-----Original Message-----
>From: steve sharra
>Sent: Oct 29, 2012 7:06 AM
>To: usaafricadialogue
>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why progressives should ditch Obama & let Romney win, for now . . .
>
>[For a while I've been psychologically preparing myself for a possible
>Obama loss and Romney win, seeing what a toss-up the US election has
>become. I've been attributing my disappointment with Obama to the
>functions and structure of the US presidency, rather than to his
>personal failures. But this article below has pushed me over. Obama
>needs to be defeated, even if it means letting Romney win for now.
>Obama's presidency has weakened progressivism; progressives are now
>unable to stand up for social justice causes for fear of antagonizing
>a president who sells himself as a progressive, when in reality he is
>not; or at least the office he occupies, does not allow him.
>
>As a Pan-Africanist, I'm yet to fully grasp the implications of this
>argument and the consequences of an Obama loss. Granted, in his first
>term Obama has done nothing for Pan-Africanism, but my view has been
>that it was largely because of the way the US presidency works. I
>wasn't expecting anything different. But I was hopeful that Obama's
>second term, when he will not have another election to constrain him,
>might bring back the Obama one reads in his first autobiography,
>_Dreams from my Father_, a deeply Pan-Africanist and progressive
>portrait of who Obama the individual really is. Seven days to go, I'm
>ready for President Romney. But only for now. Apologies for the length
>of the article. Steve]
>
>SATURDAY, OCT 27, 2012 02:00 PM SAST
>The progressive case against Obama
>
>Bottom line: The president is complicit in creating an increasingly
>unequal -- and unjust -- society
>
>BY MATT STOLLER
>
>A few days ago, I participated in a debate with the legendary antiwar
>dissident Daniel Ellsberg on Huffington Post live on the merits of the
>Obama administration, and what progressives should do on Election Day.
>Ellsberg had written a blog post arguing that, though Obama deserves
>tremendous criticism, voters in swing states ought to vote for him,
>lest they operate as dupes for a far more malevolent Republican Party.
>This attitude is relatively pervasive among Democrats, and it deserves
>a genuine response. As the election is fast approaching, this piece is
>an attempt at laying out the progressive case for why one should not
>vote for Barack Obama for reelection, even if you are in a swing
>state.
>
>There are many good arguments against Obama, even if the Republicans
>cannot seem to muster any. The civil liberties/antiwar case was made
>eloquently a few weeks ago by libertarian Conor Friedersdorf, who
>wrote a well-cited blog post on why he could not, in good conscience,
>vote for Obama. While his arguments have tremendous merit, there is an
>equally powerful case against Obama on the grounds of economic and
>social equity. That case needs to be made. For those who don't know
>me, here is a brief, relevant background: I have a long history in
>Democratic and liberal politics. I have worked for several Democratic
>candidates and affiliated groups, I have personally raised millions of
>dollars for Democrats online, I was an early advisor to Actblue (which
>has processed over $300 million to Democratic candidates). I have
>worked in Congress (mostly on the Dodd-Frank financial reform
>package), and I was a producer at MSNBC. Furthermore, I aggressively
>opposed Nader-style challenges until 2008.
>
>
>So why oppose Obama? Simply, it is the shape of the society Obama is
>crafting that I oppose, and I intend to hold him responsible, such as
>I can, for his actions in creating it. Many Democrats are disappointed
>in Obama. Some feel he's a good president with a bad Congress. Some
>feel he's a good man, trying to do the right thing, but not bold
>enough. Others think it's just the system, that anyone would do what
>he did. I will get to each of these sentiments, and pragmatic
>questions around the election, but I think it's important to be
>grounded in policy outcomes. Not, what did Obama try to do, in his
>heart of hearts? But what kind of America has he actually delivered?
>And the chart below answers the question. This chart reflects the
>progressive case against Obama.
>
>The above is a chart of corporate profits against the main store of
>savings for most Americans who have savings — home equity. Notice that
>after the crisis, after the Obama inflection point, corporate profits
>recovered dramatically and surpassed previous highs, whereas home
>equity levels have remained static. That $5-7 trillion of lost savings
>did not come back, whereas financial assets and corporate profits did.
