On Oct 13, 2014, at 1:21 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 9:13 AM, Charles Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his > eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that > agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained even his much > more modest efforts. It's hard to take such claims seriously. > > Read more: > http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-defense-of-obama-20141008#ixzz3FwK4Za2l > > > > This is such a bullshit straw-man. > > It was not Republican obstructionism that forced Obama to conduct drone > warfare on a massive scale, expand the surveillance state and conduct mass > deportations of undocumented people. It was not because of the Republicans > that he let Wall St off scot free from their crimes in the financial crisis. > > Try defending these instead of constructing silly straw-men. > > Obama did these things ultimately because he wanted to. And that is the > actual reason Obama sucks. Not because he failed to bring socialism.
If Charles has any differences with the DLC or the White House, I’ve yet to see them. There were no political barriers coming out of the 2008 election, none. The Democrats controlled Congress until 2010, and Obama and his advisors could have harnessed the powerful desire for a break with the failed domestic and foreign policies of the Bush administration in the first two years to pass the deeper financial, housing, and social reforms demanded by the crisis had they the political will to do so. What would have been the consequences? Impeachment? A military coup? The rise of the American right? Losing control of the Congress in the midterms and widespread disappointment with the Obama presidency? FWIW, I commented elsewhere on Krugman’s Rolling Stone piece as follows: "Good article which outlines the objective constraints on Obama, not least the racial divide in the country. However, Krugman does not take into account the narrow window of opportunity to pursue deeper reforms within the capitalist system following his sweeping election victory of 2008. The Republicans and Wall Street were back on their heels, and Obama was making inroads among conservative working class voters worried about their homes and jobs who were ready to subordinate their racial fears to their class interests. Instead, he chose establishment-approved officials and policymakers like Geithner and Summers, and allowed the Republicans and Wall Street to lift themselves off of the canvas. The result was the rise of the Tea Party, built on those working class and petty-bourgeois voters whose support might have been consolidated had Obama, following FDR, continued to blame the malefactors of great wealth rather than bend over backwards in a futile quest to reach across the aisle to the Republicans and the Wall Street interests they represented.” _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
