Friday, July 16, 2010

The Fall of Obama : Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

The Fall of Obama : Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

'It is not Obama’s fault that for 30 years, America’s policy under Reagan, both Bushes and Bill Clinton has been to export jobs permanently to the Third World. The jobs that Americans now desperately seek are no longer here in the homeland and never will be. They’re in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, India and Indonesia.

No stimulus program giving money to cement contractors to fix potholes along the federal interstate highway system is going to bring those jobs back. Highly trained tool and die workers, the aristocrats of the manufacturing sector, are flipping hamburgers—at best—for $7.50 an hour because U.S. corporations sent their jobs to Guangzhou, with the approval of politicians flush with the money of the “free trade” lobby.

It is not Obama’s fault that across 30 years more and more money has floated up to the apex of the social pyramid till America is heading back to where it was in the 1880s, a nation of tramps and millionaires. It’s not his fault that every tax break, every regulation, every judicial decision tilts toward business and the rich. That was the neo-liberal America conjured into malign vitality back in the mid-1970s.

But it is Obama’s fault that he did not understand this, that always, from the get-go, he flattered Americans with paeans to their greatness, without adequate warning of the political and corporate corruption destroying America and the resistance he would face if he really fought against the prevailing arrangements that were destroying America. He offered them a free and easy pass to a better future, and now they see that the promise was empty.'


Exactly.

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