>Also notice that this is unprecedented in postwar history. Home equity
>levels and corporate profits have simply never diverged in this way;
>what was good for GM had always, until recently, been good, if not for
>America, for the balance sheet of homeowners. Obama's policies severed
>this link, completely.
>
>This split represents more than money. It represents a new kind of
>politics, one where Obama, and yes, he did this, officially enshrined
>rights for the elite in our constitutional order and removed rights
>from everyone else (see "The Housing Crash and the End of American
>Citizenship" in the Fordham Urban Law Journal for a more complete
>discussion of the problem). The bailouts and the associated Federal
>Reserve actions were not primarily shifts of funds to bankers; they
>were a guarantee that property rights for a certain class of creditors
>were immune from challenge or market forces. The foreclosure crisis,
>with its rampant criminality, predatory lending, and document
>forgeries, represents the flip side. Property rights for debtors
>simply increasingly exist solely at the pleasure of the powerful. The
>lack of prosecution of Wall Street executives, the ability of banks to
>borrow at 0 percent from the Federal Reserve while most of us face
>credit card rates of 15-30 percent, and the bailouts are all part of
>the re-creation of the American system of law around Obama's
>oligarchy.
>
>The policy continuity with Bush is a stark contrast to what Obama
>offered as a candidate. Look at the broken promises from the 2008
>Democratic platform: a higher minimum wage, a ban on the replacement
>of striking workers, seven days of paid sick leave, a more diverse
>media ownership structure, renegotiation of NAFTA, letting bankruptcy
>judges write down mortgage debt, a ban on illegal wiretaps, an end to
>national security letters, stopping the war on whistle-blowers,
>passing the Employee Free Choice Act, restoring habeas corpus, and
>labor protections in the FAA bill. Each of these pledges would have
>tilted bargaining leverage to debtors, to labor, or to political
>dissidents. So Obama promised them to distinguish himself from Bush,
>and then went back on his word because these promises didn't fit with
>the larger policy arc of shifting American society toward his vision.
>For sure, Obama believes he is doing the right thing, that his
>policies are what's best for society. He is a conservative technocrat,
>running a policy architecture to ensure that conservative technocrats
>like him run the complex machinery of the state and reap private
>rewards from doing so. Radical political and economic inequality is
>the result. None of these policy shifts, with the exception of TARP,
>is that important in and of themselves, but together they add up to
>declining living standards.
>
>While life has never been fair, the chart above shows that, since
>World War II, this level of official legal, political and economic
>inequity for the broad mass of the public is new (though obviously for
>subgroups, like African-Americans, it was not new). It is as if
>America's traditional racial segregationist tendencies have been
>reorganized, and the tools and tactics of that system have been
>repurposed for a multicultural elite colonizing a multicultural
>population. The data bears this out: Under Bush, economic inequality
>was bad, as 65 cents of every dollar of income growth went to the top
>1 percent. Under Obama, however, that number is 93 cents out of every
>dollar. That's right, under Barack Obama there is more economic
>inequality than under George W. Bush. And if you look at the chart
>above, most of this shift happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats
>controlled Congress. This was not, in other words, the doing of the
>mean Republican Congress. And it's not strictly a result of the
>financial crisis; after all, corporate profits did crash, like housing
>values did, but they also recovered, while housing values have not.
>
>This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional,
>it is the modern American order, and it has a certain equilibrium, the
>kind we identify in Middle Eastern resource extraction based
>economies. We are even seeing, as I showed in an earlier post, a
>transition of the American economic order toward a petro-state. By
>some accounts, America will be the largest producer of hydrocarbons in
>the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia. This is just not an America that
>any of us should want to live in. It is a country whose economic basis
>is oligarchy, whose political system is authoritarianism, and whose
>political culture is murderous toward the rest of the world and
>suicidal in our aggressive lack of attention to climate change.
