First, quick reply to your scrivenings! Ah, so you are starting to agree with historians’ observations about how things and people often follow similar patterns! :) And fear not (as if you would have any reason, lol), plenty of windbaggage at the ready!
In his book, Obama lamented that in politics, one’s words are distorted, motives suspect, you get beholden to money, and you run afoul of traps set by the media. The unscrupulous deceive and manipulate public opinion.
That awareness didn’t seem to "prepare him none," in the words of some. Time and again, we are going to compare the Obama of his book and the Obama in office and wonder not just if they are the same person, but how his advanced knowledge of things hasn’t seemed to help him all that much.
“Please stay who you are, they will say to me. Please don’t disappoint us.” Obama 102. Like McCain his opponent, Obama fails on both counts.
An indication of the war on government is this: for six to eight years, we had tax cuts with no meaningful spending cuts—from a president and Congress that were Republican (the supposed party of spending cuts). The results were gigantic deficits and national debt. “What is clear is that the sea of red ink has made it more difficult for future administrations to initiate any new investments to address the economic challenges of globalization or to strengthen America’s social safety net.” Obama 148. Precisely. The government is the enemy; no new investments are desired. There is near-constant promotion of an anti-government message.
But he’s right in seeing the trend: “It will mean a nation even more stratified economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want in the marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets—while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their retirement, and their children’s educations. It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign lenders and expose ourselves to the whims of oil producers; an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.” Obama 148
What happened to that smart guy? And it goes along with what you just wrote about haves and have nots.
Obama points out the benefits of globalization to American consumers, and the perils to American employees. It’s this latter facet that is problematic. Were it just competitiveness, the argument of the “free market above all” crowd might have more merit. But as we’ve seen, often this is a smokescreen for companies to exploit workers for sheer greed here, let alone abroad. The companies, and their investors, enjoy all the benefits of the workers’ productivity; the workers’ virtually none. One doesn’t have to be Marxian to see the wrongness in that.
The assumption is “that any government intrusion into the magical workings of the market…necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth. The bankruptcy of communism and socialism as alternative means of economic organization has only reinforced this assumption.” Obama 150 Yet government builds the infrastructure and trains the workforce, two foundations for economic growth. “The Hoover Dam, the TVA, the interstate highway system, the Internet, the Human Genome Project—time and again, government investment has helped pave the way for an explosion of private economic activity. And through the creation of a system of public schools and institutions of higher education, as well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change.” Obama 152-153
“Aside from making needed investments that private enterprise can’t or won’t make on its own, an active national government has also been indispensable in dealing with market failures—those recurring snags in any capitalist system that either inhibit the efficient workings of the market or result in harm to the public.” Obama 153 He goes on to say that “people who are hungry, people who are out of a job, are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” So government also “regulates the marketplace and protects labor from chronic deprivation.” Obama 155
“We don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism…Like those who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility. And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately. In other words, we should be guided by what works.” Obama 158-9
Litany of Half-Truths: Across the developed world, we often see crisis. With many of those countries having adopted, partially or mostly, the Chicago-School economic ideology, they are caught in a bind. Yes, the size and structure of their governments are too draining on resources, having forgotten the central maxim that governments only consume, they don’t produce, and that unless government is directly supporting research, education, infrastructure, etc. that undergird economics, government should be careful about what is “necessary” to spend. But the other side of this tarnished coin is that the wealthy, by manipulating tax laws, international movement of money (and sheltering), and other clever evasions and refusals to provide funds (indeed, to only increase wealth transfer upward), government’s truly needed avenues go unfunded and deep debts are accumulated. Not to mention government has little to no fiscal wherewithal to actually regulate and rein in the wealthy who are inflicting this phenomenon on the various societies. Additional clever undercutting of international cooperation on these fronts further serves the purposes of this commonly focused, common fiscal-languaged (and trained and educated) wealthy “elite.”
More, plenty more, coming up on Obama’s often insightful and thoughtful words and their relation (and not!) to the world at large.
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