Tag Archive for 'barack obama'

Obama’s real world economic experiment

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Economics, International, Markets and USA
. 71 Comments

Responding to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachussetts Senate seat to Republican Scott Brown, Barack Obama is set to announce a three year discretionary spending freeze. (Note that military spending is apparently compulsory not discretionary.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.Com thinks that the move is, politically speaking, a “brain freeze”. He also queries “the wisdom of curtailing government spending in the middle of a massive consumption deficit”.

Obama’s move will placate ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, including champion deficit hawk Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose seat is looking shaky. In a broader sense, it’s further evidence of the triumph of politics over economics, albeit in a somewhat different register; a return to a sort of pre-Keynesian mindset, or Maggie Thatcher’s petit bourgeois rhetoric of ‘household budgets’ without the monetarism.

David Dayen:

Obama is basically saying that the stimulus fixed the economy, that there will be no further government support measures and that he’ll govern like a hybrid of John McCain and Herbert Hoover for the rest of his term to curry favor with the deficit maniacs.

Andrew Leonard at How The World Works:

If ever there was a time to pull out the old Karl Marx chestnut, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” that moment is now. Prominent members of Obama’s own administration have warned against repeating the errors of 1937, namely, Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending and balance the budget too quickly, thus strangling a nascent recovery from the Great Depression. But with the U.S. economy far from healthy, the president has decided, once again, to bow to the political winds and make the deficit priority number one.

It’s also the effective decoupling of the US from the G20 stimulus agenda, and further proof that America is mired in the politics of domestic decline. What happens to a globalised economy when the globalisers opt out?

Incidentally, this is additionally the sort of policy u-turn the Coalition in Australia have long been advocating. If further sclerotic growth, or even a double dip recession in America, is the result, it won’t be without its ramifications for the political debate here.

Update: Robert Reich on how Obama’s political panic could ruin the economy.

Update: Michael Lind.

Update: Brad DeLong: This is such a disaster in the making.

Update: Krugman: Obama Liquidates Himself.

Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 15 Comments

A number of US financial blogs are reporting that Ben Bernanke faces a chance of failure to be confirmed by the American Senate for a second term in office.

James Bianco at The Big Picture has all the details, and there’s also coverage at Naked Capitalism.

What’s the big picture here?

On the short term political front, Scott Brown’s win in Massachussetts exemplifies the frustration felt by many with politics as usual. Whether it’s expressed as concern over deficits (and that’s a much more salient touch point with Indendent voters on health care than the rhetoric of the wingnuts), or just as disgust with the jobless recovery’s disjunction with business as usual on Wall Street, there’s no doubt that an election year is starting to focus minds on the politics of financial decision making.

… and that brings us to the bigger picture. Continue reading ‘Bernanke’s confirmation in doubt’

Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat lost: The politics of anti-politics

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Culture, Foreign Elections, Politics and USA
. 88 Comments

News is just coming in that Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts has been lost by the Democrat, Martha Coakley, to the Republicans’ Scott Brown. FiveThirtyEight.Com has the margin at 52-47 and that blog will be well worth watching for analysis and breakdown of the result.

Writing for Crikey today, David Hirst observes:

Luckily for the Republicans, who doubted they had a chance at taking a seat Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years, they nominated a nobody called Scott Brown who drove a truck — a fact the Democrats somehow allowed to become an issue. Naturally Brown, equipped with political advisers as the Republicans smelled not blood but a bloodbath, drove at their behest to Wall Street, where he somehow managed to park.

It wasn’t a huge issue but it played well — the message presumably was that sophisticated people from places such as Boston were not represented by folks who drove trucks. Kennedy sure didn’t drive a truck.

The shell-shocked mainstream media better get used to it, for there are many shocks to come. That the Republicans had the sense to see “truck” and “Wall Street” and bring the two to one was clever indeed.

His analysis suggests that the result is born of the sentiment of a plague on the US political classes, bailing out banks with abandon, but doing nothing perceptible for ‘Main Street’, and the straightened economic circumstances many Americans face after the GFC. He also suggests the Republicans will be emboldened to escalate their anti-Obama rhetoric, but that they themselves have nothing effective to offer; short of pandering to anti-government sentiments deeply embedded in American political culture.

In truth, the US party system is incapable of doing anything other than slightly tacking in the direction of popular sentiment; something confounded by the hyperbolic checks and balances, whose frustration of a majority in the Senate is precisely what made this special election so important.

