GUI ROCHAT: Catch as catch can

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The salesmanship of hope we can trust in and change we can hope for, has resulted in a deep distrust of the executive amongst the public, so Obama is being hoisted by his own petard. Like Tony Blair he has the gift of the charming gab and in fact he is surely intellectually Blair’s superior, but both are basically demagogues.

BY GUI ROCHAT  [print_link]

Faced with a severe decline in national economic power, the Obama administration has ratcheted up its aggression in word and deed, thus reinforcing the known fact that every Democrat rule becomes a war regime. First of all he plays Russian roulette with China which will be a formidable foe to have because it cannot be intimidated nor ignored. The large weapons sale to Taiwan and the reception of the Dalai Lama which are deliberately provocative political gestures and the constant badgering to lower the barriers of China’s trade policies, are skirmishes that may result in great problems for Washington.

The threat to China of American aggression in the Middle-East is strengthened by this war-like attitude in the hope that it will deter China sufficiently to allow free aggression against Iran. It is of no consequence if Iran does have or does not have plans to develop nuclear armaments, as long as it does not threaten the American hegemony in that area. Pakistan which does not have the natural energy resources of Iran, but does possess nuclear armaments, is mostly left alone.

The conquest of Iran would be a direct threat to China and Russia, though Russia is less on Washington’s mind because Russians are Slavic Caucasians and assumed safely Western in character and response and contained by N.A.T.O. What is aimed at is a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around China, from the still occupying forces in Japan to a nuclear India, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. Like Clinton in his hour of need to cover up his escapades in the oval office by suddenly ordering another air attack on Afghanistan in 1998, so Obama now has to deflect attention from his failing internal policies to much harder to challenge external policies, thereby hoping to show himself to be an effectual leader.

The problem here is that the personal is the political, i.e. the character and behavior of a president influence his decisions in foreign policies. If America were truly a functioning democracy, there would be many ways to curb this unreliable factor by leaving every declaration of war in the hands of congress, fallible though that institution may be. That option is unfortunately no longer available. The deliberate flow of political power to the executive has disturbed the balance of powers as envisioned by the Constitution, because a single man with his cabinet are much easier to control by the elite than two bodies of legislative discordants.

Though the whole congress and the judicial as everyone knows but is hopeful to ignore is basically bought and paid for by huge private interests, there are still loopholes for protests and legal actions by private citizens. Despite the newly legalized freedom for corporations to influence the elections and there is little Obama can or will do about it, the public is less obfuscated than one would deduce from the media. The nonsense of promises for control over the banking system, the pious concern for helping citizens with the mortgage disaster and the insincere concern over job losses which are a result of outsourcing labor to the poorer countries, are well understood by the public and this is reflected in the polls, though these are as always mostly unreliable.

The salesmanship of hope we can trust in and change we can hope for, has resulted in a deep distrust of the executive amongst the public, so Obama is being hoisted by his own petard. Like Tony Blair he has the gift of the charming gab and in fact he is surely intellectually Blair’s superior, but both are basically demagogues. And with those powers invested in the presidency that is a truly dangerous situation as was experienced with former holders of that office.

Should one then work within the present institutions to dislodge them from corruption or refuse to be caught in the fictional web of voting rights remains the basic public option. While the walls are going up for protecting the government from the population, there are ways to bypass these barriers that are being erected to ensure the empowerment of state totalitarianism. One of the most effective would be of course not to file federal income taxes, but that requires a modicum of courage that most people miss because of potentially severe consequences and the power of retaliation from the federal government is immense and rightfully to be feared.

The institutional corruption in Washington is certainly nothing new but it appears now that Obama has helped lift the ideological blinders from American eyes, simply by promising the sky after the generally despised Bush and then spectacularly following policies that are directly in contradiction of what he promised in his campaign speeches. No president ever has so openly shown his true colors, something he is trying at present to hide again by his belligerence at populist town hall meetings. Whatever has caused the reversal of Democrat fortunes in states such as Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and Massachusetts, it is the evidence of a vote of no confidence in the fictional hope that people were asked to believe in. Rather have an enemy you know than a hidden enemy that you did not know.

The American political scene is very much at a crossroads right now, so will it descend into a full containment of political life by corporate interests led by their representatives in congress and a chained executive, or will the public react by sowing dissension and supporting such as the ubiquitous but badly informed Sarah Palin with her pseudo-populist tea bag marchers. The trend in American politics has been for a long time towards the conservative side, to what the French call a ‘rappel a l’ordre’ (a call to order, i.e. a return to the ‘status quo ante’) and that is not excluded at all, because it is a return to familiar ground, how odious that may happen to be. The scattered left will have then no appeal whatsoever, nor will a tightened and impoverished political landscape allow for divergent ideas. This is a reality to be faced and nothing less than principled actions by progressives can rescue common sense from the present confusion and salvage some individual rights from the fast spreading corporatist state control.

Based in New York City, GUI ROCHAT is a senior editor with The Greanville Post.