majority? Masterful manipulation of the media, courtesy of Karl Rove. That, and a bullying disposition Obama couldn’t hope to emulate.
Fourth, Obama didn’t do more simply because he didn’t want to. A man of limited accomplishments whose career zoomed him to the pinnacle of wealth and power in twenty-five years, the system worked great for him. He had neither the personal experience nor the empathy to see the misery spreading all around him. He didn’t favor radical reforms because he didn’t want to see radical changes.
Obama is a classic grandstander, one who talks big and does little. Talking attracts liberal support, not following through reduces conservative opposition. An early example was his rant over $165 million in bonuses paid to executives of American International Group (AIG) with federal bailout money. “How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?” he asked.104 The question for us was: how could Obama justify it? His own Treasury Department knew all about those payouts. It approved them.
Two years into the Obama presidency, Americans largely accepted the concept of structural unemployment. Tens of millions of people had lost their jobs and didn’t expect to ever find a new one. Demographers were shocked by 2011 Census data that showed that over 100 million Americans–one-third of the population–were either poor or “near poor,” that is, living on an income that is less than 50 percent above the poverty line.105
Hundreds of Occupation tent cities sprang up around the country in October and November 2011. The battle cry went up: “We are the 99%!” Class conflict, previously an impossible sell, caught on. “A society that has permanently expelled a significant proportion of its members from the work force would soon deteriorate into an unbelievably angry country, with intense and continuing conflict between the have-jobs and have-nones. America could become a very sick society, just when it needed to be stronger than ever to flourish in the global economy,” the sociologist Herbert Gans wrote.106
It was Obama’s fault.
It was also our responsibility. We put our faith in a man and in a system that didn’t deserve it.
Obama’s supporters soon sussed out that the president’s economic policy wasn’t much to brag about. So they focused on foreign affairs. Hope and change might not keep the jobless out of the rain, but the era of lawlessness under Bush–his attacks on human rights and civil liberties–had come to an end. That was something, but not much.
Soon after becoming president Obama signed an order to close the concentration camp at Guant ánamo107 and the CIA’s secret “black site” torture prisons within a year. As I write this at the start of his fourth year in office, however, those facilities remain open.108 Thanks to Obama, Bush’s torturers enjoy immunity from investigation and prosecution. Due to the Obama administration’s obsession with secrecy, there is no way to know if torture is continuing; given the record, it would be illogical to assume otherwise.
Obama’s executive orders were crafted with weasel words that let him take back America’s (supposedly) renewed commitment to constitutional rights with the snap of his fingers. The president, reported the New York Times, would have the ability “to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured.”109
During the campaign Obama promised there would be “no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens.” He changed his mind. Days into his first term, Obama signaled that he would keep Bush’s “temporary” Patriot Act.
Obama not only renewed the act through 2015–he expanded it. “In May 2011 Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Intelligence Committee, said that the Obama administration had ginned up a secret legal theory about the text of the renewed law that expanded the extent of domestic surveillance. “I want to issue a warning,” he announced. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”110 We still don’t know what Wyden was talking about.
Meanwhile, at a time when the United States could least afford optional foreign adventurism, Obama began pouring billions of dollars and thousands of lives into the charnel house of Afghanistan with no prospect of victory.
Obama’s inaugural address pledged to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” yet–in all the ways that mattered–the president immediately announced his intent to keep most of Bush’s most outrageous policies in place. He talked about “moving forward.” But nothing much changed.
Closing Gitmo, reported the New York Times, was merely “a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies.” But he refused to relinquish the right to abuse innocent people (i.e., people who had not been convicted by a court of law). “In a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects [at Guant ánamo] without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration.”111
Under Obama, the 241 POWs still at Gitmo would no longer be called “enemy combatants.” Yet they wouldn’t be going home. “The filing signaled that, as long as Guant ánamo remains open, the new administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some detainees there,” continued the paper. Where would they go next?
Gitmo II.
Countless detainees have been tortured by US military personnel at Bagram, the US airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned six hundred people without charges. Some were murdered in the camp’s notorious “salt pit.” “Even children have not been spared,” says Amnesty International.112
Obama ordered that Bagram be nearly doubled in size in order to accommodate two hundred-plus detainees from Gitmo in addition to POWs from Obama’s expanded war against Afghanistan. By 2011, there were three thousand new detainees at Bagram. It’s much harder for US lawyers to travel to Afghanistan than to Cuba. And the conditions are more difficult. Daphne Eviatar, an attorney for Human Rights First said, “It’s worse than Guant ánamo because there are fewer rights.” That’s how the Pentagon likes it. In late 2011 it took bids to add facilities to accommodate an additional fifty-five hundred inmates.
Hope and change? Not for the detainees, many of them children, most of whom have remained behind bars for years despite a total lack of evidence against them.
At least torture was no more. Unless you consider indefinite detention without due process torture, Obama said his detainees wouldn’t be tortured. Mostly. Probably. Maybe.
Or maybe not. The Washington Post quoted an administration insider who said that the CIA would enjoy “more leeway” than the Army Field Manual allows, in order to “take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans.”113
Extraordinary renditions, the notorious Bush-era practice of official kidnapping and torture outsourced to Third World dictatorships, continued under Obama. “In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently,” reported the New York Times in February 2009, “Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.”114
On March 9, 2009, Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush’s “signing statements.”
“Yet two days later–literally–Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon.115
Rich Lowry of the right-wing National Review magazine summed up Obama’s early approach to the presidency: “Barack Obama has perfected a three-step maneuver that could never even be attempted by a politician lacking his rhetorical skill or cool cynicism. First: Denounce your presidential predecessor for a given policy, energizing your party’s base and capitalizing on his abiding unpopularity. Second: Pretend to have reversed that policy upon taking office with a symbolic act or high-profile statement. Third: Adopt a version of that same policy, knowing that it’s the only way to govern responsibly or believing that doing otherwise is too difficult.”116
Mostly, the media went along with Obama’s charades.
The revelation that one detainee had been waterboarded 183 times in a single month struck a Katrina-like nerve. Pollsters found that most Americans wanted Obama to investigate and/or prosecute the lawyers who authored Bush’s torture memos. The New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman countered calls for accountability with the centrist pundit’s standard gambit–cynicism in the guise of pragmatism delivered in his customary prose, itself perhaps the victim of enhanced interrogation techniques:
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 of those declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees, and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials.117
Friedman’s math omitted detainees murdered by the military in other places like Guant ánamo or the Navy’s fleet of prison ships, killed by the CIA at secret prisons, or slaughtered by foreign torturers after being “extraordinarily renditioned” by the United States. No one would suggest letting a serial killer off the hook for twenty-seven torture-murders.
