Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| 1860-61 and Today: Crisis and Opportunity for a Lame-Duck President |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2015-04-11
Today, President Obama has an opportunity to address several crises from his position as a lame-duck president. He is unlikely to pass new legislation. He faces huge opposition from Congress at every turn. What he has going for him is his independence from electoral concerns of his own. He has opportunity to speak to all Americans and thus to shape issues for the next electoral cycle. The Emergency of 1860-61 After the presidential election of November 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected, and before his inauguration in March 1861, a great crisis over-swept America: the southern states began to secede, Lincoln had to choose between the dissolution of the United States and a war to preserve it, preparations for war began to be made by the South, and Washington was thick with spies and saboteurs. President-Elect Lincoln was still in Springfield and his Secretary of State designate, William Seward, then still a senator, was in Washington. Seward did what he could to placate, if not the South, then the border states, and an enormous crisis was managed as well as seemed possible by the incoming administration during the short time of the lame-duck period for the sitting president, James Buchanan. Buchanan apparently did nothing to deal with the crisis. OK, that was January-February 1861, 150 years ago. In those years, all of America knew there was a crisis. The South was feeling its power, the North was scared, Buchanan did nothing, Lincoln and Seward had to act before they came into power. Today We Have Three Crises Today America has many crises including the three I have chosen to concentrate on, crises which fall to the Obama Administration to manage (or mismanage) in his remaining 20-month lame-duck period. There is little sign, today, that Americans know or care anything of these crises. There is little sign that President Obama cares. So far it seems he finds Buchanan a better model than Lincoln. Let’s examine the three crises. Keeping America Out of War The first crisis is keeping America out of yet another war in the Middle East despite a fierce drive toward war by pro-war elements of Congress. It is hard to know where this cry for war most comes from. There are ideologically motivated folks who seem to love war for its own sake (the neocons who pushed for the Iraq war among them), who love American muscle flexing as they imagine it, who have no care either for our victims or for the enormous costs to ourselves in treasure and American lives. The Republican push for harsher sanctions and eventually perhaps to war with Iran makes it hard to remember that before WWII, Americans and especially Republicans were non-interventionists who wanted to keep America out of wars at all costs. The impetus for a war with Iran comes, most especially, from the hard-line Israel lobby (AIPAC and its allies: see this brilliant discussion) and from Israel itself and its sometimes comical leader Benyamin Netanyahu. It is hard for me to account for this American over-willingness for war, this blood-lust among Americans. Perhaps it arises from various losses of self-esteem which some people felt (and still feel) can only be rebuilt by success in war. America’s military self-esteem was severely injured when America was fought to a standstill in Korea and lost horribly in Vietnam, the latter occurring just when Israel fought brilliantly to quick victory in 1967. Perhaps Americans’ new fondness for war arises from jealousy of Israel’s huge success. Perhaps, too, America’s overly-firm alliance with Israel arises from this same jealousy, as if our failures might be repaired by alliance with the seemingly invincible Israel. Then again, many white Americans who had had a feeling of superiority to Blacks had their self-esteem injured by the civil rights successes and destruction of formal Jim Crow in the 60s and needed to rebuild it through aggressive wars against people of color elsewhere. Also pushing for war, one imagines, are corporate pressures from the usual war-profiteers: weapons makers, companies which reconstruct what our bombs have destroyed (Bechtel and Halliburton among them), and high-priced mercenary soldiers (Blackwater) and, of course, also from oil companies and other mostly extractive industries who wanted their foreign holdings protected at national expense by war. And, lastly, there are people suffused with irrational fears of bogeymen, “enemies” in far away places ready and able to do Americans harm. Certainly the second president Bush did a lot to scare Americans with talk of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, all false, propaganda used to foment war. And talk of a menace of “terrorism” transformed national consent to “war” into national consent to “endless war”. (As to “weapons of mass destruction”, it is noteworthy how flexible the language of the federal government is. Whereas we went to war against Iraq because Iraq was supposedly seeking “weapons of mass destruction”, the man just convicted of bombing the Boston Marathon was convicted, in part, of using a “weapon of mass destruction”, that is, a very small bomb. By that definition, every country in the world has and has long had weapons of mass destruction. Why didn’t America attack all of them?) But back to the present crisis. Whichever the cause, war must be avoided. We do well to recall that we have lived many years in a world with thousands of nuclear weapons outside our own control, many now in the hands of Russia and China, a few in the hands of North Korea. What we have to fear from one bomb in the hands of Iran is beyond my comprehension. If Iran wants a bomb at all—it says it does not—it is only to establish a sort of parity with Israel, which has hundreds of them, and not to attack anyone and get wiped out. To be fair, President Obama seems to be trying to avoid this particular war, but he has not avoided war noticeably during his presidency. And he has not spoken—how could he?