Obama's first year: Change we can still believe in?

In revisiting some of the arguments I made in my New African article – sensationally entitled ‘Why I would not vote for Obama’ – I acknowledge that one year on, it is too soon to profoundly evaluate Obama’s presidency and the impact of his domestic and foreign policies to date.[1] I had deliberately entitled that article ‘Uncertainties in voting for Barack Obama’ to convey the considerable reservations I had at the time of writing and also the sense that historical perspective requires us to stand back from individuals and their actions in order to appreciate how intricate details contribute to the making of the larger historical picture. Also, the intention of the abandoned title was to suggest that in understanding current affairs, sometimes our noses are pressed too close to the events to enable us to properly explain them. Time needs to elapse before we can evaluate them effectively and soberly.

Since writing that article, I wish to correct two things. Firstly, Obama was the fourth African American to contest the presidential candidacy after Shirley Chisholm, Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton. Secondly, I concede to colleagues, friends and students who have since asked me: ‘Would you really not have voted for Obama?’ that if I were an American citizen entitled to vote, I would have given Obama my vote – but hesitantly – and not so much on the basis of racial solidarity but on the basis of harm reduction (i.e. between McCain and Obama it is the latter who, on paper, was the candidate more likely in November 2008 to better the world and America, rather than harm it).

With 20 January marking a year since Obama’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States, it may be argued that it is not fair to judge him as his record is far from complete. Certainly, if Obama is to win the next election, historians of the future will have a solid basis to evaluate the impact of his policies on the American people and the world. However, one year into his presidency, a positive psychological impact of Obama’s presidency is that a black family is occupying the White House. Some argue, that it is an inspirational and symbolic role model for Africans in the diaspora, particularly in Europe and the UK, where we do not see many images of the African family unit in the mainstream media compared to in the USA, where there are far more TV programmes with black families featured in them. In the UK, the dysfunctional black family or black single parent is considered to be the stereotypical norm and therefore it is positive to see challenges to such representations.

Another positive must be that Obama’s electoral victory will help end the invisibility of ‘Afro-Latinos’ in the other Americas i.e. Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia and elsewhere. While ‘Si, se puedo!’ (‘Yes, we can!’) as a slogan may become forgotten, Obama’s physical and political occupation of the White House has psychologically empowered – and will continue to empower – people of African descent in South and Central America to struggle against socio-economic and political inequalities in their societies.

In terms of concrete positives, one school of thought has argued that Obama has made considerable efforts in repairing Washington’s image as a hegemon committed to the rule of law and multilateralism unlike his predecessor. Early in his presidency he announced relaxations for Cuban Americans travelling to the embargoed island. Yet, the 50-year-old embargo continues to remain in place for no other reason than to punish Cuba for the audacious threat of being a model of a non-capitalist society. Most ominously, the Obama administration signed a deal with the right wing government of Columbia on 30 October 2009 allowing America to make use of seven military bases in the country. This is action that can only alarm left wing governments such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in the region. Even Time magazine observes that ‘Obama’s Latin American policy looks like Bush’s.’ [2]

On the closing of the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Obama acknowledged in November that his administration would miss the self-imposed deadline to close the centre by mid January 2010. The difficulties revolve around where to relocate the remaining 200 detainees, which has been condemned by some Democrats and Republicans in Congress as freeing terrorists who could strike America again.[3]

Obama sought to reach out to the Arab world when he visited Cairo in June 2009 and gave a candid apology for the CIA sponsored coup against Iran’s Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953, unlike the lecture he gave to Ghanaians in July on the need for good governance and his failure to apologise for the CIA backed coup against the government of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966.

On the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there have been no significant developments in terms of moving nearer to the realisation of a Palestinian state. Instead the Israelis continue to build illegal settlements on Palestinian land. In order to secure Obama’s political future he has concluded that a top priority of his Middle East policies must be to continue to strengthen the US-Israeli partnership. He cannot resist the power of the Israeli lobby who dictate that the foreign policy for both the US and Israel are one and the same.

Obama’s participation in the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December last year, despite the failure to reach a legally binding agreement, has been cited as confirmation of his break with the unilateralism of George W. Bush, Jr. The granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama that astounded many (including myself), demonstrates that there are considerable invested aspirations in Obama. Can he or will he deliver a more peaceful and humane world? How has he fared in regards to healthcare reforms for the almost 30 million Americans who are without healthcare, the economic crisis and Afghanistan?