No one but Friedman. He justified “the president’s decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible.” Why? Because “justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart.”118
How odd: Americans didn’t buy the argument that high-ranking officials should be exempt from prosecution when the Germans made it at Nuremberg.
“In July [2009],” reported the New York Times, “CIA Director Leon E. Panetta tried to head off the investigation [of the CIA’s torture program] … He sent the CIA’s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to Justice Department to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric Holder to abandon any plans for an inquiry.”119 There’s a term for this: obstruction of justice. You’re not supposed to try to influence the outcome of an investigation. It was count six of the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.
But Obama didn’t worry. He didn’t have to. Unlike Bush, he faced no real political opposition. Liberals remained loyal, silent, and–by allowing Bush’s policies to remain in force–tacitly pro-torture.
In February 2012, a group of well-respected attorneys for Guan-t ánamo detainees alerted the world that conditions at the facility had further deteriorated since the arrival of a new hard-ass commander, Rear Admiral David B. Woods, in 2011–under Obama.120
“If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer,” Yogi Berra said. President Obama demonstrated that he didn’t know much about Afghanistan. Sadly, that didn’t stop him from talking about it. Frighteningly, it didn’t slow down his implementation of the one campaign promise he ought to have broken: sending tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.
“Well, I think Afghanistan is still winnable, in the sense of our ability to ensure that it is not a launching pad for attacks against North America,” he told a Canadian television interviewer.121
Afghanistan has never been a “launching pad” for a single attack, much less plural attacks, against the United States (or, as far as I know, Canadistan). There were, until 2000, a few jihadist training camps in Afghanistan. Two or three. But those were used to train Taliban soldiers to fight in Afghanistan’s civil war against the Northern Alliance. The training camps (loosely) affiliated with Al Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups were in Pakistan. Anyway, mostjihadis who trained there wanted to fight countries other than the United States: Chechens seeking independence from Russia, Uyghurs waging a low-intensity insurgency against China, Uzbeks trying to overthrow Uzbekistan’s dictator.
US soldiers were even likelier to die in Afghanistan than in Iraq. No serious Central Asian analyst deemed the war to prop up the puppet Karzai regime “winnable” for the United States.
Even Karzai was turning against the war for Karzai.
“Entering by force our people’s houses is against the government of Afghanistan,” the former Unocal oil consultant told foreign dignitaries in Kabul in December 2008. “This way the Afghan government will be destroyed and it will never be strengthened when in my country, the foreign soldiers go and arrest people, hit them and even kill them.”122
“Throughout vast areas of the country, 2008 felt like a slow descent into hell,” wrote Chris Sands in the National, an English-language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates. “Down in Kandahar the Taliban knew they were winning and so did just about everyone caught in the crossfire. Tribal elders who had initially sat on the fence now gave weapons and money to the rebels. They said the Soviet occupation had never been so brutal and, whether that is true or not, they clearly believed it.”
One quarter of all civilians killed in Afghanistan during 2008 were blown up in United States and NATO bombing raids.
Winnable? What would winning look like? Obama couldn’t say.
“If you’ve got narco-trafficking that is funding the Taliban, if there is a perception that there’s no rule of law in Afghanistan, if we don’t solve the issue of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then we’re probably not going to solve the problem,” Obama told the CBC.123
In reality, the opium problem was complicated. The Taliban bought weapons with taxes collected from local poppy farmers. Put the farmers out of business by spraying their crops, however, and they wouldn’t merely not pay a tithe–they’d sign up as soldiers. If the Taliban wins, on the other hand, they might curtail or eliminate opium cultivation as un-Islamic. They did it before, in 1999. Staying the course would lower the price of heroin on the streets of Amsterdam.
“We’re pretty good about getting rid of old governments, but not really good at building new ones. I don’t think any other country has that skill, either,” said Gordon Adams, professor of foreign policy at American University and former Clintonista. “We can burn millions of dollars and lose thousands of American lives pretending we know how–but we don’t know how.”124
US and NATO forces weren’t the solution to anarchy in Afghanistan. They were its cause.
Before the post-9/11 occupation, the Taliban had consolidated control over 95 percent of the country. Highways were safe. Rapists were executed. Warlords lived in exile. After 9/11 the CIA brought back the warlords and showered them with bricks of tens of millions of dollars in cash. Security vanished. Neofeudalism took over. Allied forces never lifted a finger to protect ordinary Afghans from the thieves and murderers in their midst; to the contrary, they installed many of them as officials in Karzai’s corrupt government.
The New Afghanistan is neither secular nor democratic. Its constitution is based on Sharia law, as it was under the Taliban. Many former Taliban judges kept their jobs under Karzai, but the US media refused to report the icky truth.
Liberals who flogged Afghanistan as “the good war” claimed that US troops had liberated long-oppressed Afghan women. Then, in early 2009, Afghan president Hamid Karzai signed a law, the Shiite Personal Status Act, applicable to roughly 15 percent of Afghans, which states that “women cannot leave the house without their husbands’ permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands’ permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex,” according to the British newspaper the Guardian. 125
The Status Act requires women to have sex with their husbands at least once every four days unless they are sick or menstruating. “Obedience, readiness for intercourse, and not leaving the house without the permission of the husband” are the duties of the wife, reads the law. “As long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night.”126
In fairness to the predominantly male Afghan parliament, they did add a provision to protect Shiite women from “dead bed”: Afghan men have to put out “at least once every four months.”127
“Anyone who spoke out [during the debate] was accused of being against Islam,” Afghan senator Humaira Namati recalled.128 Hundreds of women protesting the law on the streets of Kabul were beaten by men as policemen stood back and watched.
Meanwhile, hundreds of women languished in Afghan prisons-including brides as young as ten who ran away from their older husbands, who had purchased them.
Nice theocracy you got there, Mullah Karzai.
I talked to the mother of an American soldier who was blown up in Afghanistan. Why, she asked me, did her son die? Why, really? Obama couldn’t tell her. The truth was flaccid and horrible: to prop up Karzai’s regime until a new-and-improved strongman could be found to replace him, then to prop up the successor. To flex military muscle against emerging regional economic rivals, most notably China, Iran, and Pakistan. And to keep a shot at scoring a piece of the action if the trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline was ever completed.
It’s not enough to die for. It’s not even enough to scrape your knee for.
