Maybe Barack Obama will “change” things

…. by doing something to stop the export of American jobs, by cleaning up the mess Bush left in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, by fighting wars to win VICTORY instead of to make your cronies rich …. and by giving hillbillies and all impoverished Americans the right to be heard everywhere and on all subjects instead of on the very narrow range of secondary issues they are ordered to talk about - abortion, guns, creationism, The Flag, homosexuals [that’s the full list of permitted subjects, isn’t it?].

If Barack Obama does become the Democrats candidate, it will be interesting to see how many out-and-out Republicans in absolutely “redneck” constituencies will vote for him solely because of the report of his private remarks on bitterness.

It’ called democracy.

“… getting out on the streets and organising a campaign strong enough to force the US ruling class to bring the troops back from Iraq!?”

The elected Government in Iraq hasn’t asked the CoW troops to leave. In fact it periodically says it wants them to stay. Until the Iraqi Government say go leaving isn’t an option- or at least not an ethical one.

As to Obama’s contentious statement, I only wish he’d make more such refreshingly candid comments. I doubt he’ll lose any votes- nephew Cletus and uncle Earl were never gonna vote for him anyway.

Obama speaks to American voters as if they are adults. I think enough of them are listening to elect him.

The most significant part of Obi’s reply to Senator Duck-Clinton came near the end of his address in Steelton PA. He did it without auto-cues. He swatted her condescending “Annie Oakley” attack on him as an “out of touch elitist” while simultaneously barrelling Johnny Bomb-Bomb.
Obi tagged the pair of them as Beltway-beholden whores, but he did it nice.

“……this campaign we said we were gonna do something different….
we said we weren’t gonna take Pac. money
we weren’t gonna take money from federal lobbyists
because I wanted to be accountable to you.
And there were all kinds of people who said, well….
he’s not going to be able to compete against all those big money interests in
Washington.
Well you know what they didn’t understand, they didn’t understand you.
They didn’t understand that you were tired of politics that was all about tearing
each other down, you wanted politics that was all about lifting the country up,
They didn’t understand, they didn’t UNDERSTAND that you were gonna finance my campaign with 25 dollar contributions and fifty dollar contributions.
They didn’t understand that you were gonna help to build the best political organisation out there, that could compete with anybody no matter how many big endorsements the other candidates got, we had the people on our side…….
And so I’m here to say to you, all of my friends in Layton
…that…you have funded my campaign…..
I am accountable to you……those lobbyists, they have not funded my campaign,
they will not run our White House and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I’m president of the United States of America.
[link]

Clinton is some 135-140 delegates behind and unless something majorly dramatic happens, it’s only a matter of time before she folds her hand. Of the comments so far, Kevin Rennie at 11 rings truest imo.

[The things that the Obama and Clinton camps have been saying about each other are trivial compared with Bush and McCain in 2000. Once the Democratic convention is over, it will be McCain who feels the heat, especially on economic issues. Years of nasty leadership fights and personal attacks didn’t harm Kevin Rudd or the ALP last year.]

McCain is also deeply stepped in the blood of the Iraq fiasco. When the Dem dust clears after Obi has seen HRC off, he will make political pink mist of McCain despite the histrionics of the MSM. Just as the majority of the electorate were switched off to all things Johnny before Tin-Tin’s ascendancy, so too are a majority of US voters swithched off to all things GOPper.

Street politics put it on the agenda for the Democrats…who eventually got the hint…

No. In 1968 the Democrats, by choosing Hubert Humphrey in 1968, turned their back on the anti-war movement.

Congressional Democrats played very little part in getting the US out of Vietnam. “Vietnamization” was Nixon’s idea. The anti-war movement helped to persuade Nixon to seek a way out of the war, and the anti-war movement radicalised significantly after the invasion of Cambodia.

But Nixon, who won a landslide in 1972, could afford to ignore the Democrats.

Up to 1972, Nixon’s foreign policy did Nixon no electoral harm at all. Street politics enabled Nixon to appeal to and to win the “Silent Majority”.

But on the contrary, since 2003, Bush’s foreign policy, and especially Iraq, has helped to sink the GOP.

