Political news travels slowly, and in my casual observation
progressive Europeans have held on to the myth of Barack Obama as a good
man much longer than most progressive Americans did. How could a young
black American from Chicago and Harvard be otherwise?
Over here
reality has been evident for a while, thanks to the President's pattern
of giving way to banks, lobbies, Republicans and right-wing extremists.
Whether your prime interest is housing, health care, peace, justice,
jobs or climate change, if you are an activist in America you have known
for a long time that this President is not your friend.
Still,
even on these shores disillusion often took a mildly forgiving form. The
President was a "disappointment." He was weak. He had "bad negotiating
skills." He had a tendency to "deal with hostage-takers," to
"surrender." All of this fed the image of a man with a noble spirit, a
good heart, the best intentions, but trapped by limited ability and the
relentless and reckless determination of his foes.
Obama is no progressive
The debt deal will make things
clear. The President is not a progressive -- he is not what Americans
still call a "liberal." He is a willful player in an epic drama of
faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to
neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot
rightward and deliver a conservative result.
What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his
sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and
a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society
insurance programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of
course, no tax increases at all.
To see the arc of political
strategy, recall that from the beginning Obama handed economic policy to
retainers recruited from the stables of Robert Rubin. From the
beginning, he touted "fiscal responsibility" and played up the
(economically non-existent) "problem" of the budget deficit. From the
beginning his team sabotaged economic recovery with optimistic forecasts
and inadequate programs -- in the clear interest of protecting the
banking system from reform.
As the presidency moved along, false claims of economic recovery supported a transition toward obsessive focus on debt and deficits, validated by a federal commission and constantly reinforced by a Washington propaganda chorus funded by Peter G. Peterson, for many decades a billionaire campaigner against Social Security and Medicare.
Debt ceiling a pseudo-crisis
But it wasn't enough. Even
with the Republican victory in the 2010 mid-terms there wasn't the
political will-power simply to pass the cuts and make them stick. For
it wasn't sufficient just to pass them: politicians need cover when they
do ugly things.
They need an excuse, something that will offer protection from the
anger of the victims, or more precisely from other politicians who might
exploit that anger. In the well-practiced manner of organized crime,
blood needs to be on everyone's hands. That way, no one can defect; no
one can turn states' evidence and safely get away with blaming the
others.
The debt-ceiling pseudo-crisis created the necessary panic. The
debt ceiling is a unique American law -- no other country has one -- a
little travesty of democratic bad faith. It was first enacted in 1917,
to allow congressmen to hoodwink the rubes back home even as they voted
for a large issue of Liberty Bonds to finance the Great War.
It has been a vehicle for posturing ever since -- but that it would be raised has never been in doubt. (Even this time the markets never showed the slightest worry.) It became a vehicle for blackmail because it was convenient. It was convenient, because Obama failed to insist it be his price for agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts last December. Whether that omission was accidental or calculated at the time is, for the moment, unknown.
Obama's neglected options
Even as "crisis" loomed, the
President had powerful options. The Constitution of the United States
flatly forbids default on debt or any other public obligation. The
President could have simply asserted his duty and refused to negotiate.
Even more cleverly, he could -- under a quirk of existing law -- have turned drama to farce by minting a large platinum coin -- say for a trillion dollars -- and using that to buy back public debt held by the Federal Reserve, so that the debt ceiling would never have been breached. (There would have been an uproar but no other economic effect.)
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