Howling Protests
Granted, to have taken these actions would have risked a major disruption to the system as it now exists. You would have heard howling from the trading floors of Wall Street to the editorial-page offices of the Washington Post. Obama would have been called an angry black man, an out-of-the-closet socialist. Conservative Democrats and independents might have bolted.
It's also not clear that a more aggressive strategy toward the immediate national problems would have worked. Indeed, such an approach might have made conditions worse.
If the "too-big-to-fail" banks rebelled, the economy might have toppled into a depression for which Obama would have gotten the blame. Powerful institutions, like the Pentagon and the CIA, might have turned their political guns on the new president. The mainstream media would have joined in the uprising against him. His public popularity likely would have sunk even faster than it has.
Plus, the Left is extremely weak in the United States. At times when I've noted the Left's tendency to criticize but not do much, I've been told bluntly by progressives that "there is no American Left." But whose fault is that? And how do people on the Left expect politicians to make these fights without a political movement behind them?
The bottom line is that whether Obama can summon up the nerve to make bold job proposals or not, they won't happen unless the American people can demonstrate that they understand the lessons of the New Deal, that only effective action by a democratized federal government can counter the recklessness of Wall Street and reduce the suffering of the unemployed.
It's hard to understand why supporters of Social Security and Medicare can't be as potent a political force as the Tea Partiers who want to dismantle these government programs. There may be rich right-wingers, like the oilman Koch brothers and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, funding the Tea Party, but there are wealthy progressives, too.
This movement could make the reasonable argument that many of the fortunes of America's super-rich were not simply the result of their own industriousness, but rather their ability to piggyback onto major advancements paid for by the taxpayers, from the Interstate Highway system to miniaturized computers built for the space program, from microbiology to the Internet.
Yet, instead of paying back the country generously for making their fortunes possible, the rich hire lobbyists and accountants to help them avoid reimbursing the taxpayers -- and starving the government so it can't finance other technological breakthroughs that could help future generations of Americans.
If the responsible rich like Warren Buffett really do recognize how much the country has done for them -- and how they should reinvest more of their money in the country -- why can't they build the sort of political/media infrastructure that the greedy rich have? Or why can't middle-income progressives at least do more to support some worthy projects taking on these tasks?
It's not enough simply to criticize President Obama for not making all the right moves. The problem is much bigger than Obama.
The mess in America recalls the famous line in the Pogo comic strip, "we have met the enemy and he is us."
Cross-posted from Consortium News(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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