This success has been achieved without street politics. And perhaps it can be argued that it has been achieved because there have been fewer manifestations of street politics.

(However, Obama’s recent gaffe has threatened to galvanise the GOP-leaning silent majority into action again.)

And it should not be forgotten that the counter-culture of the 60s-70s had bigger fish to fry. As Jerry Rubin said, “If Vietnam didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.” The anti-war movement was perceived by many as a means to a bigger end — the transformation of American culture. At present in the US there is no serious left counter-culture.

As a result it is more permissable to be anti-war in 2008 because that stance doesn’t imply a general repudiation of American mainstream values.

Reminds me of the Save Our Sons movement…five women jailed in 1970 for handing out anti-conscription leaflets in Melbourne.

Of course its not the same as last time but can you honestly tell me that, with Clinton’s attitude to Afghanistan and McCain’s to Iraq and Iran, that the current conflict is not going to spread..?

Street politics put it on the agenda for the Democrats…who eventually got the hint…

“The anti-war movement knows what’s possible in 2008 USA and they are achieving their goals — slowly.”

No, they ain’t achieving shit while they shackle their car to the Democrat jackass. And having a Jackass rather than an Elephant in power ain’t going to help them either.

Whether you believe that Obama would do anything differently from the free trade orthodoxy

>
Well he could do something very different from the ‘free trade orthodoxy’. He could introduce free trade. .
>
Not that that’d make him very popular with the spectre towns of middle America.

Street politics erupted in the states only after it became clear that electoral poltics would not end Vietnam.

Certainly, the Dems have been pusilaminous over Iraq, but the polls are running heavily against continued engagement in Iraq, unlike the polls re Nam until quite late in the piece.

Everyone is just sitting pat counting the days until Bush shambles out of the WH.

Certainly that means that the last American to die in Iraq will die about May 2009 rather than Sept 2008.

But no mainstream Dem wants to upset the apple-cart with a Chicago 1968-style spectacle in this election year.

The anti-war movement knows what’s possible in 2008 USA and they are achieving their goals — slowly.

cafehayek and engram

Sure the number of people in manufacturing has declined a lot but that has been going on for a long time and is a good thing (higher productivity). Also, I believe that the level of activity has dipped slightly very recently ( the figures in the links only go to 2005) but the lower dollar will turn that around pretty quickly.

Also interesting is that the US manufacturing economy is 3 times that of the Chinese.

When war fatally weakens the prestige and power of the ruling elite, the above might be proximatley possible. We are a long way from that in relation to the war on Iraq.

The truth is that you are invoking a formulaic account of a formula developed by people who retrospectively ‘imagine’ the social effect of total war.

The war on Iraq will go on and on. There is no ‘draft’ (conscription), the only people who are dying are either poor, (blacks, whites and hispanics in the peculiar racial and ethnic taxonomy reserved for the US working class), from rural US (meaning poor-again) or are contractors, meaning poor but well remunerated mercenaries from all over the empire. While the absolute numbers of US people killed in the war are of course, terrible, it is not total war of the type that your political program envisages, and the possibility of strikes and civil disobedience as a response to its continuing prosecution, are zero.

The US working class will be flat out achieving any social protection whatsoever against the deluge created by financial crisis, even universal health care has proved beyond the politcal capaity of the left and progressive wings of the US politcal class to deliver, and US left and progressive organisers and activists will be flat out deflecting a McCain election victory next year. When things get worse, the tendency is for things to get much worse, before they ever get better.

That’s right, that’s because rallies aren’t enough. They need to be built on and there needs to be an escalation,…sit-ins, occupations, blockades and most importantly, the unions or the rank-and-file need to be brought on board as strike action can be decisive in defeating the war drive.

But have that perspective in the first place you need the politics that looks outside Parliament/Congress to the streets and workplaces where our power really lies.

I’ve probably been caught by a troll here but … this is total crap as the “Left” HAS largely been the force that HAS organised the rallies to bring the troops home.
The problem is Chav that even 500K people marching in Sydney weren’t “strong enough” to change the policy of our recently testimonialled ex-PM.

