Obama incompetence

After Bill Clinton assumed office in January 1993, with promises of “putting people first,” he quickly demoted “the people,” putting his most intense political effort into pushing NAFTA, reducing the budget deficit, “reforming” welfare, bailing out investors in Mexican bonds, toughening crime and terror legislation (and filling the priso
ns), protecting the military budget following the death of the Soviet Union, and warring against Yugoslavia. He failed to improve the medical care system, but he did finish the deregulation of finance and ending of Glass-Steagall, in this and other ways contributing to the late 1990s stock market bubble. His failures to perform for the people helped bring about the 1994 Gingrich-Republican electoral victory, and his overall performance fed well into the Bush victory and years of accelerated class and external warfare.

The Obama performance confirms that this pattern of Democratic inability to serve popular interests, followed by Democratic political loss, and then further moves to the right, is now built-in to the system. This results in large measure from the steady increase in inequality and business-finance-elite power, the concomitant decline of organized labor, and the absence of any other focal points of power for ordinary citizens. This is reflected in the political system where money rules and candidates to be effective must be able to raise lots of it. There is a de facto money primary in which serious candidates must solicit big money and in the process are vetted by that money. Candidates outside the two party system, even with the prestige of a Ralph Nader, do not even enter the money primary and cannot compete in the U.S. political system. The packing of the Supreme Court with rightwingers, with Democratic help, has helped along this plutocratization, process, recently culminating in Citizens United vs. FEC, which should make corporate domination of politics even more complete.

The now non-serious candidates might compete if there were a democratic mass media that would make candidates newsworthy in accord with their real qualifications for office and the extent to which their programs were rational and in accord with public interests, needs and priorities. But this is not the case. The mass media in the United States have become more centralized, more commercialized, more ad-hungry and ad-intensive, and more closely integrated into the corporate-dominated political economy. The overtly rightwing component of the media, led by Fox, has become larger, more aggressive, and able to set the tone and keep the “liberal media” in line. None of them like “populism” or will challenge the military-industrial complex’s (MIC’s) growth and command over resources and the associated “power projection” of the imperial state. It has been noted that whenever the Democrats suffer political setbacks the mainstream media response is that they must move rightward, away from leftist redistributional tendencies and weakness on foreign policy. A George W. Bush in office faces no such obstructions as he redistributes income and wealth upwards and advances the MIC command over resources and projection of power; his deficits are treated lightly.

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Last Edited by Account Deleted by User on 09/29/2011 04:31 PM