Previous discussion on LP: Here.

Update: Nate Silver on the swing.

Two strikes against ‘extreme capitalism’

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 23 Comments

As Derek Barry observes in a comprehensive post, the Productivity Commission has weakened its recommendations on corporate governance and remuneration. Business groups were reportedly complaining about ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’. (Intriguingly, those appear to be two of the most common litanies of lamentation from biz lobbies, despite the fact that they’re meant to be intrinsic to the operation of markets.)

Unions aren’t happy. Writing in The Australian today, the CFMEU’s John Sutton sees:

Kevin Rudd’s grand treatise on the failures of capitalism a few months into the global financial crisis ending with a whimper rather than a roar.

Sutton questions whether measures discussed in response to the GFC (over and above questions of executive pay and bonuses) amounted to very much. It’s an eminently reasonable question to pose.

I suspect that the economic situation in Australia has allowed Labor politicians to retreat from their previous rhetoric. In Britain, where things are still much more dire, Gordon Brown’s government has responded with limitations on bankers’ bonuses, in the lead up to this year’s election, which Labour is expected to lose. In the US, Barack Obama has continued with the big bail out of everything Wall Street, handing the Republicans a useful weapon for the 2010 midterms.

It’s an intriguing contrast.

It’s also intriguing to note that discussion of all the ‘toxic debt’ unaccounted for has gone completely missing, unless I’m missing something.

Update: The Tobin Tax and the GFC.

Open Democracy’s retrospective and prospective look at the decade/s

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Climate change, Developing world, Economics, Environment, International, Markets, Politics, Security, Sociology, Terrorism, The Web and War
. 12 Comments

Open Democracy has asked a range of its contributors to answer the following questions:

A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.

After Copenhagen

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Developing world, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, Imperialism, International, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 39 Comments

In the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, we’re starting to see some more thoughtful analyses which go beyond the proximate causes of the imbroglio to gesture to more structural factors. Robert has already cited George Monbiot’s recent blog post.

I’d like to take a look at a couple of other articles. Naomi Klein, writing for The Guardian, argues that Barack Obama was at fault. Anticipating criticism about the difficulties of getting anything through the US Senate, she nevertheless claims that Obama missed several opportunities to put climate change response much higher on the agenda, at a time when he still had massive political capital. There’s a real sense in which this is true, but Klein doesn’t search for the underlying reasons why Obama has acted the way he has, which go beyond the reflex accusations of being a sell-out (‘triangulating wolf in the guise of a liberal sheep’, you know the drill).

We’ve all been somewhat misled by the Obama as Bush antidote theme. George W. Bush’s regime, in many ways, was the last gasp of an Imperial ideology of leading the free world, or of making war on bits of it to make them free. The collapse of the conjuring trick which was supposed to pay for all this, and the increasing realisation that the US couldn’t make its desire reality purely by will (expressed through military force and propaganda) determines the conjuncture which Obama inherited. There’s a tendency to look to him as if he will actually give flesh to the bones of the carcass of the myth of American benevolence. But, in fact, his task is managing America’s decline. Thus, his actual behaviour, as opposed to his flights of rhetoric, demonstrates that America is now a nation among nations, looking to protect its own national interest rather than project some sort of salvational salve for the world’s woes. That should have been evident from Copenhagen.

It’s important to look beyond the quotidian, and understand that the sands of political economy were actually shifting beneath the feet of the delegates and negotiators at COP. That also implies that assumptions about a future based on straight extrapolation from the position pre-Copenhagen may be as dangerous as the assumption that climate change is itself a linear process, rather than the interaction of many complex factors and systems, human and non-human. While I don’t necessarily accept all that he argues, that necessary perspective is well displayed by ecological economist Brian Davey, writing at Open Democracy. With permission, under a Creative Commons licence, I’ve reproduced his piece over the fold. It provides much food for thought, as we come to grips with our collective responsibility to shape the planet’s future.

[Please click through to the original article for hyperlinks and diagrams.]

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen’

Liveblogging Barack Obama’s Copenhagen speech

Published
by
Mark
3 months ago
in Blogging and Climate change
. 7 Comments

Helmut is live blogging President Obama’s address to the Copenhagen climate change conference at Phronesisaical.