>
>Many will claim that Obama was stymied by a Republican Congress. But
>the primary policy framework Obama put in place – the bailouts, took
>place during the transition and the immediate months after the
>election, when Obama had enormous leverage over the Bush
>administration and then a dominant Democratic Party in Congress. In
>fact, during the transition itself, Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank
>Paulson offered a deal to Barney Frank, to force banks to write down
>mortgages and stem foreclosures if Barney would speed up the release
>of TARP money. Paulson demanded, as a condition of the deal, that
>Obama sign off on it. Barney said fine, but to his surprise, the
>incoming president vetoed the deal. Yup, you heard that right — the
>Bush administration was willing to write down mortgages in response to
>Democratic pressure, but it was Obama who said no, we want a
>foreclosure crisis. And with Neil Barofsky's book "Bailout," we see
>why. Tim Geithner said, in private meetings, that the foreclosure
>mitigation programs were not meant to mitigate foreclosures, but to
>spread out pain for the banks, the famous "foam the runway" comment.
>This central lie is key to the entire Obama economic strategy. It is
>not that Obama was stymied by Congress, or was up against a system, or
>faced a massive crisis, which led to the shape of the economy we see
>today. Rather, Obama had a handshake deal to help the middle class
>offered to him by Paulson, and Obama said no. He was not constrained
>by anything but his own policy instincts. And the reflation of
>corporate profits and financial assets and death of the middle class
>were the predictable results.
>
>The rest of Obama's policy framework looks very different when you
>wake up from the dream state pushed by cable news. Obama's history of
>personal use of illegal narcotics, combined with his escalation of the
>war on medical marijuana (despite declining support for the drug war
>in the Democratic caucus), shows both a personal hypocrisy and
>destructive cynicism that we should decry in anyone, let alone an
>important policymaker who helps keep a half a million people in jail
>for participating in a legitimate economy outlawed by the drug warrior
>industry. But it makes sense once you realize that his policy
>architecture coheres with a Romney-like philosophy that there is one
>set of rules for the little people, and another for the important
>people. It's why the administration quietly pushed Chinese investment
>in American infrastructure, seeks to privatize public education,
>removed labor protections from the FAA authorization bill, and
>inserted a provision into the stimulus bill ensuring AIG bonuses would
>be paid, and then lied about it to avoid blame. Wall Street speculator
>who rigged markets are simply smart and savvy businessmen, as Obama
>called Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, whereas the millions who fell
>prey to their predatory lending schemes are irresponsible borrowers.
>And it's why Obama is explicitly targeting entitlements, insurance
>programs for which Americans paid. Obama wants to preserve these
>programs for the "most vulnerable," but that's still a taking. Did not
>every American pay into Social Security and Medicare? They did, but as
>with the foreclosure crisis, property rights (which are essential
>legal rights) of the rest of us are irrelevant. While Romney is
>explicit about 47 percent of the country being worthless, Obama just
>acts as if they are charity cases. In neither case does either
>candidate treat the mass of the public as fellow citizens.
>
>Now, it would not be fair to address this matter purely on economic
>grounds, and ignore women's rights. In that debate with Ellsberg,
>advocate Emily Hauser insistently made the case that choice will be
>safe under Obama, and ended under Romney, that this is the only issue
>that matters to women, and that anyone who doesn't agree is, as she
>put it, delusional. Falguni Sheth argued that this is a typical
>perspective from a privileged white woman, who ignores much of the
>impact that Barack Obama's policies have on women, and specifically
>women of color. And even on the issue of choice, you could make a good
>case, as she does, that there's less of a difference between Obama and
>Romney than meets the eye.
>
>Sheth's piece is persuasive. Barack Obama is the president who hired
>as his lead economic advisor Larry Summers, a man famous for arguing
>that women are genetically predisposed to being bad at math.
>Unsurprisingly, Anita Dunn, a White House adviser, later called the
>Obama White House a "hostile work environment" for women, in large
>part because of the boys club of Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers. Obama
>is the president who insisted that women under 17 shouldn't have
>access to Plan B birth control, overruling scientists at the FDA,
>because of his position "as a father of two daughters." Girls, he
>said, shouldn't be able to buy these drugs next to "bubble gum and
>batteries." Aside from the obvious sexism, he left out the possibility
>that young women who need Plan B had been raped by their fathers,
>which anyone who works in the field knows happens all too often. In
>his healthcare bill, Obama made sure that government funds, including
>tax credits and Medicaid that are the key to expanding healthcare
>access to the poor, will be subject to the Hyde Amendment, which
>prohibits their use for abortion. It's not clear what will happen
>with healthcare exchanges, or how much coverage there will be for
>abortion services in the future.
