The US Socialist Worker is running a series of commentary from a range of left-wing perspectives assessing the first 100 days of US President Barack Obama. Two contributions are published below. To read more of the commentary, visit .
The first contribution is from Brian Jones, a teacher, actor and activist in New York City, and contributor to . The second is by Lee Sustar, a journalist for Socialist Worker.
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Brian Jones: To be honest, I'm still processing the fact that we have a Black president. I don't think I'm the only one, either.
The euphoria of election night is gone, though, replaced by sharp economic pain. So we have a Black president, but the collapse of the housing market has meant the collapse of Black wealth.
Obama landed the job, but a lot of Black people are losing theirs — Black unemployment is still far above the national rate.
But a sense of possibility remains. Things that seemed like they'd never happen are happening.
We won gay marriage in Iowa, after losing it in California. Workers occupied a factory in Chicago and made common cause with the LGBT movement there. Israel's assault on Gaza led to the largest anti-war protests in years.
The dust hasn't settled on this new political era, and there's a feeling that we have room to fight for our demands.
I think two things are going on at once. The economic crisis is pushing people to radical conclusions —capitalism is becoming the enemy, and there's a new openness to talking about socialism.
At the same time, people continue to believe in Obama as a person. They are confused by some of his recent moves, or are trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. A woman recently asked me: "How is it possible that Obama is following what all these people from Goldman Sachs tell him to do?"
No one would be confused if Bush did these things, but Obama is supposed to be one of us. He's the guy who grew up like a regular person, he gets it.
Consequently, folks are quicker to see AIG executives or the Goldman alums as the source of the problem than they are to include Obama in that category.
And now the lunatic right is trying to revive itself (thanks to Fox News) with populist (not to mention, racist) anti-Obama hysteria. I think it's perfectly understandable for people to develop a knee-jerk Obama-defense reflex in response.
Meanwhile, there are some on the left who think that our primary task is to "break people from Obama". But in this context, I don't think that's the right approach. People are not Obama-dupes.
When you're going to lose your job or your home, you're less likely to wait around for Obama to do something, and more likely to start thinking about what you should do.
I've met plenty of people in the last month who voted for Obama, but are now reading Karl Marx. We're going through a sorting process, trying to figure out how to stop the war, how to save our jobs and how to get out of this economic mess.
That's where the left comes in. We should always have next steps prepared — be ready to invite everyone to get involved right away.
At the same time, we have to give honest answers to big questions: Why is Obama supporting the people who want to privatise education? Why isn't Obama fighting for single-payer health care? Why is Obama dropping bombs on people in Pakistan?
We have to patiently explain that regardless of what Obama is like as a human being, he is now in the position of being the leader of the US ruling class, and he must answer to them.
We need to build a new left that's independent of the Democratic Party on principle, but knows how to relate to people who are in various stages of figuring out what they think about the Democrats.
Here's a suggestion: let's dust off some of Obama's old slogans from the campaign trail, like "Change doesn't from Washington, it comes to Washington". Let's put that on a placard with the words: "YES WE CAN Stop the War!"
Lee Sustar: Many on the left were unsurprised that Obama has maintained the Bush administration's imperial project in the Middle East and escalated the war in Afghanistan. But perhaps more were shocked that Obama's approach to the banking crisis is to be even more generous to the bankers than Bush.
Obama has simply handed the bankers a blank cheque from the Treasury, with just a few conditions on executive pay to make it more politically palatable.
Even where bailouts have given the government enough shares in company stocks to control them — such as at insurer AIG and Citibank — the Obama administration has done everything it could to avoid taking outright control in order to leave private capital in charge.
Of course, Obama has advanced elements of a break with the free-market, neoliberal economic policies of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush. The scale of the crisis has given him little choice: government must substitute for consumer spending and business investment.
Obama's budget sets aside US$634 billion over 10 years for increases in health care, and the rich will have to be taxed more highly to pay for it.
Yet, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out, the effective top tax rate paid by those with incomes of more than $2 million (in 2006 dollars) has been cut in half since 1955 — a year when a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, was in the White House.
By the standards of today's Republican Party, Eisenhower, the former head of Allied forces in the Second World War, was a flaming socialist radical.
In fact, by refusing to aggressively tax the income — and accumulated wealth — of the rich, Obama has undercut his bold rhetoric on economic policy. And his recent order that federal agencies cut $100 million from the budget is a bow to Democratic moderates and the Republicans.
This follows a far more serious compromise over the stimulus plan, which was skewed toward relatively ineffective tax cuts rather than social spending, and pulled back on aid to budget-strapped states.
The administration's hope seems to be that an early economic recovery will allow it to avoid hard choices over aggressive government spending and "fiscal responsibility". Indeed, the end of Obama's first 100 days comes as administration officials are signaling the beginning of an economic recovery.
The recent rally in the stock market seems to support that claim, as do big earnings at Wachovia, Citibank and other huge banks.
But the best that can be said about the US economy is that it isn't as deteriorating as fast it was a few weeks ago. The pause in economic decline is due largely to the cash tsunami created by the Federal Reserve as well as the $700 billion in bank bailouts and Obama's $787 billion stimulus plan.
CNN tallied up the various spending packages, loans, loan guarantees and other spending commitments, and came up with a figure of $10.5 trillion. By comparison, annual US economic output is about $14 trillion.
With that much cash sloshing around, there's bound to be some bounce-back in economic activity. And the administration is desperately hoping that this recovery takes hold in order to lower the political temperature over the various bailout schemes.
They worry that the outrage over bonuses paid to executives at the nationalised insurance company AIG will lead to popular opposition to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's plan to cover banks' losses by having the government subsidise big private investors' efforts to purchase toxic securities.
Finally, an economic recovery — even it does emerge sooner rather than later — won't address the long-term problems of the US and the world economy.
This recession isn't just another economic downturn that's endemic to capitalism. Rather, it's a crisis of the entire neoliberal economic model of free trade, privatisation and "flexible" (read: low wage) labour.
This model could flourish as long as US finance capital (and its enforcers in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation) were capable of penetrating new areas of the globe and extracting concessions from local capitalists.
It survived the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 only when the US stepped in to become the importer of last resort, thanks to debt-based consumer spending based on low interest rates.
Now, of course, US consumer spending will be minimal for the foreseeable future, and US financial giants have fallen.
What's needed — even in capitalist terms — is a far-reaching program to restructure the economy on a more stable basis, based on a revival of production.
Instead, Obama's program is trying to resuscitate a failing financial system while simply nudging private capital towards more US investment.
The crisis ensures that the debate will continue. Early recovery or not, unemployment is likely to keep rising for months to come.
The left must be prepared to use that opportunity to open a wider debate on economic priorities — and get organised to fight for them.