Obama Fail

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Politics and USA
. 64 Comments

Writing in the always fabulous London Review of Books, David Bromwich has a very interesting argument on why Barack Obama has been something of a disappointment. Though Bromwich’s political commitments are fairly well known – at least to readers of HuffPo – his critique isn’t particularly ideological. Rather, Bromwich, a Professor of Literature at Yale, encapsulates Obama’s political failings rather more astutely than a lot of professional observers of political strategy. The whole argument is worth reading, but the kernel of it is the observation that Obama consistently underestimates the forces ranged against him, and that he becomes mired again and again in role confusion – inspirer-in-chief tends to trump politician in a predictable pattern.

It may be that this is actually inherent in the American system of government – it’s a very difficult balancing act for one figure to be simultaneously symbolic head of the nation and executive of the political state. It’s pretty clear, too, how the particularity of Obama’s identity can be mobilised by the Fox News noise machine to disrupt the first identification, leading the President to spend far too much time rising above politics rather than practising it. It’s always going to be more difficult for a president of the centre-left to straddle this divide, but as Bromwich suggests, it’s rather puzzling that a man as intelligent as Obama goes on making the same mistake again and again.

Update: In the New York review of Books, Michael Tomasky writes on the right wing street protests and the noise machine, and Elizabeth Drew examines Obama’s performance in office through the prism of the healthcare debate:

In fact, the question has arisen of whether Barack Obama’s particular—one might say idiosyncratic—governing style is right for these times.

Words not deeds

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Culture, Imperialism, International, Politics, Sociology, USA and War
. 11 Comments

SocProf links to a really fascinating piece on Obama’s Nobel Prize [previous LP discussion here] by Don Waisanen at ThickCulture, riffing on Weber’s characterisation of modernity as disenchantment of the world.

It would appear that the Nobel committee at least partially picked Obama for his renewed faith in public discourse to bring about peace and change in the world. Tim Rutten argues in the Los Angeles Times that the award was rightly given to the President for “words” rather than “deeds.” I would further argue the prize most appropriately went to Obama for finding a midway through Weber’s predicament in the above passage. Obama’s rhetoric has sought to enchant the political realm through sublime values that no human being can live without—for example, through the trope of “hope”. At the same time, these are values that are grounded in direct and personal human relations, or in abductive intersubjectivity rather than deductive, non-contextual assertion. There is much to critique in Obama’s administration, but it has at least evidenced an empirical concern for active listening and diplomacy as consequential in politics.

I think that’s a very consequential set of observations. It also makes me wonder if there’s not a continuity between Bush and Obama’s administration (beyond the obvious maintenance of core aspects of the US’ war-imperial machine, which is at the heart of the left objection to his acceptance of the award). Thinking back to the infamous comments from a Bush administration official about remaking reality, it strikes me that both administrations are fundamentally postmodern in their use of rhetorical discourse to reshape facts. That’s about as far as you can get from Weber’s modern government as “administration of things”.

Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

Published
by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in International, Politics and USA
. 96 Comments

The reasoning for the award, such as it is, can be found here. It’s quite odd. I really don’t think Obama has achieved much at all internationally. Probably it’s for not being George W. Bush.

There’s a paradox here. On one hand, it’s very US-centric – as if the US really were the ‘leader of the free world’. On the other, it’s most unlikely to do the President any domestic good.

Update: Maria explains at Crooked Timber:

But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.

Lordy. I think a lot of people in the world would quite like America not to think it was the centre of it. Perhaps, in particular, people in those countries currently occupied by US troops. I thought Crooked Timber was supposed to be some sort of high falutin’ academic blog.

Update: Here’s the Nobel Committee press release; Michael Tomasky asks whether Obama should accept the award.

Update: Glenn Greenwald is worth reading, and has a number of interesting links.

Elsewhere: Legal Eagle.

Obama, healthcare and social democracy

Published
by
Mark
7 months ago
in Health, Medicine, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 126 Comments

Reports that Barack Obama is prepared to concede the public option in the health care bill (with some perhaps vague hope that it might be reinserted in a conference between the House and Senate on reconciling inconsistent provisions) expose the difficulty any President faces in securing even an approximation to what are basic and threshold social democratic reforms in the United States.