What follows are some tentative evaluations – by no means exhaustive – in terms of the trajectory so far pursued by the Obama administration.

OBAMA & THE DOMESTIC FRONT

The Great Recession that confronts America is not of Obama’s doing, but how his administration responds to it will be the basis of how he will be judged. To date the American banksters have been bailed out by American taxpayers to the tune of US$787 billion in a fiscal stimulus package. It remains to be seen the extent to which Obama will be tough on the financial institutions that brought the country to its knees. For nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth; one in eight are on food stamps; many have lost their homes in repossessions. Unemployment and underemployment has soared to 17.5 per cent of the population, while the national average is 10.2 per cent. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics ‘in 2008 the unemployment rate for African Americans 25 years and over without a high school diploma was 14 per cent’, while Latinos followed close behind at 13.2 per cent.

Recovery is far from being on the horizon. There appears to be no plan to help create million of new jobs in the foreseeable future whilst millions of people remain jobless. The working people – white, Asian, black, Latino – are suffering.

On healthcare, Obama attracted voters on his election trail by his campaign pledge to carry out health care reform in a nation where approximately 30 million Americans have no access to health care and are uninsured. Meanwhile, Obama’s election campaign managed to receive US$20 million from the health care industry, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival, John McCain who raised US$7,758,289 from the healthcare industry.[4]

What kind of healthcare proposals Obama was seeking to implement, was not exactly clear in the highly vacuous campaign trail. We are now clear that the bill is not about health care but about protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. The fierce public debate over health care during the year was eventually concluded in late December 2009 when the bill was passed with painful compromises for some leftwing Democrats. The public option government-run health insurance scheme had to be dropped as it was seen by many, including the all powerful private health insurers, as a means to rein them in. The bill that has been passed is instead a giveaway to big business, as it requires all Americans to obtain health insurance whilst insurers will be forbidden from denying coverage based on patient pre-existing conditions. Yet, it is ludicrous to mandate that an individual must buy an insurance premium they cannot afford and then fine them for failure to do so. Who benefits in such a situation?

It appears that alongside the intense debate over healthcare reforms, it is most bizarre that Congress a US$636 billion defence budget passed in late December, without any discussion and major headlines. Why is there a disconnect in the American psyche between a war that Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and L. J. Bilmes predict will cost between US$3-5 trillion and American economic suffering at home?[5]

In Obama’s West Point Speech announcing his surge decision on 1 December 2009, Obama mentioned the cost of sending 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan at a cost of approximately US$30 billion per year. This cost is likely to soar fantastically. Added to the cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should be the cost of maintaining what Chalmers Johnson calls its 600 ‘empire of bases’ in 130 countries.[6]

The US manufacturing sector has been shrinking, whilst paradoxically the military industrial sector is nearly three times as large as the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, as Engelhardt and Turse point out, most Americans think of themselves ‘as something like the peaceable kingdom’. Yet, as the authors argue, the USA ‘garrisons the planet in a way no empire or nation in history has ever done.’[7]

AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, PAKISTAN, IRAN & NOW YEMEN?

Obama’s election campaign was unambiguous in asserting that he would seek an exit from the war in Iraq, which he considered the ‘wrong war’ whilst simultaneously deploying troops to Afghanistan, the ‘right war.’ Therefore his announcement on 1 December 2009 that he was sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan (making a total of approximately 64,000) was no surprise. The only surprise was that a president who was in office for just under a year was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and then decided to send further troops to Afghanistan where the war is entering its ninth year. The war in Afghanistan has now become America’s longest war, surpassing the one in Vietnam and evoking many parallels as to whether it will be Obama’s own Vietnam.

It seems America is waging two and a half wars in the Middle East and Asian continent. The third war, after Afghanistan and Iraq, is the intensification of deadly drone missile and commando attacks inside neighbouring Pakistan, which killed 708 people in 2009, of which only 5 were identified as al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.[8]

Obama is still entrapped in the illusion that the conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan is a ‘war of necessity’ and a ‘just war’ to which he gave a subtle defence in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. It is certainly a necessity for the military-industrial and intelligence complex that will continue to grow as result of the extension of the war. However, waging war will not make the American people nor the world a safer place because America continues to remain, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, once said, ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’

The opposition of the Obama administration to Iran’s right to a nuclear enrichment programme, which is considered as a move towards acquiring nuclear weapons, smacks of duplicity in a region where Israel has between 100-200 nuclear weapons and is the sole nuclear power in the region of the Middle East. If the Obama administration is committed to preventing Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, why will they not demand that Israel dismantles its weapons and that France ceases making use of nuclear energy? Obama will not do so because Israel is its most reliable pro-Western ally in an Arab dominated region. Leaving aside the morality of nuclear weapons, the fact that the US has arrogated itself the prerogative that America can and should decide which nations are civilised and sufficiently responsible to possess such weapons, is indeed an instance, among many, of imperial arrogance and audacity. It is indeed ‘nuclear imperialism’, as Kwame Nkrumah characterised the French testing of atomic weapons in the Sahara dessert in the early 1960s.

