Party creep and the Big Zap

Just to prove how bass-ackwards this election year has become, the "conservative" candidate has proposed direct help to homeowners facing foreclosure, an idea which the "progressive" candidate nixes in favor of sending billions to the financial institutions that got us into this mess. Moreover, John McCain is being saddled with responsibility for the financial disaster -- even though he (not Obama) proposed legislation in 2005 which would have done much to correct the problems at Fannie Mae.

Previously, I've complained that today's progressives are acting like Republicans. (You've heard the refrain: "Daily Kos is the new Free Republic.") But who'd a thunk we'd see a day when the Democrats started governing like Republicans?

Yet that's where we are right now. The Democratic leadership marches in lock-(or is that goose-?)step with the Bush administration, while John McCain offers all-too-occasional blurts of true opposition. Yet McCain is routinely derided as "Bush II." Should we not reserve that title for Barack Obama? At the very least, they could share that mantle...

As long as the concept of "party drift" -- a.k.a., the Republicanization of the Dems -- remains relegated to humble blogs such as this one, the idea will not join the mainstream meme-stream. Fortunately, some heavy hitters have begun to notice the same process.

Kevin Phillips. Although he began his career as a Republican strategist, he modified his position quite a few years ago. In such works as American Dynasty and American Theocracy, he offered blistering critiques of the life, family and political fortunes of George W. Bush. A century from now, anyone who wants to understand the current catastrophe will view those works as key documents.

In his latest, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, Phillips predicted the consequences of the financial mismanagement of the Bush years -- a forecast that came true months after the volume hit the shelves. Sounding a note unheard in the previously-mentioned works, Phillips now seems to consider the Democrats almost as culpable as the Republicans -- perhaps moreso.

For the adherents of the GOP cult, laissez faire is the key article of faith. They believe in Milton Friedman more than they believe in Jesus. For the Dems, simple bribery sufficed. The hedge fund managers and the leaders of the great financial institutions bought political power through massive contributions.

As we've noted before, Barack Obama received more from Fannie and Freddie, in a very brief span of time, than has any other politician.

Paul Street. Surprisingly, I've never referenced this guy before. He's the author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, which I am reading.

I've been looking for a book to recommend to progressive opponents of Barack Obama. Conservative authors -- including the ghastly Jerome Corsi and the even ghastlier Floyd Brown -- have produced works which combine the occasional valid point with the usual GOP smear-and-hysteria stew. Street's long-standing discomfort with Obama comes from a traditional leftist perspective. See, for example, his 2007 review of The Audacity of Hope, here:

Racial hierarchy isn’t the only oppression structure that Senator Obama is willing to eagerly accommodate. As I’ve been arguing for some time now (Street 2004, 2006, 2007a-2007e), he plays the same essential opportunistic and power-worshipping game in relation to related inequality structures of class and empire. Beneath peaceful and populist sounding claims to the contrary, he’s largely on the dark and neoliberal side of power when it comes to each of what the democratic socialist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism (King 1967, 250-251; Garrow 1986 p. 546) It’s not for nothing that Obama was recently described as a “conservative” in a flattering New Yorker write-up titled “The Conciliator.” (MacFarquar 2007)

The technically biracial Obama’s campaign and persona are perfectly calibrated for this era of victim-blaming neoliberal racism. He allows whites to assuage their racial guilt and feel non-racist by liking and perhaps even voting for him while signaling that he won’t do anything to tackle and redress the steep racial disparities and systemic racial oppression that continue to deeply scar American life and institutions.

If you can't read Street's book -- it isn't easy to find -- check out this interview. A few excerpts:

But what is "the Obama phenomenon," exactly? Its nature and meaning remain shrouded in fantasy, wishful thinking, projected aspirations, and (on the right) preposterous neo-McCarthyite accusation.

I have been in good places to see the rise of Obama up close. I was an urban social policy researcher producing project studies on various Illinois issues Obama deliberated upon (chiefly campaign finance and welfare "reform") in the Illinois state legislature during the late 1990s. Between 2000 and 2005, I was the research director at a predominantly black civil rights and social service agency located in the historical heart of Chicago's South Side black ghetto... I knew the Obama phenomenon before it hit the national scene and I knew it from within the black community (white though I may be), where it was common to see Obama as excessively "bourgeois" and as too close to the Chicago (Richard M. Daley) Machine and to other centers of white, political, corporate, and academic power.