The families of the dead weren’t the only ones paying a price for Obama’s decision to keep expanding the American empire even as the streets of the homeland were filling up with the homeless and hopeless. Tens of billions of dollars were going down the shitter–money that could have been used to keep people in their homes, to keep families intact, to feed the hungry, to pay longer unemployment benefits.
It was insane. The United States was dying, yet we were more preoccupied with killing Afghans than saving ourselves.
During the winter of 1944-45, with the Allied and Soviet armies closing in on Berlin, German leaders made an analogous, similarly insane decision. Rather than protect Germany from the Allied advance as long as possible, they sped up the Holocaust. The Nazis’ policy of accelerated genocide deprived the war effort of increasingly precious resources. Soldiers and paramilitaries were pulled back from the battlefront in order to arrest and guard ever-increasing numbers of Jews and other “enemies of the state.” As battle after battle was lost, trains assigned to transport reinforcement troops were reassigned to ship the regime’s victims to the death camps. Killing Jews was the Nazis’ top priority. It came ahead of everything else–even their own lives. Total madness.
But who are we to judge? Here we were, sixty-four years later, doing the same thing. Locked in a last-ditch struggle for survival, the US government was diverting vital resources to its own top priority: murdering Muslims.
My road-to-Damascus moment came while watching Afghan villagers sobbing outside a house being searched by US troops. “The Russians never violated our homes,” an old man told me. As in many societies descended from nomads, Afghan culture dictates that a man’s home is truly his castle. “Even when they came to kill you, the Taliban knocked on the door and waited for you come out. They didn’t touch your wife or daughter. They never came inside. Never.”
I stared at the house’s front door, smashed and splintered after having been kicked in. I thought to myself: These people will never forgive us. Women were shrieking inside the house. The soldiers yelled at them: “Shut the fuck up!” At least they did it in English, so they couldn’t understand. Hearts and minds. I went to my rented room and filed a story for the Village Voice with the headline: “How We Lost Afghanistan.” It was December 11, 2001.
Insanity doesn’t come cheap. It costs $1 million to sustain one American soldier overseas for one year.
Obama was doubling down on a “new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy,” reported the Washington Post in March 2009. “Along with the 17,000 additional combat troops authorized last month, Obama said he will send at least 4,000 more this fall.”129 There were 38,000 when Obama took office. Soon there would be 55,000. By early 2011, at least 70,000. Thousands more would be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan. In America, there have been few protests. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, we were out of our collective minds.
Not including support personnel and private mercenaries, there were 102,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan in 2011.130 Not including interest payments on debt service, the United States had spent $468 billion on a war it couldn’t possibly win. At this writing, Obama continues to pour in $6.7 billion a month despite having announced troop withdrawals.131 Including debt service, that works out to about one thousand dollars a month for each of the twenty million Americans who have become structurally unemployed since the beginning of the 2007-08 meltdown.
Even during a depression there remains one gig with high job security: writing a consistently wrong column for the New York Times. Columnist David Brooks agreed with Obama that seven years of bombing wedding parties called for an eighth. “This energetic and ambitious [Afghan troop surge]–amid economic crisis and war weariness–says something profound about America’s DNA,” said Brooks.132
I assume he means that we’re stupid.
Eight years into the war, no one could say what victory would look like. “The Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won,” Brooks’ newspaper reported in August 2009.133 The Pentagon’s proposed metrics ranged from the insipid to the absurd. The “number of operations in which Afghan soldiers are in the lead,” to cite one example, would be tabulated and reported to a credulous media. Whether said sorties were effective wouldn’t matter. Another way to measure victory: “an opinion poll to determine Afghan public perception of official corruption at national, provincial and district levels.” Never mind that 90 percent of Afghans live in areas controlled by violent local warlords, who are not known for their love of free speech.
When you can’t tell whether you’re winning or losing, you’re losing.
Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican, was the longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history. On April 28, 2009, Specter finally did something that eclipsed his previous greatest hit–his aggressive (others might say vile) questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
He became a Democrat.
In the past, most Senate bills were resolved by a process called “reconciliation,” a straightforward up-or-down vote in which the majority (fifty votes or more) carried the day. For the last several years, however, Republicans had begun deploying the parliamentary tactic of automatically filibustering over every bill of importance. As a result, Democratic bills that didn’t attract sixty votes died in the Senate. (Democrats rarely filibustered.) With sixty votes, on the other hand, supporters could invoke “cloture,” which ended a filibuster and allowed debate and a vote.
Democrats had been telling liberals that their and Obama’s inaction on the economy, healthcare, and other matters wasn’t their fault. “Now there is a routine filibuster, a standard permanent filibuster of all legislation. Everything takes a filibuster-overriding 60 votes to pass now, every major piece of legislation, no matter what,” said Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.134
Thanks to Specter’s switch of parties, Democrats held fifty-nine seats in the US Senate.
Meanwhile a recount battle was dragging on in Minnesota over the outcome of that state’s Senate race between an incumbent Republican and his Democratic challenger, comedian Al Franken. After a number of court challenges, Franken was sworn in on July 7.
Sixty.
The magic number.
Ka-ching!
Specter’s defection and the certification of Franken handed Democrats the one thing they had always said they were lacking. The one thing they needed to pass a progressive agenda: a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate.
Democrats suddenly faced the awful challenge of coming up with new excuses for not doing anything.
How would Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and other fake liberals wriggle out of making good on their promises for real action on healthcare, the economy, and the war? It wouldn’t be easy. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. Obama was about to fill a new vacancy on the Supreme Court.
The Times of London wrote that “Mr. Obama, by some assessments, has more political leverage than any president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1937”–at the peak of the New Deal, just before he overreached by trying to pack the Supreme Court.135
The Republican Party, on the other hand, was suffering a crisis of faith–too much God-cheering and not enough adherence to core values, including small government, fiscal conservatism, isolationism, and protectionist trade policy. A mere 21 percent of Americans still called themselves Republicans, the lowest number since 1983. Similarly, reported an ABC News/Washington Post poll, “just 21 percent say they’re confident in the Republicans in Congress to make the right decisions for the country’s future, compared with 60 percent who express that confidence in Obama.”136
Democrats had never been so strong. Republicans had rarely been so weak. The Republican agenda had been delivered a decisive, sweeping rejection.
You’d think this would prompt an ambitious progressive legislative push: socialized medicine, big jobs programs, infrastructure projects like high-speed rail, help for the victims of hurricane Katrina–many had received nothing since losing their homes back in 2005. No way. The corporate media wasn’t having it (and neither was Obama).
“The left is going to push Obama–now that he’s got a veto-proof majority–to drive an agenda that a smart president would realize is … a long-term political disaster,” said GOP pollster Rick Wilson.137 “Long-term political disaster” is media code for “stuff corporations hate.”
