Beware Of Obama's Groundhog Day
Dec 12, 2008 By *John Pilger*
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One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill
Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he
deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same
circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope
desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this
a parable for the age of Obama?
Having campaigned with "Change you can believe in", President-elect Barack
Obama has named his A-team. They include Hillary Clinton, who voted to
attack Iraq without reading the intelligence assessment and has since
threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran on behalf of a foreign power,
Israel. During his primary campaign, Obama referred repeatedly to Clinton's
lies about her political record. When he appointed her secretary of state,
he called her "my dear friend".
Obama's slogan is now "continuity" . His secretary of defence will be Robert
Gates, who serves the lawless, blood-soaked Bush regime as secretary of
defence, which means secretary of war (America last had to defend itself
when the British invaded in 1812). Gates wants no date set for an Iraq
withdrawal and "well north of 20,000" troops to be sent to Afghanistan. He
also wants America to build a completely new nuclear arsenal, including
"tactical" nuclear weapons that blur the distinction with conventional
weapons.
Another product of "continuity" is Obama's first choice for CIA chief, John
Brennan, who shares responsibility for the systematic kidnapping and
torturing of people, known as "extraordinary rendition". Obama has assigned
Madeleine Albright to report on how to "strengthen US leadership in
responding to genocide". Albright, as secretary of state, was largely
responsible for the siege of Iraq in the 1990s, described by the UN's Denis
Halliday as genocide.
There is more continuity in Obama's appointment of officials who will deal
with the economic piracy that brought down Wall Street and impoverished
millions. As in Bill Murray's nightmare, they are the same officials who
caused it. For example, Lawrence Summers will run the National Economic
Council. As treasury secretary, according to the New York Times, he
"championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the... instruments - aka
toxic assets - that have spread financial losses [and] refused to heed
critics who warned of dangers to come".
There is logic here. Contrary to myth, Obama's campaign was funded largely
by rapacious capital, such as Citigroup and others responsible for the
sub-prime mortgage scandal, whose victims were mostly African Americans and
other poor people.
Is this a grand betrayal? Obama has never hidden his record as a man of a
system described by Martin Luther King as "the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today". Obama's dalliance as a soft critic of the disaster in
Iraq was in line with most Establishment opinion that it was "dumb". His
fans include the war criminals Tony Blair, who has "hailed" his
appointments, and Henry Kissinger, who describes the appointment of Hillary
Clinton as "outstanding" . One of John McCain's principal advisers, Max
Boot, who is on the Republican Party's far right, said: "I am "gobsmacked by
these appointments. [They] could just as easily have come from a President
McCain."
Obama's victory is historic, not only because he will be the first black
president, but because he tapped in to a great popular movement among
America's minorities and the young outside the Democratic Party. In 2006
Latinos, the country's largest minority, took America by surprise when they
poured into the cities to protest against George W Bush's draconian
immigration laws. They chanted: "Si, se puede!" ("Yes we can!"), a slogan
Obama later claimed as his own. His secretary for homeland security is Janet
Napolitano who, as governor of Arizona, made her name by stoking hostility
against Latino immigrants. She has militarised her state's border with
Mexico and supported the building of a hideous wall, similar to the one
dividing occupied Palestine.
On election eve, reported Gallup, most Obama supporters were "engaged" but
"deeply pessimistic about the country's future direction". My guess is that
many people knew what was coming, but hoped for the best. In exploiting this
hope, Obama has all but neutered the anti-war movement that is historically
allied to the Democrats. After all, who can argue with the symbol of the
first black president in this country of slavery, regardless of whether he
is a warmonger? As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Obama is a "brand" like
none other, having won the highest advertising campaign accolade and
attracted unprecedented sums of money. The brand will sell for a while. He
will close Guantanamo Bay, whose inmates represent less than one per cent of
America's 27,000 "ghost prisoners". He will continue to make stirring,
platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that
President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that
transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality
intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: "They have nowhere else to
go."
Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars
and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose
enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to
power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of
"continuity" ? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have
been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall
Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have
begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day,
can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and
the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama
should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.
--
Maya S.
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