—of the evils of war in general. Acting to Mitigate Climate Change The second great crisis is dealing with climate change. I take it as clear beyond cavil that man-made climate change is real, is a problem today and will inevitably be a vastly greater problem tomorrow, whether we act or not, but far worse for every day that we further defer acting. Since all this is well known today and has been well known for a decade, why is so little done to mitigate this problem? America faces an enormous and well-funded reactionary resistance movement which insists on inaction on climate change either in denial of any problem, in denial that anything useful can be done about it, or—more simply and more truly especially from the corporate world—in ostrich-like head-in-the-sand refusal to undertake painfully wrenching and costly actions today to save mankind from unutterable tragedy 20-50-100 years from now. All these tendencies must be identified, called out, and vigorously opposed. And, it should go without saying, climate change must be opposed in a wide variety of ways, mostly costly and inconvenient, many contrary to our present lifestyles—immediately. This is President Obama’s greatest problem and greatest responsibility and opportunity. Disabling the Power of Money in Politics The third crisis is, in a way, the greatest, because it deals with the mechanisms which have created the other crises: dealing with the over-arching problem of wresting governance of the USA from the intensely selfish hands of America’s oligarchs (a few very, very wealthy individuals and the CEOs of big banks, big defense industries, big oil companies, big private prison companies, big agriculture, and all the other “bigs”) and returning it either to governance by democracy or to governance at least by wise, knowledgeable, people-friendly leaders not controlled by the intensely selfish and short-time-line-concerns of the managers of international, global capital. The practical problem of oligarchy is not that it is undemocratic. After all, democracy depends on the education, information, wisdom, attention, and good will of the people, and people are not well informed and not all that wise. The practical problem with oligarchy is that today’s oligarchs want to avoid dealing with climate change and have succeeded in paralyzing government in that regard. The oligarchs also do not appear to be averse to a war with Iran. And why should they be? They have no assets in Iran to be damaged and don’t pay sufficient taxes in America to have to pay for the war. War will not hurt most of them. One possibility is that Iran’s threat to sell its oil for a currency other than dollars threatens the preeminence of the dollar among world currencies and makes all the oligarchs favor stomping on Iran. Concern by oligarchs for the strength of the dollar may also account for some of its opposition to mitigating climate change, which requires getting America and the world to stop using fossil fuels: when oil is no longer the world’s most important commodity, the dollar (in which oil is generally traded) will become less important, to America’s loss. The President’s Present Opportunity President Obama has a short time of virtual independence from now until his successor is inaugurated in 2017. He faces no election of his own. He can speak and act independent of and against the pressures routinely exerted against politicians by America’s oligarchs. He can speak to America honestly and tell Americans of the crises we face. In some ways he can actually act independently of Congress. But above all, he can speak and encourage others to speak. And he can encourage Americans to listen to the scientists, whom he can encourage to describe the processes and dangers of climate change in words that ordinary people can understand. By what the president says now, if he seeks to address today’s crises forcefully and persuasively, he can also help to shape the discussions which we will hear in the next year and a half from the presidential and other candidates for office. I recall the teach-ins in opposition to the Vietnam war. Universities were bubbling, media were reporting, the public was engaged. At least the public knew there was a problem and were hearing proposals for action. And I remember the enormous March on Washington in November 1969 in opposition to the Vietnam war. I was there, Today there is almost no such “activism”. It is as if people know they are on a sinking ship and (as a matter of good manners) agree not to speak of their fears, angers, or sadness. Or perhaps it is as if people know nothing, want to know nothing, want instead to enjoy life (or at least to get on with life) as best they can and have no time or inclination to understand the political pressures that lead us toward war with Iran and away from “war” on climate change. Either way, it is as if the people know that democracy no longer works and have given up on it. Some know about the oligarchy and its virtual erasure of practical democracy, and some just know that elections don’t fix anything for them. The result so far is a descent into torpor, a retreat from political activism. Most people who deplore big-money-in-politics do so as if nothing can be done about it. Those who do seek to oppose it often focus too narrowly on reversing one or two recent Supreme Court decisions on campaign finance and corporate enjoyment of untrammeled rights of communication to the public on matters of political and social controversy. They forget that lobbying and “corporate capture” of regulating agencies is decades older and also needs to be addressed. Overall, I think we can fairly say that today is a time of immense crisis for America, and immense crisis for the world, and our president has the opportunity to do something, to do anything, to reverse America’s course toward disaster. He also—in my view—has the duty to take action. By his early speeches, before his first election, I judged Barack Obama to be one of the most decent men we’ve had in political life for a long time. In the years that have gone by he has learned “how Washington works” which is to say that he has learned to behave in an indecent manner, as politicians usually do in the face of, and overwhelming presence of, enormous wealth manipulated by the oligarchs (described above). He has forgotten that he “is” City Hall and has instead learned the hard lesson that “you can’t fight City Hall”—meaning that he has given up any hope of independent action as president. And yet we are in three undoubted crises, the threat of war and crisis of inaction on climate change the most pressing of these. I wish him well and wish all of us well. This essay is my way of being an “activist”. There are doubtless other ways. Citizens: do what you can! ----------- [1] ”We’ve seen a complete subversion of our political system,” former President Jimmy Carter recently said, diagnosing the ailment. He said that unlimited money in politics “violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president.” Ibid. |
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