Beware Of Obama's Groundhog Day
By John Pilger
December 12, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- - 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.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21441.htm
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