The trouble for our cute, charming prez was that he had no intention of introducing a true national healthcare plan, one that covers everybody for free. Liberal mandate or no, he wasn’t liberal.
Real change–rolling back the wars, real healthcare, cracking down on the banksters–would cost trillions of dollars to multinational insurance companies, defense contractors, and other huge financial concerns who donate generously to candidates of both political parties. These corporations have a track record of using their clout to manipulate elections in favor of their favorite candidates. A classic example is oil companies, which push down gas prices before elections in order to help Republicans.
The most voters can expect from “their” Democratic politicians is incremental, symbolic change–minor tweaks that don’t cost their corporate sponsors any serious coin. The New York Times marked Obama’s hundreth day in office with an editorial that approvingly encapsulated his accomplishments to date: “He is trying to rebuild this country’s shattered reputation with his pledge to shut down the prison camp in Guant ánamo Bay, Cuba, his offer to talk with Iran and Syria, and, yes, that handshake with Venezuela’s blow-hard president, Hugo Chávez … The government is promoting women’s reproductive rights. It is restoring regulations to keep water clean and food safe. The White House has promised to tackle immigration reform this year.”138
Trying.
Promoting.
Has promised.
Even these microachievements were less than advertised. Guant ánamo detainees were simply being moved to Afghanistan. Under Obama the United States was back to its usual saber-rattling and sabotage against Iran and Syria in deference to Israel. Defending abortion rights was popular and didn’t cost Bank of America a penny. Environmental organizations found themselves at odds with Obama over safety issues such as “fracking” and the issuance of offshore oil drilling permits. Immigration reform is code for legalizing illegal immigrants and not closing the border; in any event, it never happened. Instead, the administration set a new record for deportations.139
Another day, another sellout. Business as usual in Washington.
No doubt Obama and his fellow members of the political class were sleeping soundly at night. Little did they know that they were digging the graves of the American empire and Western capitalism.
On August 5, 2009, a fifty-year-old man, Guadalupe Miranda, headed to a termination hearing at a San Jose recycling plant with mayhem in mind and a pistol hidden in his boot. “Put roses on my grave,” the distraught man told his son.140 The son called police, who intercepted Miranda en route.
Also in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 216,000 more Americans lost their jobs. The official unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent, the highest level in twenty-six years.
Obama, whatever imagination he possessed safely locked in The Bubble, left for the first installment of his annual ritual, a family vacation at a millionaire friend’s compound in Martha’s Vineyard. “One of the worst things I think that could happen to a president is losing touch with what people are going through day to day,” he’d told a reporter weeks after his victory. “I want to make sure that I keep my finger on the pulse of the struggles that people are going through every day.”141
People knew, all right. They knew that Obama could help them. If he wanted to. Nothing was stopping him.
He didn’t want to help us.
The president’s approval rating was down to 50 percent, dropping 18 percent in seven months.142
For the first time since the 1960s, Americans started to question their government. Why didn’t Obama want to help? Why didn’t the system care about them?
Throughout Obama’s first year, pro-Obama political cartoonists drew variations of the same cartoon: the president, in the role of beleaguered parent on a family trip, is driving a car labeled “The Economy.” The American public, depicted as Uncle Sam or Joe Average, whines: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” We were being treated like impatient children. But kids don’t have bills to pay.
With official unemployment between 8 and 10 percent and underemployment at 15 to 24 percent, Americans are running out of money–and patience. Obama’s approval ratings have fallen between fifteen and twenty points since he took office, meaning that he has lost one in six Americans. His biggest weakness remains the economy.
“I think the public knows three things,” said White House chief of staff and propagandist Rahm Emanuel. “We inherited a total mess; we’re working hard on it; and we’re not going to get out of it overnight.”143 The trouble for Obama was twofold. First, people couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Second, there wasn’t any light to see.
“The key to what this year is about is rescuing the economy from falling off the cliff and trying to put in place the building blocks of recovery,” argued Emanuel.144 In other words, bailing out the banks, insurers, and automakers. Certainly, that was what 2009 was about for the Obama administration. But for ordinary Americans, 2009 was about keeping or finding a job. And they weren’t having much luck.
The federal government was spending billions, ostensibly to create jobs.
George W. Bush had been the biggest spender in US history, running up a $1.8 trillion deficit on wars and tax cuts for the rich. Compared to Obama, however, Bush was a tightwad. Six months into Obama’s term the Congressional Budget Office reported that Obama had already more than quadrupled the deficit by an additional $8.1 trillion. “The total debt held by the public [will] rise from 57 percent of GDP in 2009 to 82 percent (!) of GDP in 2019,” reported U.S. News & World Report. 145
Obama was sinking the US Treasury into financial oblivion seventy-two times faster than Bush. Where’d the money go? Mostly to insurance companies, banks, and brokerage firms, which used it to redecorate their offices and give themselves raises.146
Obama claimed that bailing out the banks would create jobs. Instead, unemployment kept rising: 1.3 million more jobs lost by late summer 2009. Reporters couldn’t find a single homeowner who had avoided foreclosure thanks to help from the government.
Obama said his plan “was not designed to work in four months–it was designed to work over two years.”147
So how’d that work out? Net job change after two years: a loss of 3.5 million.
The bailouts were a scam, the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy in human history. What the United States needed in order to jump-start the economy was a ginormous federal jobs program.
It wouldn’t be “make work.” The American Society of Civil Engineers estimate that the nation’s long-neglected highways, bridges, and tunnels require $2.2 trillion in repairs to get them up to basic safety code–a new high-speed rail system would cost more. Obama’s ersatz stimulus plan asked Congress for $42 billion–less than 2 percent of what was required. Yet another squandered opportunity: every $1 spent on infrastructure generates a $1.59 payback in the form of increased tax revenues–and creates a lasting legacy.
The only infrastructure that came out of the bank bailouts was in the form of corporate restrooms.
One of the most frustrating aspects of Obama watching the economy go by was that he wasn’t flying blind. It wasn’t as though he was faced with something new, as if he needed to improvise in the face of aliens landing on the National Mall. Capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycle strikes with regularity. The 2008 meltdown had many parallels with the 1929 stock market crash; all Obama and his economic advisors had to do was study and update what worked during the 1930s.
Throughout his 1932 campaign against Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised that help was on the way. In radio addresses and in speeches across the country, FDR argued against Hoover’s trickle-down approach. He spoke on behalf of the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
Roosevelt recognized that the Depression represented more than an economic challenge. It was an existential threat to the US government. The communist alternative was on the rise in the Soviet Union, China, and around the world. He needed to fix the economy, but first he had to convince the American public not to rise up and revolt.
