Issue # 1411 20 May 2009
www.cpa.org.au/guardian/2009/1411/19-culture.html
Culture & Life
To a great many people, both inside and outside the USA, the defeat of George W Bush became an end in itself, something to be desired from which great things – democratic things – would flow.
These people were apparently seduced into thinking that if a coalition of people and organisations resoundingly voted Bush and Co out on a slogan of “It’s Time For Real Change” – or words to that effect – then a new team would occupy the White House and the country would be transformed.
The rule of law would be restored: torture would be stopped and the perpetrators punished; Guantanamo Bay and the many similar facilities would be closed; detention without trial would cease; jail would stop being the country’s answer to poverty.
Affordable health care would be made available to all, as would affordable housing. Scandals like the homeless Katrina cyclone survivors who still have not seen a cent of government aid would become but a distant memory.
And pigs would fly.
The tragic irony is that all of this was possible: the USA is a rich country still, despite the sub-prime mortgage crisis and recession. The US economy could easily absorb universal health care, upgraded schools and public housing programs, but not while a bloated military industrial complex leeches the greater part of the country’s wealth out of the national budget.
And just as changing the priorities of the military-industrial complex is a massive task requiring fundamental shifts in thinking across the whole of US society, so changing the direction of US government policy from following the dictates of big business to meeting the needs of the US people requires more than a change of tenant in the White House.
The election of Barack Obama was not a revolution. It was certainly an expression of the American people’s deep desire for a change of policy direction, but when the dust had settled, despite the new incumbent in the White House and the new heads of the various departments of the US government, the fundamentals of that government remained unchanged. In fact, most of the people actually carrying out the policies of the Obama White House are the same people who carried out the policies of the Bush-Cheney White House.
Small wonder then that there seems to be a resistance within the apparatus of government to making fundamental changes of direction. Obama has been president now for a little more than 100 days and counting, but already he seems to have hit a significant roadblock, called the National Security Bureaucracy.
In the name of “national security”, Obama has reneged on his agreement to make public photographs of detainees being tortured by American soldiers. Suddenly he is joining the minions of Bush-Cheney in sheltering behind the “national security” blanket.
The US National Security Bureaucracy is truly vast. As law columnist and former presidential counsel John W Dean wrote recently, “I have never tried to catalogue the parts of this dominant segment of our national government, but any off-the-top-of-one’s-head list would have to include the Cabinet departments with the largest budgets, like the Department of Defence (with the Army, Navy, and Air Force), Department of State (with its Foreign Service and Embassies throughout the world), Department of Homeland Security (which united some 22 agencies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US Coast Guard, the US Customs Service, the US Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration.)
“In addition, virtually every Cabinet department has national security responsibilities – from the Department of Commerce to the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice, with its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). And, of course, there are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) – all are involved in national security.
“In fact, since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the president has had a National Security Council, which fills much of the Executive Office Building beside the White House, and sits atop this huge apparatus with its reach throughout the federal structure, and the entire world. Suffice it to say that the national security bureaucracy is massive.”
In addition to resistance from the national security bureaucracy, President Obama and his team have to overcome the opposition of innumerable vested interests, many backed up by scads of money, all intent on protecting their investments, their sinecures and their policies.
To successfully change the face of America will require not only a charismatic president with a program and vision for change, but an active nation-wide movement for change, fundamental change, a movement that manifests itself in the streets and town halls of the USA.
We aren’t (or rather, the USA isn’t) at that stage yet, so we should not expect Obama to deliver it. In the meantime, progressive Americans are struggling to prevent conservatives and right-wingers from watering down Obama’s program even further.
It may not be what everyone hoped for, but it is surely better than the available alternative at the moment!
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