Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
The
Audacity of Obama's Farewell Address
Jack Rasmus
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
telesur
President
Barack Obama's farewell address to the nation last night was a strange and
disappointing attempt that failed to replicate the hope, energy, and optimism
of his first 2008 address to the nation.
Instead of
celebrating the unity of all those who joined to put him in office, the mood
was downbeat, with Obama warning listeners that the country had become more
divided than ever during his intervening years in office, that democracy was
threatened on many fronts – cultural, legal, and economic – and that the people
to whom he was speaking, and throughout the United States, now had the task to
take up the fight to protect what's left and restore it, for clearly, he had
not been able to do so.
At times
the fire of hope, dominant in his 2008 victory speech, briefly returned. Obama
declared, referring to 2008 and 2012, that "maybe you still can't believe
we pulled this whole thing off." But what exactly was pulled off? What was
accomplished that was so great is hard to know. But he apparently thinks
something was.
During the
speech he listed a series of accomplishments that represent, in his view, the
high marks of his presidency: As he put it, he "reversed the Great
Recession, rebooted the auto industry, generated the longest job creation
period in U.S. economic history, got 20 million people health insurance
coverage, halved U.S. dependency on foreign oil, negotiated the Iran nuclear
proliferation deal, killed Osama Bin Laden, prevented foreign terrorist attacks
on the U.S. homeland, ended torture, passed laws to protect citizens from
surveillance, and worked to close GITMO."
Sounds
good, unless one considers the facts behind the "hurrah for me" claims.
The auto
industry was rescued, true, but auto worker’s wages and benefits are less today
than in 2008 and jobs in the industry are still below 2008 levels. So, too, are
higher paid construction jobs. Half of the jobs created since 2008 include
those lost in 2008-2010, and the rest of the net gains in new jobs since 2010
have been low-paid, no benefits, part-time, temp/"gig" service jobs
that leave no fewer than 40 percent of young workers under 30 today forced to
live at home with parents. More people are working two and three part-time jobs
than ever before. Five million have left the workforce altogether, which
doesn't get counted in the official employment and unemployment rate figures.
If one counts part-time workers, temps and those who've left the labor force or
not entered altogether, the jobless rate is not today's official 4.9 percent
but 10 percent of the workforce. That's 15 million or more still, and after
eight years. Meanwhile, those who do have jobs are victims of the great
"job churn," from high to lower wage, from a few, if any, benefits to
none at all.
As for
ending the Great Recession, the question raised is for whom it ended and what
constitutes an end- The U.S. economy grew after 2009, but at the slowest rate
of growth historically, post-recession, since the 1930s.
But he did
end the great recession for the wealthy and their corporations. Corporations
have distributed more than US$5 trillion in stock buybacks and dividends to
their shareholders since 2010, as corporate profits more than doubled, as stock
and bond markets tripled in value, and as more than US$6 trillion in new tax
cuts for corporations and investors (beyond the US$3.5 trillion George W. Bush
provided) were passed on Obama's watch. Not to be outdone by Obama and the Democrats,
Trump and the Republican Congress are now about to pass another US$6.2 trillion
for investors and businesses, to be paid for in large part by tax hikes for the
rest of us and the slashing of education spending, Medicare, Medicaid, health
care, housing, and what's left of the U.S. social safety net.
In his
farewell address, Obama also cited how the country "halved its dependency
on foreign oil." True enough, at the cost of environmental disasters from
Texas to the Dakotas to Pennsylvania, as oil fracking replaced Saudi sources,
in the process generating irreversible water and air contamination in the U.S.
In foreign policy, he noted he signed the Iran deal, but left out mentioning
that during his administration the U.S. set the entire Middle East aflame with
failed policy responses to the Arab Spring, with Hillary's coup in Libya, to
support of various terrorist groups (including al-Qaida) in Syria and to the
arming of the Saudis to attack Yemen.
Looking
farther east, Obama's foreign policy outcomes are no better. The U.S. is still
fighting in Afghanistan 16 years later – the longest war in U.S. history – as
the Afghan government now collapses again in a cesspool of corruption and
graft. And the U.S. is still engaged in Iraq. A related consequence of the failed
U.S. Middle East policy has been the destabilization of Europe with mass
refugee migrations that have been only temporarily suspended by equally massive
payoffs to Turkey's proto-fascist Erdogan government (which also blames the
U.S. for the recent failed coup there, by the way).
Other
failures on the Obama foreign policy front must include the U.S. militarization
of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe following Obama's inability to rein in
Hillary's U.S. State Department neocons in 2013-14, who made a mess out of
their U.S.-financed coup in the Ukraine in 2014. That debacle has driven the
U.S. and Russia further toward confrontation, which perhaps Hillary and the
neocons may have wanted in the first place (along with a U.S. land invasion of
Syria at the time which, in this case, Obama to his credit resisted).
And what
about Obama's much-heralded "pivot to China?" On his watch, China's
currency achieved global reserve status, that country launched a major trade
expansion, and a government-established pan-Asian investment bank. The collapse
of the U.S.-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership will also mean a
China-Southeast Asia TPP-style trade agreement, which was already well
underway.
On the
domestic front, Obama's legacies must include the most massive deportation of
Latinos in U.S. history on his watch, nothing but words spoken from the comfort
of the White House about police and gun violence and Black lives murdered on
the streets of the U.S. and the rollback of voting rights across the country.
And let's not forget about Barack the great promoter of free trade, signing
bilateral deals from the very beginning of his administration, and then the TPP
– all of which gave Trump one of his biggest weapons during the recent
election.