In his lucid biography of FDR, Traitor to His Class, the historian H. W. Brands describes Roosevelt’s sales pitch:
For too long, [FDR] said, government had operated for the benefit of the wealthy, consigning the poor to the margins of public life. The Hoover administration had responded to the crisis by furnishing aid to big banks and corporations. This approach was characteristic of the Republicans, Roosevelt said, and characteristically wrong. It treated ordinary men and women as secondary to the powerful firms that had long dominated American life. And it certainly hadn’t done anything to alleviate the Depression, which grew worse with each passing month. Roosevelt advocated “building from the bottom up,” as he put it, supplying aid to those who most needed it.148
For FDR, job creation was the nation’s top priority. His New Deal programs put millions of people directly to work on government projects. The Works Progress Administration, which employed eight million Americans during its existence, built bridges and highways. The Tennessee Valley Authority put up dams, and the Civilian Conservation Corps improved national parks. Jobs initiatives weren’t limited to the blue-collar sector: the federal government hired artists to paint murals in public buildings and authors write travel guides to the forty-eight states.
A WPA updated to today’s population would directly employ twenty-two million Americans–enough to reduce unemployment to below precollapse levels.
By most measures, though, the New Deal didn’t end the Depression. World War II did.
Nevertheless, the New Deal served its main purpose: stave off the revolutionists by “saving capitalism from itself.” Moreover, Americans made use of New Deal-era projects for decades: “The WPA … built or improved 651,000 miles of roads, 19, 700 miles of water mains and 500 water treatment plants. Workers built 24,000 miles of sidewalks; 12, 800 playgrounds; 24,000 miles of storm and sewer lines; 1, 200 airport buildings; 226 hospitals; more than 5, 900 schools, and more than two million privies,” according to a PBS special about the New Deal.149
The causes of the 2008 collapse were strikingly similar: a real estate bubble feeding a stock market bubble and excessive borrowing and lending. So were the results: by the time Obama became president in January, the real unemployment rate–calculated the way it was calculated in 1933–was the same 20 percent it was when FDR took the oath of office. It would have made sense to respond to 2008 the same way FDR did to 1933.
Many people were urging this approach. On the Right, Joel Kotkin of Forbes magazine penned a March 2009 piece titled “Why We Need a New Works Progress Administration.”150 The Obamabots ignored them.
Why? Kotkin floated an explanation blending psychology and thin résumés: “Products of the ‘information age, ’ Obama’s academically oriented backers seem to have trouble distinguishing between words and actual things. Virtually no one in the upper reaches of this administration has been tested by running a private company, manufacturing a product or bringing in a crop. This administration of ‘experts’ from academia and government service appears to possess little tactile knowledge of the real world.”
More than one out of five Americans was jobless. Many more were underemployed. There were six job seekers for every job and inflation was out of control, yet all Obama had to offer were small-bore, laughable minisolutions like “a tax credit for homebuyers and accelerated depreciation for businesses,” a “$3,000 tax credit for each new hire,” and “allowing more businesses to deduct their net operating loans going back five years instead of the usual two.”
The plane was plummeting through space as its pilot blithely sipped his last cup of coffee. Whatever the reasons for his blissful sluggishness, Obama was more Hoover than FDR. But what did we expect? It was obvious since before the start
Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush secretly signed two executive orders. Both violated basic constitutional protections as well as US obligations under international treaties, yet both carried the force of law. They still do.
The first order grants the president (and other officials, including the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security, and presumably certain postal clerks) the right to declare anyone–including an American citizen–an “unlawful enemy combatant.” A person so declared has no redress, no way to appeal, no ability to challenge that designation. Once a person has been named an enemy combatant, according to the Bush administration–and now the Obama administration–he has no rights. He can be held indefinitely without charges, tortured, you name it–well actually, the president or the secretary of defense names it. (Remember Watergate? President Nixon–forced out of office for covering up a clumsy break-in to peek at a rival candidate’s campaign strategy–must be pounding the sides of his coffin.)
In his second covert executive order, Bush authorized the CIA to target and assassinate said “enemy combatants,” which–again–includes American citizens. The president can kill you for no reason. Without so much as an arrest warrant. Simply because he feels like it. I can’t find evidence that there has ever been a protest against the assertion that the president has the right to kill us. The president can murder us and we don’t even care.
These two documents first came into play on November 3, 2002, when a CIA-operated Predator drone violating Yemeni airspace fired a Hellfire missile at a car carrying Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, supposedly the top leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula at the time.
US officials didn’t know that an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, was riding along. (Never doubt the dangers of hitchhiking.) “The Bush administration said the killing of an American in this fashion was legal … This is legal because the president and his lawyers say soit’s not much more complicated than that,” CBS News reported.151 “I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here,” Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said. “He’s well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority.”152
It’s right there in the Constitution between the right to tax and the repeal of Prohibition.
Congress tried to clarify the Military Commissions Act of 2006, part of which–the section that eliminated the writ of habeas corpus –was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 2008. Sadly for democracy and for us, the rest of the MCA remains in full force, including a passage that defines an enemy combatant as anyone who provides “material support” to the “enemy.” And who is the enemy? The enemy is anyone the president says it/he/she is or they are.
Again, there is no distinction between foreigners and US citizens. Jose Padilla, the so-called would-be “dirty bomber” held in a Navy brig since 2002, was tried and convicted of “material support” charges in 2007. (The government couldn’t prosecute Padilla for the bomb plot because they had tortured him so severely that he had been reduced to mental mush.)
Nobody–not even a nice, articulate, charismatic gentleman–ought to claim the right to suspend a person’s constitutional rights. Not in America. Certainly no one person should be able to have anyone he wants whacked. Even in dictatorships, the right of life and death is reserved for judges and juries operating under a system purportedly designed to support impartiality and a search for the truth.
Here in the United States, these primitive principles have been set aside in favor of a new droit du seigneur. In 2002 Scott L. Silliman, director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University asked: “Could you put a Hellfire missile into a car in Washington, D.C., under [the Bush] theory? The answer is yes, you could.”153
Throughout 2010 and 2011, Obama ramped up the assassination of political opponents of the United States and the US-aligned authoritarian regime in Pakistan, deploying more Predator drone plane attacks than Bush. To date these drone assassinations have been limited to foreign countries with weak states unable to defend themselves from US incursions, but that’s by choice.
On September 30, 2011, Obama personally ordered the drone assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, an imam and US citizen, in Yemen.