Already opinion polls have shown a decline in support for Obama since his election to office. It appears the sparkle of the Obama magic is gradually fading. Will it dissipate further if he were to extend the global war on terrorism to Yemen in the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorists there? Has Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young Nigerian bomber who attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas day given new life to Washington’s global war on terror campaign in Yemen? M. K. Bhardrakumar, a former ambassador and a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, observes Obama’s intelligence and realism but asks is he ‘blundering into a catastrophic mistake by starting another war that could turn out to be as bloody and chaotic and unwinnable as Iraq and Afghanistan?’[9]

As I have argued elsewhere, Abdulmutallab’s action has given those committed to waging the global war on terror a further justification for extending it to Yemen and in doing so the strategic importance of the region between Yemen, Somalia and particularly Djibouti, where America has some 2,000 troops stationed at Camp Lemonier, will increase in geopolitical significance.[10] We shall see the emergence of an American pretext for US or NATO, with a probable AFRICOM input in the militarisation of the waters around the Gulf of Aden and across the strait of Bab el-Mandab in Djibouti. This geographical area is the critical oil chokepoint as considerable Saudi oil passes through this region. As others have pointed out, the pretext of aiding the Yemeni government to fight al-Qaeda extremists in Yemen conceals America’s challenge to China’s influence in the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean which are the arteries of the Chinese economy. As Bhadrakumar argues, ‘By controlling them [i.e. the sea lanes], Washington sends a strong message to Beijing that any notions by the latter that the US is a declining power in Asia would be nothing more than an extravagant indulgence in fantasy.’[11]

The tone of Obama’s foreign policy may be different from that of his predecessor, but at its core the American empire and its imperialist corporate interests continue to be loyally served by Obama’s administration. His tone is different on account of Obama’s sophistication, but we should be under no illusion that he seeks to substantially dismantle the fundamental imperialist corporate structure which he serves. It is obvious that he would not have been elected if he had policies counter to those of the financial oligarchy and their imperialist interests. Obama is a liberal centrist with occasional conservative instincts. Some believe he is Clinton without the sleaze; charismatic, and a self-described believer in ‘the free market.’ However, during the election campaign Obama was able to package himself as ‘new’ and ‘fresh’, whilst Republicans cast him as left-wing for his pronouncements on health care reform. Whilst Obama uses the utterances of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, we shouldn’t be under the illusion that Obama is committed to the triple threats of eradicating global racism, poverty and militarism that King identified as ills of humanity.

RACISM NOW GOES VERY COVERT WITH OCCASIONAL OVERT

The arrest and manhandling of the African American Professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home in middle class white suburbia and the media attention it received demonstrates the highly nonsensical and mythical diatribe begun by the Wall Street Journal’s pronouncement of America entering a ‘post-racial age.’ Institutional racism did not end with the election of Obama and it is only white Americans who delude themselves in believing that racial inequality ended with the election of America’s first black president.

Prejudice, discrimination, racial inequalities remain deeply structurally embedded in American society – in the judicial system, in health care policies, in inadequate and under-funding for schools in poorer black neighbourhoods, in the way many of the subprime mortgages were sold to African American and Latino families, who are now the victims of such inflated mortgage deals. Or take for example the fact that, as of mid 2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men. Another example is that while whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at thirteen times the rate of white males.[12] The prison industrial complex of America thrives on the incarceration of black and brown males and females who are disproportionately represented within its institutions.

The danger of Obama’s election is that racism has become and will become reinforced (not just in American society but globally) because his election has given rise to what has been called ‘neoliberal racism’[13] or ‘enlightened exceptionalism.’[14] Essentially this new subtle and covert type of racism was reflected in the remarks by the senior member of the Democratic Party, Harry Reid, who was a key figure in pushing Obama’s campaign. Reid said that he was won over by Obama’s oratorical talents and believed that America was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially a ‘light skinned African American, with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’ His comments, made privately during the long 2008 campaign when discussing why Obama should seek and could win the presidency are contained in a new book recently published by the journalists M. Halpern and J. Heilemann called ‘Game Change’.