With Obama’s secret speech to the San Francisco Central Committee still playing across the airwaves, the curious disconnect between the challenges facing American society and the problems many people regard as uppermost appears to be widening. A USA Today poll, part of which was taken after Obama’s remarks became public, has the man from Illinois trailing Hillary by twenty points in Pennsylvania and though, all things being equal, the poll is about as accurate as chucking the I Ching, it’s more than likely that later, better ones will confirm a precipitous falling-off in Bama’s recent rise in downhome support.

Nor could you really blame people for turning away from someone willing to portray them as a symptom, people to be talked about, rather than to, on their own terms. Even if people in these zones know some people of whom a sudden lurch into religion or flag-waving can be attributed to losing their jobs and much more, who are they going to feel more solidarity for, their kith and kin, or the smartarse kid pointing out the fix they’re all in? Obama is smart enough to know it, too. He’s probably kicking himself from Philly to Pittsburgh over what might be another nail in the pine box not of his nomination, but of his presidential run.

Yet if you were one of the benighted flyover-zone Americans in question, the sensible thing would be to try and get beyond your irritation with the candidate’s boneheaded willingness to reveal his membership of the elite, and evaluate the policies, because let’s face it, things are melting down pretty much everywhere, pretty fast. With news that Wachovia, the country’s fourth-largest bank, is posting a $7bn loss due to sub-prime and other liabilities, and the housing price crash going global very quickly – and thus boomeranging back redoubled into the States – the actual conditions of life have a way of butting back into the endless process of identity politics positioning.

Hillary for one has taken advantage of that going way out into left-populist territory, promising the abrupt cancellation of NAFTA, and a halt on further free-trade agreements. Given that NAFTA was one of Bill’s proudest achievements, you’d think that might make for a few tense moments, if they weren’t a couple essentially raised by wolves, lacking memory or conscience or an awareness pretty much anything apart from the next throat. She’s also sheeting home the blame to China, promising bans on Chinese imports, if they don’t adjust their currency to a level more favourable to US exporters.

Come the slightly-less-unlikely-than-it-was possibility that she become president, would she follow through with that? There’s every indication that Hillary is economically further to the (social-democratic) left than Obama, whose San Francisco remarks included the notion that mid-America’s anti-trade feeling was yet another symptom – rather than a reasonably accurate assessment of the source of their predicament. But so, when he got in, was Bill, and he was pretty quickly talked around to the full global neo-liberalism thang.

What might make a different policy more likely, from either Clinton or Obama, or even McCain, is both the increasingly dire position the West finds itself in in the current global economic set-up, its apparent partial collapse notwithstanding. It may well be said that China is breaking the “rules” by adjusting its currency settings – but the whole global set up is so shonkily arranged for the benefit of the developed world that China pretty much has the right to do whatever it likes to match the protectionism and captive markets with which the West rose to economic prominence.

The myth of free trade has been debunked often, but the most recent – Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade – is one of the best, showing how partial and selective it was. The myth of it is currently being sold as a way of doing what protectionism actually achieved – maintaining an advantage of the West against the rest. The ideological nature of economics teaching in the West means that many of its economists and business leaders actually believe this, while the Chinese and Indians got a rather better education in Western intentions.

An honest defence of protectionism would simply observe that the US cannot compete with Indian or Chinese wages, and that the higher prices and possible inefficiencies of protected industries are a price paid collectively for protecting jobs and sharing the pain – one way or another, the standard of living is going to go down. This can’t be said, so a moral argument has to be made – those damn Chinese, looking after their own national interests, by exploiting our limitless desire for cheap crap.

The consequences for the US of reintroducing a measure of protection are pretty serious – having tried it with steel when the ink was still wet on the WTO treaty, it knows there is only so much it can get away with. In particular, the greater unity of Europe in the wake of the Lisbon treaty would put it in a good position to join with the East in turning the full force of WTO regulations on the US, prompting a crisis in the barely decade-old arrangement — and a clue to why it was never established in the 40s, as the Bretton Woods conference intended.