The president reserves the right to unilaterally order a government agency to murder you, which is weird, but not nearly as weird as the fact that nobody cares enough to do something about it.
As Obama marked his first year in the White House, Americans were souring on Mr. Hopey Changey, as Sarah Palin memorably called him. Not only had the bank bailouts failed to stimulate the economy, they had failed to persuade tight-fisted bankers to loosen credit. Unemployment was still rising, and worst of all, help wasn’t coming. The administration didn’t float any jobs programs or another bailout.
Things were going to get worse. Everyone knew that. All the momentum was flowing in the same direction. It was a tsunami of bad news–relentless and with no end in sight.
However, Obama did have one card up his sleeve. Throughout 2009 he had been pushing for comprehensive reform to fix America’s scandalous Fourth World system of for-profit healthcare. Presidents back to FDR had tried but failed–Bill Clinton most recently and most notably. Until now there hadn’t been enough political will to overcome the deep-pocketed medical industry led by the big insurance companies, for-profit hospital corporations, and doctors groups.
By the 2008 campaign, most Americans were fed up. Nearly fifty million people were uninsured. Families doled out over $2,000 for insurance plans that refused legitimate claims. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were going bankrupt due to high hospitalization bills. Thousands were dying due to lack of adequate care.
During the race, Obama said he favored a national healthcare plan that included a public option. Most people backed him on it, and they still did when he came to power. If anything, the Great Recession was increasing support for the public option: according to a September 2009 CBS poll, between 68 and 70 percent wanted one.154 After remaining aloof and above the fray for most of 2009, the president pushed Congress to come up with a deal. He knew it was his last chance to do something big, something he could campaign for reelection upon.
January 2010: Analysts were predicting that Democrats would lose some seats in the House and Senate during the November midterm elections, but the GOP, the thinking went, was too disorganized and fractured to wipe the floor with incumbent Democrats in a 1994-level rout. As usual, I disagreed with conventional wisdom: “I think Democratic losses will be more severe than the experts expect. Voters are being forced to flop back and forth between two parties they hate, but their contempt for the Democrats will be particularly toxic. Republicans don’t (and didn’t) promise anything more than the same old tax cuts for the rich.”
Then details of Obama’s healthcare plan, his ace in the hole, began to leak out.
It was a terrible plan. First and foremost, no public option. No government subsidies. No British-style national health system. The centerpiece of ObamaCare is a mandate that requires uninsured patients to buy insurance at hyperinflated prices from greedy for-profit private corporations.
Problem: People can’t afford healthcare.
Solution: Force them to buy healthcare.
Theory: If everyone buys in, average rates will decline.
The problem with this theory is that insurance companies will pocket the cost savings. A sane solution to the healthcare disaster would begin with shutting down health insurance companies, then nationalizing the entire system. Public health and the profit incentive don’t mix.
David Rivkin, a right-wing lawyer who worked in the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, fired the first salvo against the mandate in the Wall Street Journal. “If you say the government can mandate your behavior as far as this insurance goes,” Rivkin wrote, “there will be nothing the government can’t do. They can control every single way in which you dispose of your income.”155
Mark Hall, a law professor specializing in public health at Wake Forest University, countered that Congress enjoys “ample power and precedent through the Constitution’s ‘Commerce Clause’ to regulate just about any aspect of the national economy.”156 Can Congress make us buy health insurance? The courts would have to decide. Since ObamaCare, which stood to pour billions of dollars into the pockets of the big insurance companies, wouldn’t go into effect for years–after the 2012 election–it might never go into effect.
The court challenges would be fun for lawyers. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be stuck with a medical system–the terrible old one or Obama’s arguably worse new one.
Under the new system, the poor–individuals who currently earn under $14, 500 a year–would be required to go on Medicaid. Unless they don’t qualify for whatever reason, in which case they would pay at least 2 percent of their income to private insurers. If they refused, they would be fined $750 each year.
The working poor would be charged a percent of their income on a sliding scale. People who earn between $14,500 and $43,000 a year would pay between 4 and 12 percent of their annual income to private insurers. (For example, an individual who earns $43,000 would have to shell out $430 a month. If she lives in a high-tax place like New York, that would leave about $2,000 a month to live on after taxes.)
Deductibles were the biggest secrets in ObamaCare. A family of three earning less than $27,000–the poor–would be relatively well covered. ObamaCare would cover 97 percent of their bills. Going up the scale, however, coverage for a family of three earning between $45,000 and $73,000 would be only 70 percent. The lower middle class would pay one-third of their medical bills out of pocket.
There are copays: $20 per doctor’s visit, $250 for a hospital visit, laboratory tests and X-rays come out of your pocket.
But not only will huge insurance companies make higher profits at our expense, so will the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office, invariably described as the “non-partisan” Congressional Budget Office, projects that the US Treasury will come out ahead by $130 billion over 10 years.157 The prospect of deficit reduction helped garner votes among Democratic deficit hawks in Congress.
But…
If the healthcare bill will turn a profit for the federal government, where is that $130 billion coming from? From us. From you and me. Our taxes will be higher than they should be. Our health benefits will be fewer.
Maybe we were wrong about Obama. Maybe he’s not smart.
Maybe he’s just calm.
And mean.
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, the deepest oil drill in the history of energy exploration, went up in a fireball, killing eleven workers. Two days later the rig, owned by British Petroleum, sank in the Gulf of Mexico. The ensuing blowout 35, 500 feet below sea level triggered the biggest offshore oil spill ever.
The spill continued through the spring and all summer long. Week after week, the White House stood by passively, allowing BP to take the lead on cleanup and efforts to plug the leak. The government, including the Army Corps of Engineers, did absolutely nothing as wildlife died and tar balls washed up on coastlines from Louisiana to Florida. The leak was finally capped in September.
Deepwater Horizon became Obama’s Katrina–a signature event that encapsulated his administration’s habits of vacillation and catering to the interests of the worst sort of corporations.
It turned out that BP had cut corners on safety, most notably on a controversial “blowout preventer.” But that was relatively insignificant. The big question on everyone’s mind was: Why did they build Deepwater Horizon in the first place? As anyone who has ever watched a Jacques Cousteau special knows, seven miles down is the abyss–a world so different that we have no idea how the laws of physics play out in it. You didn’t need to be a geologist to know that if anything went wrong down there, there would be no way to send anyone or anything to fix it.
What were they thinking? And what about the government regulators? Had they given this stuff any thought? Or had BP simply paid them off?
