2008 US election

Eight years later…

2008 US election
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Eight years ago on this day our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity finally ended when the 2000 presidential elections halted in stalemate and Bush let his daddy’s lawyers steal the election for him.

You can sum up Bush in the disasters he left behind: the stolen election, the worst terrorist attacks on American soil ever, a bungled war in Afghanistan, another needless war in Iraq to show up his dad, an economy only keeping going by seducing people into unmanagable debts. — And then you fuckers re-elected him. Sure, the second election was as phony as the first, but still half or almost half of the people that actually bothered to vote after four years of endless disaster still thought Bush was a swell guy!

It only took another four years of unending war, the death of a major American city and the complete collapse of the American economy, swiftly followed by that of the rest of the world for you lot to realise that maybe, just maybe, voting for an asshole is not a good idea, not matter how much this will annoy that hippy drippy art teacher you had back in high school.

Please let Obama win tonight, not because he’s a socialist, or a leftist or even much of a liberal, but just because he is moderately competent and doesn’t constantly have to prove to the world he’s a better man than his daddy or how big his weiner is. We need somebody who will finally stop making things worse. The last eight years have been a complete washout, let’s not waste the next four.

Update: 5 AM local time: Thank you.

Also:

Also.

The ruling class enjoying itself

2008 US election, Life under Capitalism
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Barack and John, supposedly in mortal combat for the presidency, having a good time together. Some would call it a thriumph for the idea of democracy as fair play, but you can guess my attitude from the title. It’s just slightly sickening to see them clowning around while there’s so much at stake. Certaintly doesn’t improve my opinion of Obama, too much of a centrist stoge anyway.

But at least abortion is safe with him, there will be slightly less pressure to punish the poor for their poverty, perhaps even some modest measures to easen the burden of the working classes and of course no half senile, rage addict with his fingers on the button and an Alaskan ignoramus waiting in the wings.

Obama will bring the revolution

2008 US election, US politics
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Andy Newman is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking today, by arguing that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will buy space for the left to grow. In particularly:

If Obama wins, then that is a mass popular endorsement of hope — that things should and can change. The revival of trade unionism in the sit down strikes in the 1930s could not have happened without the confidence given by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The growth of the 1960s civil
rights movement, and the growth of women’s liberation and black power movements were linked to expectations of injustice being ended by Kennedy and LB Johnson.

Barack Obama

I’m skeptical, as it reminds me too much of similar guff heard when New Labour was first elected, back in 1997, as witnessed in such thriumphal books like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better (Andy seems to recognise this, considering the title of his post). But more importantly, it seems to me Andy has got the relationship between a strong progressive or leftist mass movement and a left leaning president wrong. The movements he mentions, trade unionism and the civil rights movement, existed and knew success before they got a president on their side. Roosevelt started off a moderate and was largely forced into the New Deal, Kennedy gave lip service to the civil rights movement but it was only with his successor LBJ that civil rights legislation really got going. And in both cases this wouldn’t have happened without pressure from a broadbased, grassroots uprising, didn’t go as far as the movement wanted or extended itself to foreign policy, which was just as reactionary under Roosevelt and Kenndey/LBJ as their under their predecessors.

With Obama we’ve seen that his first instincts certainly aren’t anything but centrist or even rightwing. He got lucky in that he didn’t have to vote for the War on Iraq, but it took a long time for him to take a real stand against it once he was elected. Even now, he only wants to leave Iraq to strengthen Afghanistan and he’s hawkish on the “threat” of nuclear armed Iran, as well as saying all the wrong things about Georgia. He does talk the talk about poverty in America, but also felt the need to urge Black fathers to take their responsibility. As Andy admits himself, he has a lot of support from Wall Street which is despairing of the Republicans bollixing up the economy and his core advisors are not exactly leftist firebrands either…

To come back to Andy’s main argument, that Barack Obama will bring a feeling of hope that has been missing for the past eight years, which will open space on the left, I’m with John Pilger, as quoted by Andy. “ An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.” We’ve seen it happen already, as the various centre left organisations like MoveOn have fallen in line behind the Democrats.

Hillary or Rudy

2008 US election
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That might be the horrific choice on offer next year in the American presidential elections, the worst of the Democratic candidates versus the nutties of the Republicans. Not a very inspiring choice, not that there’s any Democratic candidate much better, or any Republican less worse. I well understand why so many Americans don’t vote anymore, as it changes nothing.

Nothing, I hear you say, but what about the War on Iraq, or the Supreme Court, or Healtcare, or… And sure, you’re right, having a Democratic president, even one as awful as Hillary would be slightly etter than yet another Republican nutjob. With Hillary in the White House, the ongoing war against the poor would be covered up somewhat, more people would get slightly less poor, the structural racism and sexism in American society would be lifted somewhat and there would be slightly less and slightly less insane foreign military adventures on offer.

But that’s all. Hillary won’t give up the god-given right of the United States to meddle in other countries affairs, nor will she do anything that will offend big business too much. At best she will provide a breathing space, four or eight years in which the battered US middle classes can recover somewhat, the military can get itself back into shape after Iraq and Afghanistan and things can go back to normal. Which is better than what Rudy would offer, more craziness, but not much better.

To me, the upcoming elections feel somewhat like a rerun of 2004, with a rightwing Democrat against a loony rightwing Republican; the big change is that this time, the Democrat will probably win. But it’s hard to get excited about this, as it seems that four more years of war and disaster hasn’t lead to a more radical alternative. Ghu knowns I’m not hoping for a socialist, but at the very least an actual liberal, somebody who has not bought into the War on Terror, would’ve been nice.

Linky, linky

2008 US election, Life under Capitalism
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The post over at Crooked Timber about how Americans now have worse teeth than a decade ago is interesting. Interesting, in that the discussion in the comments tries hard to avoid the simple truth as to why that is: lack of dental insurance. Too scary perhaps.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports on vulture capitalism, the practise of buying up third world debts then suing the country in question in an European or American court for the debt plus interest. Many of such funds are based in London and it probably won’t surprise you either that some of these funds have ties to highlevel US politicians…

Lawyers, Guns and money is worried about Giuliani, who has stuffed his campaign chockful with the nuttiest of neocons. Personally I don’t doubt he would be a disaster as president for America, but for the rest of the world he might be the better choice than a more competent candidate like Clinton. Because whoever becomes president will always be someone willing to use US military force abroad, and somebody a little bit nutty might be opposed more and earlier.

Does that make sense? Perhaps not.