Most Americans breathed a collective sigh of relief when the red baiting McCarthyite anti-American Christian fascist ticket of McCain/Palin was defeated by a new domestic phenomenon known as Obama-mania (a global phenomena really based upon the vague and poorly defined principal of Hope-nosis that also ran wild, not only in the U.S. but Europe and Africa and many other places). Probably most of us thought (even those of us who didn’t vote for Obama or get wrapped up in the Obama-mania phenomenon but wanted what’s best for our country), “Hey now it’s time to get some grown-ups working for us in Washington, get some sensible people running things down there in DC.” Little did we know that just days after Obama-mania was only beginning to show the first signs of dissipation, and even before the ink had dried on Obama’s historic presidential election win, the oft-referenced hope and change that the Obamaniacs had believed in (and supported Barack Obama on that basis) would become nothing more than a pleasant memory; a campaign strategy, now having little or no application to the politics and policies that will be implemented, in an attempt to solve the economic and political conundrums, of the day. In other words, we can close the history books on change, for now and in the near and distant future folks!
With nearly all Obama’s post election day appointments he put Clintonites, Rubinistas, corporatists, DLCers, Centrists, hawks, and veterans of Washington politics as usual (leaving even conservatives like Pat Buchanan to wonder why isn’t Barack Obama throwing progressives a bone?) into positions of authority and influence (by the way they were there all the time, but he just made it official). The change that he’d been pedaling on the campaign trail has shaped up to look like neoliberal imperial more of the same. And Obama seems to have a strict “only people who know where the bodies are buried” hiring policy. Perhaps where this kind of ‘change’ (or lack thereof really) is more apparent than any other area that Obama has thus far put his imprint upon, is economics.
We’ve heard a lot of unfounded speculation (what passes for ‘journalism’ in this country) during the campaign season about small time contributors who ostensibly owned (and presumably would be influencing) Barack Obama. However, a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission data, would tell us something markedly different; that only a quarter of the vast number of Obama’s donors fall into the ’small’ category (under $200), which is a lesser percentage than that achieved by the ‘people’s’ candidate (if by people we mean the oil companies, the credit card companies, the financial industry, and the polluting industries) George W. Bush (in 2004). Not only this, but thus far, considering Obama’s economic (and abundance of other inauspicious) appointments it’s clear that not only does Wall Street own Obama, but that this is who Obama will be representing and carrying out business as usual for as ‘our’ 44th president. He won’t be doing business on behalf of everyday people, people like Joe the Plumber, that Obama spoke to and about while on the campaign trail (there aren’t many plumbers that will have Obama’s ear in Washington save perhaps those of the Nixonian variety!).
An article by Larry Kudlow, a conservative CNBC host, writing for the National Review Online (the whole point of the article is to ask, is there a ‘liberal’/conservative consensus on many of today’s most important economic issues?) is instructive. No greater a creature of Wall Street than Kudlow points out that Christina Romer could have easily served as a CEA head in a Republican administration, and furthermore, that Timothy Geithner could just have as easily been John McCain’s Treasury Secretary. Not only this, but Kudlow states that Obama’s economic team is unquestionably right of center (change we can believe in?), ‘market-oriented’ (as opposed to worker/middle class oriented), and also all free traders (we see Barack’s lip service against the excesses of globalization lacks any deep-seated, substantive meaning).
Particularly invigorating for Kudlow is the presence of the anti-tax Romer amongst Obama’s cadre of economic chieftains. Romer, Kudlow believes, will be a strong voice for allowing the Bush tax cuts for the rich to simply expire, rather than moving to take an immediate course of action to repeal them. I suppose progressives can salvage one victory from Larry Kudlow’s article, Kudlow says that proposed massive Democratic initiatives to spend our way out of the current recession, will do nothing to stimulate economic growth. What will work to stimulate growth, in Larry Kudlow’s sage and expert opinion? You guessed it, the same old tired mantra of more tax cuts for the wealthy and big business (which Kudlow opines will “do the trick” to get us out of the current economic situation).
Dear reader, we have established the difference between the right and the center-right (aka the Democratic Party), on economics in this country (at least at the present moment); and it is more trickle down economics (more Reaganomics), or deficit spending to promote policies and projects to spur economic growth. Is this is the ‘change’ that’s been so loudly vaunted from nearly each and every American rooftop? Truthfully no one knows, ’cause we seem to need a microsope to find Barack Obama’s frequently referenced, vaguely (if at all) defined, seemingly Orwellian concept of change. However, I must admit, dear reader, that if this is the change that Obama has so unabashedly and unceasingly given lip service to and told his exuberant followers to believe in, it is without question better than no change whatsoever. Is it something profoundly new and different, however, reader? Substantive change, the kind of change we can believe in? I, for one, certainly am not inclined to think so.