The BP spill was a story tailor-made for the twenty-four hour news cycle: it dripped, dripped, dripped every single day. More like gush, gush, gush. You get the idea. As beaches closed and fishing operations went bankrupt, Americans–their patience already beginning to wear thin due to the awful economy–began questioning their government’s cozy relationship with giant corporations.
After the Citizens United case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations as rights-bearing individuals can spend unlimited sums on campaign contributions, many wondered about the double standard. When businesses misbehave, shouldn’t they risk punishments as serious as those imposed upon individuals?
It goes without saying that a person who commits a crime ought to face punishment proportional to the offense. Large and midsize corporations, which employ thousands, have far vaster reach and power than even the wealthiest ordinary citizens, so their crimes can be breathtaking in scope. The 1984 industrial catastrophe at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killed 15,000 people. An additional 200,000 suffered serious injuries. Compared to the boards of directors of Union Carbide (and Dow Chemical, which bought the company in 2001), Ted Bundy was small potatoes.
Unlike individual serial killers, however, corporations routinely get away with mass murder. For at least a year, management of the Toyota auto company knew that brakes in millions of its cars might fail. A 2009 ABC News investigation found that at least sixteen people had died because of this known defect. “Safety analysts found an estimated 2000 cases in which owners of Toyota cars including Camry, Prius and Lexus, reported that their cars surged without warning up to speeds of 100 miles per hour,” reported the network.158 Yet Toyota did nothing. Instead they blamed their customers, saying they were resting their floor mats on the gas pedals.
When Toyota finally faced the wrath of the federal government, its “punishment” was a paltry $ 16.4 million fine, not a cent of which went to the victims or their families.159 This slap on the wrist, a mere 5.5 percent of the company’s 2009 profit, went into the US Treasury’s general fund–used to kill Afghans and Iraqis.
Available to Congress and the president is a far more appropriate punishment: nationalization without compensation. Toyota’s American operations ought to have been seized and put under the operation of the federal government. Top officials of Toyota’s parent company in Japan, whose willful negligence murdered at least sixteen American citizens, ought to have been extradited and made to face trial in an American federal court.
Sounds extreme, huh?
Expropriating private property is actually quite commonplace … when the target is an ordinary private citizen. Ask hundreds of homeowners of New London, Connecticut–if you can find their forwarding address. The city destroyed an entire neighborhood to make way for a private luxury office development, and the US Supreme Court ratified the evictions, radically expanding the concept of eminent domain. Unlike the evil corporations I mentioned above, these homeowners didn’t do anything wrong.
Nationalizing a company (as opposed to a fine) protects the public interest. Hitting corporations in the balance sheet is a genuine deterrent to the managers of other companies contemplating lawless behavior. It brings in significant cash assets that can be used to compensate the victims of the company’s criminal activities.
Nationalization also serves the interest of public safety. An April 2010 mine explosion in West Virginia left twenty-nine coal miners dead. It also left members of the public feeling helpless and frustrated at the slow and inept rescue attempt by Massey Energy, the site’s owner and operator. Setting aside the obvious argument that natural resources ought to be exploited for the benefit of the American people rather than private businesspeople, the rescue operation would have benefited from the involvement of top experts at such government agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Upper Big Branch mine was cited for 450 safety violations over the previous year. Massey Energy paid the US Mine Safety and Health Administration less than $1 million total. That’s less than one percent of its annual profits, or about $2,000 per violation.
If you get caught speeding in Virginia, you’ll pay more than what Massey Energy paid for willfully jeopardizing the lives of its employees.160
Throughout the summer of 2010, British Petroleum spent $6 million a day on its response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. But that was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the cost that would be borne by the people of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. The disaster spilled the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez wreck into the Gulf every four days. Thousands of fishermen were ruined. The tourism industry, already in trouble due to the economy, was devastated. The full extent of the ecological damage–dead animals and aquatic plants, huge dead zones devoid of oxygen–won’t be understood for years.
Here again, nationalization would have been appropriate. Rather than waiting for the clueless executives at BP to come up with a solution, the federal government should have seized BP (its American operations, anyway), thereby putting management of the disaster under US jurisdiction; experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Navy, among other agencies, could have been brought in to stop the leak. After the leak was plugged, the profits of the now publically owned BP would have helped to defray the costs of the cleanup and extend benefits to fisherman and other victims.
Not to mention serving justice. In order to save a few bucks, BP executives picked a cheaper, riskier well casing for Deepwater Horizon–one without a redundant safety system that might have prevented the explosion and subsequent spill. Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas at Austin, told the New York Times that BP’s choice was “without a doubt a riskier way to go.”161
Imagine the possibilities. What if Too Big to Fail had been turned into Too Big to Resist?
As a nationalized asset, Citigroup–which received $476 billion in bailouts162 –would have been worth $152 trillion to taxpayers as of 2010. Put the nationalized company on sale and no American would ever have to pay college tuition again. Or pay for a doctor. We could give everyone a 50 percent tax cut. We’re a rich country–the problem is that out-of-control corporations are hogging the wealth.
Businessmen charter corporations for the express purpose of avoiding individual legal liability. It’s time we began holding criminal businessmen accountable. It’s time to put the environment first.
Lord knows we can’t count on our elected “representatives” to do anything useful. As the Gulf of Mexico was dying, President Obama was good for only one thing: talking.
“We will not rest until this well is shut, the environment is repaired and the cleanup is complete,” Obama told workers at Solyndra Inc., a solar panel manufacturer near San Francisco whose bankruptcy would become a miniscandal the following year.163 If the experts are right that a spill this big will take decades to clean up, Barack will be a busy guy after he retires.
What about Obama’s solution? “The spill in the Gulf, which is heartbreaking, only underscores the necessity of seeking alternative fuel sources,” argued the President. That was the extent of Obama’s response to Deep-Six Horizon: talking about alternative energy.
Reducing the consumption of fossil fuels and transitioning to solar, wind, and other clean sources of energy is decades overdue. But that would/will take decades more. We don’t have years. To update Keynes in an age of global warming and mass species extinctions: in the short run, we are all dead. We need radical cuts in energy consumption to slow down the acceleration of global warming.164
Meanwhile, oil kept gushing into the Gulf.
Obama and the politicians dithered. The editors of newspaper editorial pages dithered. No one acted.
Not on the economy.
Not on the environment.
They wouldn’t and they probably couldn’t.
The system wasn’t set up to allow anyone to act. To act would be to question the hegemony of corporate capitalism.