Reid’s comment gives a discerning but not a surprising prism into how some whites, particularly the 43 per cent who voted for Obama see him. By implication such a remark also gives insight into how the majority of African Americans are also viewed by some whites. In short, for those white people, Obama is the archetype of what Lamont Hill aptly defines as the ‘Cosbyesque gospel of personal responsibility (“Obama did it, so can you!”) that allows dangerous public policies to go unchallenged.’[15]

He represents a black man who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. He is the exceptional black man who has made it through hard work, educated himself and white people feel utterly comfortable in Obama’s presence, just as they do with the fictional middle class TV character of Cliff Huxtable in The Cosby Show. In the minds of such whites, the small cohort of Cliff Huxtables (i.e. a small but significant black middle class) have to be distinguished from the black and brown masses who are shiftless, continue to live on welfare, unemployed, unwilling to take responsibility for their lives and speak in a ‘Negro dialect’.

Reid’s racist reference to Obama’s skin colour has historical roots in the pigmentocracy that slavery and segregation put in place and to some extent was internalised by light-skinned and darker skinned slaves. The former were the buffer from the scary dark hued masses feared by whites. Today in many racially segregated white neighbourhoods there remains a fear of inner city black people.

The response of Obama to Reid’s comments are instructive. He was quick to say that there was nothing ‘mean spirited’ about the remarks. This is not surprising on account of the fact that during Obama’s election campaign he was most astute in his consistent deflections and silences on race matters.

The height of Obama’s hazardous walk on the entangled tightrope of race and class was his response to the fiery utterances of South Side Chicagoan Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor in early 2008. Decontextualised clips of Wright’s speeches were played by ABC news to deliberately cast him as an angry, dangerous and unpatriotic African American. Wright said in one clip: ‘We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africa, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.’ He referred to America as ‘the US of KKK’ and ‘the United States of White America.’ On 18 March 2008 in Philadelphia, Obama gave a response which was entitled ‘A more perfect union.’ He accused his former pastor of ‘express[ing] a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.’ Obama’s disapproving response to Wright’s condemnation of America not only set him apart from his former pastor, but juxtaposed him as belonging to a gentler, sympathetic, non-threatening, patriotic cohort of black people, versus the aggressive, bitter, illegitimate anger of blacks represented by Wright. Needless to say, Obama’s speech attempted to sweep under the historical carpet the fact that structural racism remains in American society in the colour-blind policies, practices, and structures of America. He conveyed that Wright was somehow stuck in time and that America had moved on. But has it? His response also reassured his white constituency that whites could be comfortable and safe with him.

Similarly, when Obama appeared before the Congressional Black Caucus in late 2009 the African American political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson observed that he was intent on maintaining his reputation as ‘a race neutral presidency.’ When approached to allocate more resources and programmes to help the black unemployed and black business people, Obama indignantly refused and stated he would not introduce any special initiatives for African Americans.[16] Obama stated that by helping everyone he was simultaneously assisting all needy black people.

Whilst we are well aware that Obama would have gotten nowhere near the presidency had he espoused the politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, the reality is that he would not have won the White House if he had not won North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. As Hutchinson points out, ‘Obama won these four states because black voters turned his election into a holy crusade and stormed the polls on Election Day.’[17] As the African American writer Kevin Alexander Gray correctly points out ‘Racial solidarity is the mood that helped get Obama into the White House. The traditional source of power and survival among blacks, it is also the novocaine of the moment, a numbing agent as people suffer through what, despite the more hopeful official forecasts, feels like a full-blown depression…’[18]

African Americans now possess what Hutchinson characterises as ‘the novocaine presidency’ – a black political messiah many believed would never arrive in their lifetime but one with whom their economic distress continues in his refusal to see racial disparities being rooted in persistent institutional racism beneath the success of a minority of privileged blacks. The colour of Obama’s skin i.e. that he is black – helps delude African Americans and continental Africans and to obfuscate the fact that he is in deference to his masters of capital and empire. Meanwhile, to paraphrase Malcolm X, the African American masses (and other oppressed minorities) continue to ‘suffer peacefully...’[19]

