Daily Archive

The underwhelming performance of the Democratic President Obama is really unsurprising considering the context of the current US political system.   State capitalism continues to grind the general population into dust to enrich the business class with Obama at its helm.  Considering where the majority where his contributions come from Obama is performing up to expectations.   Noam Chomsky looks at the hollow brand of Obama and what really his particularly vacuous platform of “Hope & Change” really mean in his book “Hopes and Prospects” in the final chapters.  I’ll reproduce some highlights from that last chapter.

“Labour journalist and lawyer Steve early wrote that “while running for office, Obama said he strongly backed the Employee Free Choice Act, a long overdue labour law reform measure that should be part of his promised economic stimulus plan.”  However, when Obama introduced his top economic advisers on taking office “and talked about steps to ‘jolt’ the economy…the Act was not part of the package,” and Chief of Staff Emanuel “declined to say whether the White House will support the Employee Free Choice Act… [Workers] will be watching closely to see whether their plight merits the same helping hand so quickly extended to Wall Street.”

The answer has been sharp and clear, and working people did not have to wait very long to find it out.  EFCA quickly vanished,  And to make priorities even clearer, a few weeks after taking office, President Obama decided to show his solidarity with works by giving a talk at a factory in Illinois (February 12th, 2009).  He choose a Caterpillar plant, over objections of chruch, peace, and human rights groups, who were protesting Caterpillar’s role in providing Israel with the means to devastate the territories it occupies and to destroy the lives of the population – also killing an American volunteer, Rachel Corrie, who tried to block the destruction of a home.

Apparently forgotten, however, was something else.  Following Reagan’s lead with the dismantling of the air traffic controllers union, the new hardline CEO of Caterpillar, Donald Fites, rescinded the contract with the United Auto Workers in 1991, instituted a lockout, threatened to bring in “permanent replacement workers”, and later did so, for the first time in generations in manufacturing industry.  The practice was illegal in other industrial countries apart from South Africa at the time; now the United States appears to be in splendid isolation.  It is hard to imagine that Obama and his advisers purposely chose a corporation that led the way to undermine labour rights.  More likely, they were unaware of the facts, which would be an even worse indictment of the business-run doctrinal system.

At the time of Caterpillar’s innovation in labour relations, Obama was a community organizer in Chicago and visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.  He must have been reading the Chicago Tribune, which ran a careful study of these events.  They reported that the union was “stunned” to find that unemployed workers crossed the picket line with no remorse, while Caterpillar works found little ‘moral support’ in their community, one of the many where the union had “lifted the standard of living for entire communities.”  Wiping out of those memories is another victory in the campaign to destroy workers’ rights and democracy that is relentlessly waged by the highly class-conscious American business sector, elementary facts about American society that the union leadership had stubbornly refused to understand.  It was only in 1978 that the UAW president Doug Fraser recognized what was happening and criticized the “leaders of the business community” for having “chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and very old, and even many in the middle class or our society,” and for having “broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.”

Placing one’s faith in a compact with owners and managers is suicidal.  The UAW is discovering that again today, as the state-corporate leadership proceeds to eliminate the hard-fought gains of working people while dismantling the productive core of the American economy, with government assistance. “

– From Noam Chomsky’s Hope and Prospects pages 217 – 219.

I urge you faithful reader to purchase or get this book from the library as it provides depth and insight into the American body politic that you most definately will not find in your local newspaper.