If Obama were half as hopey changey as he claimed during the campaign, BP’s North American operations would now be US government property, nationalized in order to compensate the fishermen and other injured parties in the Gulf. If he had an ounce of toughness, he would require that every car sold in the United States beginning next year be a hybrid. Sales of SUVs and light trucks would be banned; existing models would have to be retired from roadways within two years. All offshore drilling would be prohibited. (Yes, gas prices would rise-about three to four cents a gallon over the next ten to fifteen years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Whatever.)
Solar panels should be mass produced by government-owned and -operated factories and distributed at federally subsidized prices to homeowners and developers.
Obama couldn’t lead. Like his predecessors, he was in the pocket of Big Oil.
Just months after the spill in the Gulf, his Department of Energy was issuing new permits for offshore drilling. No change. Just business as usual.
In 1990, the American economy was in the third year of a deep recession. It was impossible to find a job. The 1980s housing bubble had popped; high-end housing prices in New York City dropped by 80 percent. Then, as now, the president seemed oblivious, aloof, and clueless. Two years later, with no recovery in sight, angry voters turned George Herbert Walker Bush out of office.
But then the World Wide Web appeared in 1991. Two years later, Mosaic–the first graphic web browser, which would evolve into Netscape–was introduced. The Internet boom began. It flamed out seven years later.
In the meantime, tens of millions of Americans collected new, higher paychecks. They spent their windfall. Consumer spending exploded and so did government tax revenues. When Bill Clinton left office in 2001, the Office of Management and Budget was projecting a $5 trillion surplus over the next ten years–enough to pay off the national debt and fund Social Security for decades. Unemployment had fallen to 4 percent. United States GDP accounted for a quarter of the global economy.
By late 2010, Americans were beginning to realize that they were not in the usual boom-and-bust cycle, but rather in a deep depression. This is structural. This is the beginning of the final crisis of late-stage capitalism, the crisis of overproduction that Marx and Engels predicted.
Help is not on the way.
Despair oozed between the lines of interviews with noted economists. Asked where the recovery would come from, they ran down lists of theoretical possibilities, dismissing each one by one. Where was the hope? The question remained unanswered, which was, of course, the answer.
“A robust rebound in retail sales earlier in the spring had fueled hopes that consumer spending–which makes up about 70% of US economic activity–would give a strong lift to the recovery. But now that is looking increasingly unlikely,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Households are not going to be the engine of growth for some time,” predicted Paul Dales of Capital Economics.
“In past recoveries, booming construction activity led the way, fueling spending and other economic activity. That’s not happening this time,” continued the Times.
If there’s some new technological innovation waiting in the wings–like the Internet in the early 1990s–no one has heard or seen any sign of it.
Congress was only making things worse. Deficits, budget cuts, austerity–all the things you don’t talk about during a downturn were their only agenda items. And Obama was going along.
Some economists hoped that the United States could export its way out of the depression; however, a radical restructuring of trade agreements and manufacturing infrastructure would have to come first, followed by years of expansion. US policy makers haven’t even begun to think about the first move. Moreover, the rest of the world isn’t in a position to buy our stuff. The rate of expansion of the economies of China and Japan is slowing down. Germany and other EU nations are imposing austerity measures.
Globalization, once seen as a strength of the free-market system, turns out to be a key factor in its downfall. In a research paper for the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute, John Makin argued that the actions of individual G20 nations threaten to bring the whole system crashing down in a Keynesian “paradox of thrift”:
Because all governments are simultaneously tightening fiscal policy, growth is cut so much that revenues collapse and budget deficits actually rise. The underlying hope or expectation that easier money, a weaker currency, and higher exports can somehow compensate for the negative impact on growth from rapid, global fiscal consolidation cannot be realized everywhere at once. The combination of tighter fiscal policy, easy money, and a weaker currency, which can work for a small open economy, cannot work for the global economy.165
Mike Whitney of Eurasia Review had an interesting, equally pessimistic take:
Obama intends to double exports within the next decade. Every other nation has the exact same plan. They’d rather weaken their own currencies and starve workers than raise salaries and fund government work programs. Class warfare takes precedent over productivity, a healthy economy, or even national solvency. Contempt for workers is the religion of elites.
Workers began fighting back. Hundreds of protesters rioted at a summit meeting of the G20 nations in Toronto, and the system understood the threat. Toronto police poured through thousands of photos and used facial recognition software to track down offenders. They even released a top ten “most wanted” list that included pictures of the activists.
Let me pause here for a digression about something called “learned helplessness.” Some four decades earlier, in 1967, animal researchers conducted an experiment in which two sets of dogs were strapped into harnesses and subjected to a series of shocks. The animals were placed in the same room, and the first set of dogs was allowed to perform a task–pushing a panel with their snouts–in order to avoid the shocks. As soon as one dog mastered the shock-avoidance technique, its comrades followed suit. The second group was placed out of reach of the panel. They couldn’t make the pain stop, but they watched the behavior of the first set.
Next, both groups of dogs were subjected to a second experiment. If they jumped over a barrier, the dogs learned, the shocks would stop. The dogs belonging to the first set all did it, but the dogs in the second set were too psychologically scarred to help themselves. “When shocked, many of them ran around in great distress but then lay on the floor and whimpered,” write Russell A. Powell, Diane G. Symbaluk, and P. Lynne Honey in Introduction to Learning and Behavior. “They made no effort to escape the shock. Even stranger, the few dogs that did by chance jump over the barrier, successfully escaping the shock, seemed unable to learn from this experience and failed to repeat it on the next trial. In summary, the prior exposure to inescapable shock seemed to impair the dogs’ ability to learn to escape shock when escape became possible.”
The decrease in learning ability caused by unavoidable punishment brings us to the midterm elections of 2010. The American electorate had voted Democrat in 2008 to punish rapacious Republicans, but two years later it voted Republican to get rid of do-nothing Democrats. It didn’t help. Not voting didn’t help. Americans were like the dogs in set B, battered and bruised with no way out.
Change from change we can’t believe in. Again.
As voters headed to the polls to hand Republicans a resounding victory, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that they had “grave and growing concerns about the Gulf oil spill, with overwhelming majorities of adults favoring stronger regulation of the oil industry and believing that the spill will affect the nation’s economy and environment.”166 Because, you know, Republicans are all about more regulation of Big Oil. And care so much about the environment.
Of course, voting Republican to express anger over the BP spill only makes sense within the context of learned helplessness. Like the poor set B dogs, desperate Americans were running around aimlessly, caught between two parties that differ only by degrees of harm. Republicans are evil. Democrats enable it.
Lying on the ground and whimpering doesn’t stop the pain either, but the way out is obvious: If a two-party corporatocracy beholden to gangster capitalism is ruining your life, get rid of it.
Don’t whimper at the fuckers.
Bite.