The Obama Administration and the Economic Crisis: Can the Left Go Beyond Conventional Criticism to Relevance?

by Norman Markowitz

I have been trying to respond recently to criticisms on the Obama administration and Obama himself from various sources that I would call the independent left among both scholars and activists on a variety of issues.

These are not ultras, members of various sectarian groups, but people with long histories of defending peoples struggles. Their general argument, if I can simplify it, is that Obama, those in his administration, and their advisers, are not really different than previous administrations in their cold shoulder to labor and their defense of capital, and that the experience of the New Deal or of the Great Society for that matter have little relevance to what is happening today because we are in a new situation in terms of political economy(even though few say what we can do in that new situation, except engage in criticism).

I have tried to respond to these criticisms in a variety of ways.

First I think that , we can look at the positives---the recovery aid in the stimulus money to states and communities. Would any president in recent memory have initiated such policies.? Today, twenty six billion was was voted to states and communities in aid to education to prevent massive layoffs of teachers and other school personnel. Obama's active support was essential in this emergency aid. Also, today, tree billion in aid to unemployed homeowners to prevent foreclosures was voted by Congress.

Earlier, unemployment benefits were extended over strong Republican opposition. National Health Care legislation, with all its faults, and they are great faults, both better legislation than the bill that Clinton failed to get through seventeen years ago and the first major piece of social legislation passed in the U.S. in over forty years, was passed and now faces serious threats from states that are suing to bring it down in the federal court system(given the present balance of forces on the Supreme Court, they certainly have a good chance).

But these explanations don't have much meaning for working people who see high unemployment, crippling cutbacks at the state and local level, and economic news that pretends as if everyone is an investor in the stock market.

To become relevant in the present political moment, we have got to come forward with specific policies(like unemployment insurance, old age pensions, public employment for the unemployed during the 1930s) and build mass support for such programs through action.

Our target should not be the Obama administration but finance capital, the banks which are hoarding hundreds of billions in public bailout money rather than investing in development that will produce jobs and decent income for the people.

There is general revulsion today at the bonus moneys given to the upper finance capitalist managers but little understanding that the whole system is "oversaving" in the Keynesian sense of the term, "warehousing" instead of employing capital.

We should call for restructuring of the financial system beyond the limited reregulation which the Obama administration has achieved(itself a step forward, given the radical deregulation of the last thirty years) to call for direct public control over the federal reserve and a policy of tying aid to the large investment bank/brokerage house syndicates to their investment in productive job high wage economic reconstruction. We should also call for the administration to enact legislation that will have finance capital begin to spend tens of billions to revitalize the public sector instead of vice versa, to channel capital into public education, transportation, housing and health care.

We can also call for a restructuring of consumer credit and debt in the interest of the people and develop contract proposals to implement that. Today the banks are holding hundreds of billions in defaulted debt, foreclosed property and doing nothing with it. Just as capital created hedge funds, derivatives, new forms to loot and profiteer at the peoples expense, we can begin to develop new forms of public sector financing, bonds, etc, to advance a public-private sector economic configuration to reduce debt and unemployment and begin to both raise and create greater equality in living standards.

These are just a few ideas. I hope our readers write in with more ideas, including perhaps more examples of what is good about the Obama administration to counter what I see as a kind of left tailing of the right , if they wish.

Although the media is filled with accounts of the rightward drift of the Republican party, the misnamed "tea party" elements(far closer to the Tories in the real American revolution than to Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere and others who they would have turned over to the British) leading the Republicans out of the mainstream and helping the Democrats, no one, given the fragmented and corrupt nature of U.S. politics, where there is no serious check on the use of money in campaigns, should feel complacent.

Right Republicans can make use of the frustrations and alienation among segments of the electorate to win a low turnout election and then seek to unleash a new wave of Reaganism, ala the Gingrich Congress of 1995, which would be a catastrophe for the people.

The left really becomes the left, really becomes radical, when it becomes relevant in terms of the battle of ideas, connecting organization with policy, as against merely negating what is. We still have a chance to do that today, to began to relate to the center in ways that will strengthen both us and the center. If we fail to take that chance, either by attacking the Obama administration from left positions or passively accepting its policy positions and compromises, we will fail at a time and lose opportunities that we have not seen since the pre cold war era.