BUILDING A GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT FOR CHANGE

During the election campaign Obama failed to present an overarching vision of what change would look like. There were certainly platitudes and references to ‘hope’, slogans (‘Yes, we can!’) and calls for an end to the Iraq war, but no detailed substantive programme was presented at any of the public platforms Obama stood on to concretely outline what precisely he wanted to do for America; in which direction he sought to take Americans and America in. Yet, American people were looking for something new after eight years of the criminal Bush. What kind of ‘new’ or change was never really spelled out by the Obama team beyond the elusive rhetoric on the website and what William Blum aptly calls the seductive ‘toothpaste advertisement smile.’[20]

However, the reality is that Obama raised more money during his campaign than Hilary Rodham Clinton. He was backed by some of the most influential and important financial institutions in America such as J. P. Morgan Chase, Manhattan, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and pharmaceutical groups and therefore he is indebted to them on account of his need to have his eye on the next election campaign. This is the reality of the American political system that American politicians have to play to. To date, at least three of the Wall Street institutions have handed out bonuses of US$30 billion. It is business as usual for these institutions, yet, how Obama will walk the tightrope of seeking to win over voters whilst simultaneously seeking to keep Wall Street on side will be tortuous.

Obama’s approval rating is currently at 50 per cent, a precipitous drop from the 68 per cent he enjoyed when he first took office and lower than many of his presidential predecessors when they began their second year in power.

In agreement with the white American anti-racist campaigner Tim Wise, ‘The worst possible outcome of the 2008 election would be for Obama to have won, only to then have the millions of people mobilised by his mantra of change go back to sleep, to hit the snooze button on the none-too-subtle alarm clock that has been going off for many a year now…’[21]

We cannot rely on a very slick Obama to change America nor the world for his vision of change is more of the same. It requires ordinary Americans of all ethnicities and particularly the youth, who possessed the optimism and motivation to campaign for him, who must be re-mobilised in a grassroots movement for genuine change.

Such people, if they do not become disenchanted by the two terms in office his administration is likely to get, must seek to replace the vulture capitalism and military class structures of the United States with a humane, just, and egalitarian society based on an extensive economic redistribution of wealth. By no means will this movement and struggle occur overnight. But before it can materialise, there needs to be a major shift in the mindset, values and interests of the American people.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Dr Ama Biney is a pan-Africanist and scholar–activist who lives in the United Kingdom.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] See New African, November 2008 edition.
[2] Time Magazine, ‘Obama’s Latin America policy looks like Bush’s’ by Tim Padgett, 3 December 2009.
[3] New York Times, November 19 2009.
[4] B. Jacobson, ‘Obama received $20 million from health care industry in 2008 campaign’ in Common Dreams, January 12 2010.
[5] Washington Post, 9 March 2008.
[6] C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, published by Verso, 2004, p. 151.
[7] ‘An American World of War’ by T. Engelhardt & N. Turse, in TomDispatch.com, Janary 4 2010.
[8] ‘US, NATO Expand Afghan War to Horn of Africa & Indian Ocean’, Global Research E-Newsletter, 9 January 2010.
[9] M. K. Bhadrakumar, ‘Obama’s Yemeni odyssey targets China’, Asian Times Online, 8 January 2010.
[10] ‘The Nigerian bomber & the Obama administration’ in Pambazuka 7 January 2010, Issue 464.
[11] M. K. Bhadrakumar, ‘Obama’s Yemeni odyssey targets China’, Asian Times Online, 8 January 2010. See also, F. William Engdahl, ‘The Yemen Hidden Agenda: Behind the Al-Qaeda Scenarios, A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint’ in Global Research E-Newsletter, 8 January 2010.
[12] New York Times 1 August, 2009.
[13] H. Giroux cited in Barack Obama & the Future of American Politics by P. Street, Paradigm publishers, 2009. p. 100.
[14] T. Wise, Between Barack & A Hard Place: Racism & White Denial in the Age of Obama, City Light Books, 2009.
[15] M. Lamont Hill, ‘Not my Brand of Hope’, CounterPunch, February 11 2008.
[16] E. O. Hutchinson ‘Obama Again Reminds He’s not Black President Obama’ December 9, 2009.
[17] E. O. Hutchinson ‘Something Special for Everyone from Obama, But not for Blacks’, December 22, 2009.
[18] K. A. Gray, ‘Obama and Black America’, CounterPunch, December 9, 2009.
[19] Malcolm X, Message to the Grassroots, 1964.
[20] William Blum, Anti-Empire Report, April 4 2009.
[21] T. Wise , Between Barack & A Hard Place: Racism & White Denial in the Age of Obama, City Light Books, 2009, p. 113.