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Edited on Fri Jan-08-10 06:58 PM by Political Heretic
It Aint About Obama
Obama enters into my criticisms because, well he is the President of our country. But the failure of our political and economic system to hang onto any semblance of social or economic justice is the fault of entire parties and entire industries, and their relationship to money and power.
The main reason Obama gets a fair amount of criticism is because he promised change from politics and usual and the political status quo, and then before even elected stacked his administration with status-quo neoliberal "pro-business pragmatists" (to borrow a Bill Clinton self-description) who were entrenched beltway insiders with absolutely no experience in systematic institutional change and zero intention to bring any such change.
Don't know why that happened, if Obama is really just as tragically naive and not ready as others claimed during the campaign, or if he simply had no intention of truly backing his campaign rhetoric, but it is a reason why he takes a lot of criticism.
But as far as I'm concerned we have bigger issues to address than the failure of Barack Obama to be a president that prioritizes the needs of low-income and working individuals and families ahead of the wants and whims of the financial elite.
It's Bigger than the Democratic Party
We have a Democratic Party that has lost touch when any sort of commitment to workers it may have arguably once had. A party that no longer even makes poverty a serious plank of its platform (talking about the comfortable, cushy "middle class" haves is not the same) a party that continues to walk further and further away from labor, that has exchanged grassroots power and populist power with establishing connections with big dollar donors representing the financial elite, and corporate interests that are happy to pay well for favors.
This is a real problem. Some people believe we need to fight a bare-knuckles desperate fight to retake the Democratic party and get it back on the right track. I can respect the sentiment, but truthfully I don't feel that the Democratic Party has ever been exactly where we the ordinary working folk need a political party to really be.
They've been better, I'm not blowing it all off. But only "better" within the constraints of an economic social structure that is built on oppression - keeping many poor so that few can reap the rewards. We can and should dream bigger than that. Democrats of history have done great things to "humanize" that basic travesty or our social and economic system, and make it more palatable to all. Social Security, the efforts of the Great Society serve as examples of that humanizing effort. Very significant aids to the working class to ease the pain of their basic exploitation.
But the basic exploitation exists, and the guaranteed trajectory of our political economy is towards increased exploitation and widening gaps between the rich few and the poor many. It's the basic trajectory that has always been, only slowed at points or "beautified" at times by bits of "humanizing" policy.
The System itself is Unjust
Talking about historical figureheads of the Democratic party such as FDR (in particular, since he is always referenced) or Johnson is a lot like talking about benevolent slave-owners of the past as compared to vicious, violently oppressive slave holders.
One is way better than the other. But, they both still hold slaves.
It's the system itself that needs to be undone. It's a system of economic and social slavery for many, a system of complete apathy and slumber in a haze of basic consumer comforts of others in the comfortable middle class, and a system of dominance and exploitation of all the underclasses - comfortable and disengaged and actively oppressed alike - that needs questioned and challenged.
Only in the United States do so many who are actively put down by their own political-economic system also so vociferously defend it. And only in the United States do you find some many people who believe that its somehow absolutely impossible blind fantasy to consider any sort of political and economic alternative to the narrow little spectrum of corporate politics we allow today.
Systems Do Get Changed!
People act as though no one in the world has never existed in an oppressive system that wasn't serving their needs or actively representing them and chosen to do something about that system. Only Americans think that the only answer is blind acceptance of the political-economic structure itself, and that daring to suggest anything else is blind utopian fantasy.
I just wish people could realize how ridiculous they sound when they claim that to any student of world history and anyone who has lived abroad in more than one hemisphere.
The system itself is the problem. I had hoped Obama would be another FDR (and was stupid for hoping that because I had more than enough evidence to suggest that would not be the case, and I let my hope blind me to it) but even if he had been another FDR, he would have served to put a humanizing tough on an oppressive, exploitative machine. We need to be thinking bigger than that.
Corporate Capitalism fails People. Period. Dress it up any way you like, the reality is exactly the same, and it does not matter how you put in political office, until the system itself comes under deep scrutiny we are not going to make good progress.
The answer may be a more well-regulated "publicly owned" free-market economic structure such as many European countries have successfully adopted. (Success by the way, does not mean perfection, and it doesn't mean free of all problems or injustices - but they enjoy higher standards of living almost across the board than the average US citizen).
Or the answer may be something completely different. I know some people believe that capitalism in any form is a problem. Personally, discussions and debates about that would be a great thing, as long as people start agreeing that this system is inherently unjust - and no amount of sticking the "right" people in offices here or there is going to change that.
The system needs changed... we can disagree about how to do that and what that would look like. But let's at least move things forward by accepting the basic fact that our long-standing political-economic structure is fundamentally flawed and needs undone and then start having those kinds of conversations.
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