>
>As Sheth also notes, there is a lot more to women's rights than
>abortion. Predatory lending and foreclosures disproportionately impact
>women. The drug war impacts women. Under Obama, 1.6 million more women
>are now in poverty. 1.2 million migrants have been deported by the
>Department of Homeland Security. The teacher layoffs from Obama's
>stimulus being inadequate to the task disproportionately hit women's
>economic opportunity. Oligarchies in general are just not good for
>women.
>
>In terms of the Supreme Court itself, Obama's track record is not
>actually that good. As a senator, Obama publicly chided liberals for
>demanding that Sen. Patrick Leahy block Sam Alito from the Supreme
>Court. Meanwhile, Obama-appointed Supreme Court Justice Sonya
>Sotomayor has in her career already ruled to limit access to abortion,
>and Elena Kagan's stance is not yet clear. Arguing that Romney
>justices would overturn Roe v. Wade is a concession that Senate
>Democrats, as they did with Alito and Roberts, would allow an
>anti-choice justice through the Senate. More likely is that Romney,
>like Obama, simply does not care about abortion, but does care about
>the court's business case rulings (the U.S. Chamber went undefeated
>last year). Romney has already said he won't change abortion laws, and
>that all women should have access to contraception. He may be lying,
>but more likely is that he does not care and is being subjected to
>political pressure. But so is Obama, who is openly embracing abortion
>rights and contraception now that it is a political asset. In other
>words, what is moving women's rights is not Obama or Romney, but the
>fact that a fierce political race has shown that women's rights are
>popular. The lesson is not to support Obama, who will shelve women's
>rights for another three years, but to continue making a strong case
>for women's rights.
>
>The Case for Voting Third Party
>
>So, what is to be done? We have an election, and you probably have a
>vote. What should you do with it? I think it's worth voting for a
>third party candidate, and I'll explain why below. But first, let's be
>honest about what voting for Obama means. This requires diving into
>something I actually detest, which is electoral analysis and the
>notion of what would a pragmatist do. I tend to find the slur that one
>need be pragmatic and not a purist condescending and dishonest; no one
>ever takes an action without a reason to do so. Life is compromise.
>Every person gets this from the first time he or she, as a kid, asks
>his or her dad for something his or her mom won't give him. If you are
>taking action in politics, you have to assume that you are doing it
>because you want some sort of consequence from it. But even within the
>desiccated and corroded notion of what passes for democracy in 2012,
>the claims of the partisans to pragmatism are foolish. There are only
>five or six states that matter in this election; in the other 44 or
>45, your vote on the presidential level doesn't matter. It is as
>decorative as a vote for an "American Idol contestant." So, unless you
>are in one of the few swing states that matters, a vote for Obama is
>simply an unabashed endorsement of his policies. But if you are in a
>swing state, then the question is, what should you do?
>
>Now, and this is subtle, I don't think the case against voting for
>Obama is airtight. If you are willing to argue that Obama, though he
>has imposed an authoritarian architecture on the American system, is
>still a better choice than Romney, fine. I can respect honest
>disagreement. Here's why I disagree with that analysis. If the White
>House were a video game where the player was all that mattered, voting
>for Obama would probably be the most reasonable thing to do. Romney is
>more likely to attack Iran, which would be just horrific (though Obama
>might do so as well, we don't really know). But video game
>policymaking is not how politics actually works — the people
>themselves, what they believe and what they don't, can constrain
>political leaders. And under Obama, because there is now no one making
>the anti-torture argument, Americans have become more tolerant of
>torture, drones, war and authoritarianism in general. The case against
>Obama is that the people themselves will be better citizens under a
>Romney administration, distrusting him and placing constraints on his
>behavior the way they won't on Obama. As a candidate, Obama promised a
>whole slew of civil liberties protections, lying the whole time. Obama
>has successfully organized the left part of the Democratic Party into
>a force that had rhetorically opposed war and civil liberties
>violations, but now cheerleads a weakened America too frightened to
>put Osama bin Laden on trial. We must fight this thuggish political
>culture Bush popularized, and Obama solidified in place.