Leaving aside the obvious attempt to articulate the health care plan with ‘right to life’ scaremongering through all the nonsense about ‘death panels’, we still have a textbook example of how culture and ideology can cause blindness to collective interests (and indeed self interest). No amount of rhetoric about the possibilities of self actualisation and choice over life goals has any meaning if there is sustained structural inequality in health outcomes (and therefore life chances), and if there is no real attempt to ameliorate this inequality through collective action by the state.

At The Global Sociology Blog, SocProf hones in on the reasons for the absence of any discussion of, or even awareness of, class inequality in American culture and politics.

Obama now faces the familiar dilemma of attempting to save political face through the passage of some watered down bill which will do nothing, and may even be harmful, given the capture of representatives and Senators by the private interests of health insurers. Progressives also face a painful dilemma – an oft repeated one: whether to be complicit in the passage of a measure whose momentum is now driven almost solely by political calculation or whether to take a stand on principle. John Odum poses this well. But it seems unlikely that conditions – under the current political arrangements – for the passage of genuine health care reform will ever be more favourable.

Faith based community

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 2 weeks ago
in Apocalypse, Blogging, Climate change, Media, Politics, Science, Sociology and USA
. 128 Comments

As a number of prominent Australian climate change scientists hit back at the increasing propensity of elements of the media and some politicians to engage in very high profile climate change denialism, no matter how discredited the ‘arguments’ they put forward are, it’s worth considering the broader phenomenon of right wing irrationality. In the United States, recent polling commissioned by Markos Moulitsas on the prevalence of ‘Birther’ beliefs has disclosed that a third of Republicans are convinced that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. As John Quiggin points out, there’s considerable overlap between the Birthers and the climate change skeptics and/or denialists.

Writing in The Guardian, Michael Tomasky considers:

the degree to which, during the Obama era, American conservatism – already fiercely ideological and obstructionist, operating according to sets of “facts” produced and paid for by oil companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and other corporate interests – has contrived to go completely barmy.

And the rhetoric of the Republicans often reflects the wider themes of the wingnut blogosphere and talk back radio:

Healthcare is socialism. Saving the auto industry is liberal fascism. Trying to halt global warming is both. Negotiating with Iran – I didn’t even get to foreign policy – is proof that Obama wants to obliterate the US. And to top it all off, the Great Obliterator isn’t even a citizen.

Tomasky implies that UK citizens are lucky that total lunacy hasn’t yet become mainstream in British conservative politics. I’m not so sure we can say the same in Australia. What lies behind all this? I mean, you can trace particular forms of irrationality to causal factors – for instance, the close relationship between polluter interests and climate change denialism. But what allows all this madness to find a receptive (albeit minority) audience? Speculate away!

Update: John Quiggin launches a “Sane Republican Hunt”.

Obama’s speech in Cairo – open thread

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 2 weeks ago
in International, Middle East, Politics, Religion, Terrorism, USA and War
. 119 Comments

I noticed a comment on Facebook that Obama’s speech at Cairo University to the Islamic world isn’t yet posted on the White House website. I checked and at the time of writing, it isn’t. But it’s up on Al Jazeera – full text here. I’m not sure if it’s a transcript released to the press or a transcription.

Somehow I can’t imagine George W. Bush saying this:

The Holy Quran tells us, “O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” The Talmud tells us: “The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.”

The Holy Bible tells us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God’s vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth.

The spectre of Specter

Published
by
Kim
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in Feminism, Media, Politics, Polls, USA and Women
. 15 Comments

Game changing. Displays the irrelevance of the GOP. Tea bag parties inspired by Fox News and all that crew coincide with a drop in partisan identification to 25% of the electorate. Etc.

Certainly, the party swap of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is a fillip for the Democrats.

Although, those with a long memory for the ‘Clarence Thomas hearings’ might question the elderly gentleman’s progressivism when it comes to issues of concern to women. Anita Hill, wherever she is now, probably isn’t over the moon:

Continue reading ‘The spectre of Specter’

High-risk, high-reward research

Published
by
Robert Merkel
10 months, 3 weeks ago
in Economics, Policy, Science and USA
. 8 Comments

Joshua Gans notes Barack Obama’s speech at the the US National Academy of sciences, in which he proposes an increase of the US’s national R&D expenditure to 3% of GDP, amongst other initiatives. One of the many good things about the speech is just how clearly it articulates the importance of encouraging scientists to do “high-risk, high-reward research”:

Continue reading ‘High-risk, high-reward research’