Way to go, Obama

by Rajpal Abeynayake

(November 10, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Obama being shellacked in the US mid term election - now, it must have some relevance for the way in which politics is conducted anywhere in the world, including in Sri Lanka. Could Obama turnaround the US economy, which was facing the worst crisis since the depression, in all of two years?

Not likely. But yet his Democrats suffered one of the worst mid-term election defeats since the 1930s.

Even so, Obama is now almost guaranteed to win the presidential election in 2012. He is a decent man they say, and with the newly elected House Republicans bound to mess up in the intervening two years, Obama’s fundamental decency would probably see him through the worst of times.

Or so the pundits say. This columnist begs to differ. No doubt Obama would probably win in 2012. But, how about the decency question? Is Obama saintly, and should we see him with an imagined halo around his head?


Personally decent

Obama is personally decent, but in this writer’ thinking that is different from saying that he is policy-decent. In political craft Obama is genteel and inoffensive to the point of people having to wonder whether he is in fact human. But by way of domestic policy he has pandered to the interests of the players on Wall Street, and not considered the possibility of affecting economic change by putting money directly n the hands of the people as was successfully done in Australia, for instance.

By way of foreign policy, there is the interminable Obama war in Afghanistan, mediated by the indefensible drone strikes on so-called terrorist targets in Pakistan which have caused untold suffering in terms of civilian casualties.

But this combination of being a decent soul while doing the bidding of the obnoxious system would probably guarantee Obama a second term in 2012. You could say he knows on which side his bread is buttered, unlike the relatively fundamentally decent Jimmy Carter for instance who to a great extent attempted to buck the system and work against the interests of the big players and the lobbyists who essentially pull the levers of the US political machine, and paid for it.

Obama is so cozily in cahoots with big business and the shadow political players that run the country, that he still would probably win in 2012 despite the fact that he is not quite the consummate politician that Bill Clinton is for instance.

Obama is throwing more money at the economy, an estimated 6 billion more in the near future it is said, when it is well established by now that throwing good money after bad didn’t engineer economic recoveries anywhere.

His first stimulus package was probably inevitable, but there too, having gifted impossibly large sums of money to the so-called too big to fail banks at the expense of the long-suffering middle-class to whom he could have offered direct financial benefits to trigger growth, Obama did only the second-best thing.
When it is now time to balance the budget and affect deep cuts that would go some distance in achieving that objective, Obama is relying on the tried and failed formula of throwing money at the system.

No jobs would be created substantially as a result of this, at least not the amount of jobs that could ease the current levels of high unemployment.

But yet, though Obama may do the wrong thing or the second best thing, that wouldn’t matter in the end as he is anyway not about to antagonize the big players on Wall Street and the powerful lobbyists who hold the key to his re-election two years from now.


American economy

While that issue is therefore out of the way, it is more pertinent to consider what Obama is doing to the American economy which we are told, would have a long-term effect on our economies as well. About that second part (will his economics affect us?), the assessment is at best a Yes and a No.

China’s Hu Jintao was officially capped most powerful man on earth in the Forbes power-list this week. Obama’s role, as this columnist mused once, is to prepare America for the inevitable coming role as the world’s second big power next to China. The next thing may be the replacement of the dollar by the Chinese Renminbi as the world reserve currency though that may not happen during Obama’s tenure, this or the next.

Some say Obama is more left of centre but that is ludicrous as he is neither fish nor fowl and probably stands for an amalgam of policy dictated by the near neo-cons in his cabinet — who in turn take their cue from Wall Street — and perhaps some other hard-core Democratic party policy wonks who are devoted Keynesians.

But since the worst of the US recession seems to be over and the depression avoided, Obama’s task is to deliver on the next cycle in the interminable cyclic flux that determines the fortunes of modern affluent economies.

But Obama is not delivering on that cycle perhaps for fear of alienating his core constituency with more threats of cuts etc.

But he committed the original sin of not accruing direct financial benefits to consumers as in Australia. Now he doesn’t therefore seem to have much choice but to affect clinical budgetary cuts,that can perhaps have a short-term deleterious effect on say education or infrastructure, but should yet NOT substantially hit middle class John Doe in the solar plexus.

But Obama is not the kind of leader who in fact inspires change, or proactively leads, though we all know he can run the most inspiring campaign. No, he wouldn’t take tough measures.

Either that, or he is so intelligent and essentially uncaring of what really happens to the economy, as he knows he is guaranteed to win in 2012 either way, especially if he pushes the correct buttons of the big power-players in the financial establishment.