>
>But can a third-party candidate win? No. So what is the point of
>voting at all, or voting for a third-party candidate? My answer is
>that this election is, first and foremost, practice for crisis
>moments. Elections are just one small part of how social justice
>change can happen. The best moment for change is actually a crisis,
>where there is actually policy leverage. We should look at 9/11,
>Katrina and the financial crisis as the flip side of FDR's 100 days or
>the days immediately after LBJ took office. We already know that a
>crisis brings great pressure to conform to what the political
>establishment wants. So does this election. We all know that elites in
>a crisis will tell you to hand them enormous amounts of power, lest
>the world blow up. This is essentially the argument from the political
>establishment in 2012. Saying no to evil in 2012 will help us
>understand who is willing to say no to evil when it really matters.
>And when you have power during a crisis, there's no end to the amount
>of good you can do.
>
>How do we drive large-scale change during moments of crisis? How do we
>use this election to do so? Well, voting third party or even just
>honestly portraying Obama's policy architecture is a good way to
>identify to ourselves and each other who actually has the integrity to
>not cave to bullying. Then the task starting after the election is to
>build this network of organized people with intellectual and political
>integrity into a group who understands how to move the levers of power
>across industry, government, media and politics. We need to put
>ourselves into the position to be able to run the government.
>
>After all, if a political revolution came tomorrow, could those who
>believe in social justice and climate change actually govern? Do we
>have the people to do it? Do we have the ideas, the legislative
>proposals, the understanding of how to reorganize our society into a
>sustainable and socially just one? I suspect, no. When the next crisis
>comes, and it will come, space will again open up for real policy
>change. The most important thing we can use this election for is to
>prepare for that moment. That means finding ways of seeing who is on
>our side and building a group with the will to power and the expertise
>to make the right demands. We need to generate the inner confidence to
>blow up the political consensus, against the railings of the men in
>suits. If there had been an actual full-scale financial meltdown in
>2008 without a bailout, while it would have been bad, it probably
>would have given us a fighting chance of warding off planetary
>catastrophe and reorganizing our politics. Instead the oligarchs took
>control, because we weren't willing to face them down when we needed
>to show courage. So now we have the worst of all worlds, an inevitably
>worse crisis and an even more authoritarian structure of governance.
>
>At some point soon, we will face yet another moment where the elites
>say, "Do what we want or there will be a meltdown." Do we have enough
>people on our side willing to collectively say "do what we want or
>there will be a global meldown"? This election is a good mechanism to
>train people in the willingness to say that and mean it. That is, the
>reason to advocate for a third-party candidate is to build the civic
>muscles willing to say no to the establishment in a crisis moment we
>all know is coming. Right now, the liberal establishment is teaching
>its people that letting malevolent political elites do what they want
>is not only the right path, it is the only path. Anything other than
>that is dubbed an affront to common decency. Just telling the truth is
>considered beyond rude.
>
>We need to build a different model of politics, one in which people
>who want a different society are willing to actually bargain and back
>up their threats, rather than just aesthetically argue for shifts
>around the margin. The good news is that the changes we need to make
>are entirely doable. It will cost about $100 trillion over 20 years to
>move our world to an entirely sustainable energy system, and the net
>worth of the global top 1 percent is $103 trillion. We can do this.
>And the moments to let us make the changes we need are coming. There
>is endless good we can do, if enough of us are willing to show the
>courage that exists within every human being instead of the
>malevolence and desire for conformity that also exists within every
>heart.
>
>Systems that can't go on, don't. The political elites, as much as they
>kick the can down the road, know this. The question we need to ask
>ourselves is, do we?
>
>--
>http://mlauzi.blogspot.com/ |
>http://freireproject.org/users/steve-sharra |
>http://www.zeleza.com/blog/stevesharra |
>http://mabloga.feedcluster.com/ | http://mlauziglobal.feedcluster.com/
>| http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/author/steve-sharra/ |
>http://www.twitter.com/stevesharra | http://facebook.com/stevesharra |
>http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevesharra |
>http://groups.google.mw/group/bwalo-la-aphunzitsi |
>http://groups.google.mw/group/bloggingmalawi |
>http://www.youtube.com/user/ssharra
>
>--
>--
>You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
> For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
> For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
> To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
> unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
>
>
No comments:
Post a Comment