McCain it might be said, is more honest about these things — or was, briefly, arguing against the Bear Stearns bailout, before his advisors suggested that applying the doctrine of competition to … the market sounded callous. Maybe it was, but it was also a reasonable objection to the transfer of billions of dollars of public money to remove from risk the risk element.

The fact that there is no relevant moral position on something like the Bear-Stearns bailout — simply a preference for the manner of being ripped off – is an indication of the deeper-set problems which the current economic impasse is making visible.

But whatever’s going to come, if it’s going to be of any assistance to Hillary, it better come quick. Pennsylvania is next week. She’ll win it, and probably Indiana after that, while Bama will take North Carolina and Oregon and that is about it in terms of big delegate hauls. A couple of real big wins by Hillary, in parallel with a series of economic disasters, would further dispose enough superdelegates to weather the range of Obama nation, and put a heartland candidate in. You know, the one who’s worth $55 million.

But I don’t think I’m making a circular argument. And I think you’re overestimating the initial size and impetus of the anti-war movement. I also think - from my pov anyway - the movement for economic justice is a higher priority. It’s not difficult to make links between social justice and the military state.

Note, I’m not having a go at you for your article and you raise some interesting points…its just the way the discussion spins off into ‘Capital Hill land’ that is such a frustrating smokescreen.

There never was much of an anti-war mobilisation in the States. What there was was clobbered by being colonised by the energy sink of the “netroots” and the Democratic leadership. Frankly, there’s bugger all chance of anything people actually do having any impact on getting troops out of Iraq. It’ll happen in some nutsoid and no doubt counterproductive way because the military themselves want out. Unless McCain gets in, which is looking more and more likely, when the consequences might well be as amused spells out.

There’s a lot more chance to change teeny weensy little things to do with how people live - but as I’m saying, you underestimate the degree to which anything whatever to do with workers’ rights and people’s living standards is verboten territory in US politics. So - go with Obama by all means - but keep an eye on the prize. The real prize.

Honestly, until the Left gets some decent politics and stops engaging in this Labour of Sisyphus,

Well the task of mobilising and organising sufficient numbers of people to withstand and push back against the ruling class mobilisation of the last 25 years in the US, is the definition of ‘decent politics’ I would have thought.

That is the difference between Obama and Clinton, not so much the policies. If anyone here thinks the US ruling class gains of the last 25 years are going to be undone with some policy wonking, and a Congress majority who will just pass the necessary legislation for universal health care for example, you are very mistaken.

The issue is not so much which policies will be adopted, so much as how big and how long will the necessary mobilisation have to be, in order to make even the slightest changes to the current dispensation in the US.

The US ruling class is not used to having to negotiate, and it is going to be an absolutley terrible decade for working people in the US, whether they are paid a salary or a wage, and whether they are working as citizens, or as indentured labour in the degraded service sectors of the US economy. The cry for ‘decent politics’ leaves me cold I am afraid. There are plenty of people who have decent politics. It’s just that they don’t want to do the necessarily difficult work of organising people. La Clinton doesn’t want to organise anyone, because that would disombobulate her financial supporters. Obama needs to mobilise, because he doesn’t have 25 years of favours owing him. That is the difference between them, and it is the difference that might mean a struggle over change, or simply business as usual. if McCain is elected President, it will be pave the way, imo, for the complete destruction of the Republican Party. If he wins, it will also presage an hisotric realigment which will also effct the Democratic party. I hope he doesn’t, because it is absolutely untrue that the worse things get, the better. The worse things get, the worse they get.

Precious few of the liberties and gains in standard of living have been won by Democrats in Washington…in most cases they have had to have been dragged kicking a screaming to implement real change and when real change does threaten they launch into desperate attempts to head off mass movements that threaten to get ‘out of control’ and upset the applecart.

Honestly, until the Left gets some decent politics and stops engaging in this Labour of Sisyphus, things will at best stay the same, but most likely get worse…

There are limits to this, though, related to infrastructure and the supply of labour. Which adds to the inflation pressures Rob is talking about. The coming (or already present) US recession looks to be - for a range of other reasons too - one where consumer spending gets hit very hard.