Obama is attractive to a large section of the U.S. power elite because he promises to pacify and co-opt angry citizens and activists and re-establish confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order by reinforcing the argument that "the system" still "works."

From a review on Firedoglake:

Appropriately, Street begins with a chapter titled “Obama’s Dollar Value,” detailing the would-be-president’s fealty to big business and bigger finance capital, in deed if not always in word. Of particular note in the current financial crisis is Obama’s initial response to the growing subprime mortgage debacle. Planting himself to the right of Senators John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, Obama rejected any form of freeze on interest rates or moratorium on foreclosures, endorsing only a meager tax credit for homeowners while pontificating on the “moral responsibility” of households caught in the corporate vise. “Obama staked out his usual position in the neoliberal middle,” writes Street, “embracing some increased federal regulation but seeking to create ‘incentives for leaders’ to restructure mortgages without giving that job to government.”

Street eviscerates Obama’s positions on every issue dear to progressives. On U.S. militarism: Obama’s determination to add 92,000 additional troops to the imperial Army and Marines; his belligerence on Afghanistan and early urging of incursions into Pakistan; his phony anti-war stance (“I am opposed to dumb wars”); his long-standing view that “we may have no choice but to slog it out” in Iraq; his warning that Venezuela and other emerging nations should not “follow their own path to development.”

On economic justice, Street skewers Obama’s 2007 “business friendly rightwing talking points” on Social Security, lending credence to Republican claims impending “fiscal calamity” for the New Deal program; his fundamental affinity for NAFTA; his corporatist campaign advisors; and his fantastical assertion to NASDAQ that corporations are unfairly criticized because “no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal.”

Naomi Klein. The celebrated author of The Shock Doctrine (and no, I still have not reconciled myself to her inclusion of the Ewen Cameron material) fears that an Obama presidency might be the latest, and most subversive, vehicle for imposing a Friedmanite "shock" to the American system, similar to the ones seen in Chile, Russia and Iraq. Klein sounded a lonely alarm back in June (and you can just imagine how the bots reacted):

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart's most prominent defenders, anointing the company a "progressive success story."

Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama--who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade--is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.

He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education--a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan.

I have made the same point about Goolsbee's "education" silliness in an earlier post:

What's the use of putting an even higher percentage of our population through college if graduates will enter an economy destined for ragnarok? Which is worse -- a schlub with no job, or a schlub with no job and a student loan debt of $90,000?

The hard fact is that most people simply are not bright enough for college. Sorry to sound snobbish, but we must be realistic. We already have too many mediocre minds attending institutions of higher learning; we cannot further lower academic standards. Persons of average IQ (90-100) have no business entering a university for any purpose beyond an after-hours dog walk. We cannot improve the lives of such people by demanding that they learn German or master trig. Nevertheless, the economy must accommodate such people, must give them prosperity -- and that's just what FDR managed to accomplish, in the days before "the Chicago boys" ruined the world.

Back to Klein. Recently, on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now, Klein notes that Obama seems to offer an alternative to Friedmanism. His followers genuinely believe that Obama will institute "trickle up" economic remedies. If so, then why Goolsbee? Why Liebman? Why Furman?

We need better ideas responding to what a Barack Obama presidency would absolutely face. As soon as he comes to office, “Yes, you can” turns into “No, you can’t; we’re broke.” No green jobs, no alternative energy, no healthcare for everyone. You know, his plan for—to give healthcare to every child in America costs $80 billion. Bailing out AIG cost $85 billion. They’re spending that money. They’re spending those promises. So, the people who are going to say, “No, you can’t,” who are going to use this crisis to shut down hope, to shut down possibility, are ready.

In other words: It may well be that those who wish to shock us into a Friedmanite "paradise" -- no unions, no Medicare, privatized Social Security, privatized schools -- understand that the Big Zap will work best if it hits while a Democrat sits in the oval office.