The media
and press incessantly refer to the 2010 Obamacare Act and the 2010 bank
regulating Dodd-Frank Act as two of his prime achievements. But Obamacare is
about to implode because it failed to control health care costs, which now
amount to more than US$3 trillion of the U.S. total GDP of US$19 trillion – the
highest in the developed world at nearly 18 percent of GDP (compared to Europe
and elsewhere, which spend on average 10 percent of their GDP on health care).
The 8 percent difference, more than a trillion per year, goes to the pockets of
middle-men and paper pushers like insurance companies, who provide not one iota
of health care services.
In his
address, Obama touted the fact that on his watch, 20 of the 50 million
uninsured got health insurance coverage, half of them covered by Medicaid which
provides well less than even "bare bones," provided one can even find
a doctor willing to provide medical services. The rest covered by Obamacare
mostly got high deductible insurance, often at an out-of-pocket cost of US$2,000-$4,000
per year. Thus, ten million got minimal coverage while the health insurance
industry got US$900 billion a year, which is what the program costs. No wonder
the health insurance companies did not oppose such a windfall. Obamacare is
best described therefore as a "health insurance industry subsidy
act," not a health care reform act.
Obama will
be remembered for scuttling his own program in 2010 by unilaterally caving in
to the insurance companies and withdrawing the "public option" while
his party refused to even allow a discussion about expanding Medicare to all –
the only solution to the continuing U.S. health care crisis. In the wake of
Obamacare's passage, big pharmaceutical companies have also been allowed to
price gouge at will, driving up not only private health insurance premiums but
Medicare costs as well, and softening up the latter program for coming
Republican-Trump attacks.
As for
Dodd-Frank, that's been known as a joke for some time, providing no real
controls on greedy bankers and investors who were given five years after its
passage in 2010 to lobby and pick it apart, which they've done. The one
provision in Dodd-Frank worth anything – the Consumer Protection Agency – is
about to disappear under Trump. And for the first time in U.S. economic history,
no banker or investor responsible for the 2008 crash went to jail on Obama's
watch.
So much for
Obamacare and banking reform as his most notable "legacies."
The true
legacies that will be remembered long term will be the accelerating rate of
income inequality, the real basis for the growing divisions in America, and the
near collapse of the Democratic Party itself.
Under
Obama, the wealthiest 1 percent accrued no less than 97 percent of all the net
national income gains since 2008, as stock markets tripled, bond markets and
corporate profits doubled, and US$5 trillion was passed through to investors as
US$6 trillion more in their taxes were cut. Under George Bush, the wealthiest 1
percent of households accrued 65 percent of net national gains. Under Clinton
48 percent. So the rate accelerated rapidly during Obama's term. Apart from
talking about it, Obama did nothing during the last 8 years to abate, let alone
reverse, the trend.
The other
true legacy will be the virtual implosion of the Democratic Party itself during
his administration. As the leader of a party, one would think ensuring its
success in the future would be a priority. But it wasn't. On his watch, nearly
two-thirds of all state legislatures and governorships – and countless court
positions – have been captured by the Republicans. To be fair, the Democratic
Party has been in decline for decades. It has won at the presidential level
only when the Republicans split their vote, as in 1992 when Ross Perot
challenged George H.W. Bush, and when George W. crashed the entire U.S., and
much of the global, economy in 2008.
Obama and
the Democrats had a historic opportunity to turn the country in a progressive
direction for a decade or more, as Roosevelt did in 1932 and then 1934 by
bailing out Main St. with another New Deal. But Obama chose to double down in
2010 on bailing out Wall Street and the big corporations with another US$800
billion tax cut, leaving Main Street behind. Unlike FDR in 1934, who swept the
midterm elections that year, gaining a Congress that would pass the New Deal in
1935, Obama doubled down on more for investors, corporations and the 1 percent.
He paid dearly for that in 2010, losing control of Congress. U.S. voters gave
him one more chance in 2012, but he again failed to deliver. The result is a
Democratic Party "debacle 2.0" in 2016, leaving a Democratic Party in
shambles. That, too, will be remembered as his longer-term legacy.
Returning
to his farewell address, the affair was a poorly rehearsed caricature of his
2008 inaugural, during which so many had so much hope for change, but ended up
with so little in the end. Like a touring theater troupe putting on its last
performance blandly, eager to change into street clothes and get out of town.
True, the Republicans played hardball and blocked many of his initiatives, but
Obama did little to fight back in kind. If he was a community organizer, he was
from the most timid in that genre. He kept extending a hand to the Republican
dog that kept biting it at every overture. He wanted everyone to unite and pull
together. But in politics, winning is not achieved by reasoning with the better
nature of one's opponents. That's considered weakness, and the biting
thereafter is ever more vicious.
But perhaps
Obama's greater political error was he never went to the American people to
mobilize support, instead sitting comfortably within the Oval Office of the
White House and enjoying the elite circus that is "inside the
beltway" Washington. He never put anything personal or physical on the
line. And that does not an organizer make. He repeatedly talked the talk, but
never walked it. The results were predictable, as the Republican hardballers –
McConnell, Ryan and crew – threw him beanballs every time he came up to bat. He
struck out, time and again, calmly walking back to his White House dugout every
time.
So
farewell, Barack. Your speech was a nostalgic call to your hometown fans in
Chicago to go out and organize for U.S. democracy because it's now in deep
"doo-doo." Take up where I left off, your message? Fair enough. Do
what I failed to accomplish, you say? OK. See you at the country club, buddy,
after your lunch with Penny Pritzker, the Chicago Hilton Hotels billionaires,
who put you in office back in 2008.
And now the
United States changes one real estate wheeler-dealer for another, this time one
who takes the direct reins of government. And he's Obama's legacy as well.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment