A PRO-WAR RECORD
If Obama is such (as many “progressives” seem to need to believe) an “antiwar” candidate, why has he offered so much substantive policy support to the criminal occupation and the broader imperial “war on [and of] terror” of which Bush says O.I.F. is a part? Here are some highlights from a summary of Obama’s U.S. Senate voting record recently sent to me by the Creative Youth News Team (CYNT 2007), a progressive African American advocacy organization:
“1/26/05: Obama voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State. Rice was largely responsible…for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims in unnecessary wars...Roll call 2”
“2/01/05: Obama was part of a unanimous consent agreement not to filibuster the nomination of lawless torturer Alberto Gonzales as chief law enforcement officer of the United States (U.S. Attorney General).”
“2/15/05: Obama voted to confirm Michael Chertoff, a proponent of water-board torture...[and a] man behind the round-up of thousands of people of Middle-Eastern descent following 9/11. By Roll call 10.”
“4/21/05: Obama voted to make John ‘Death Squad’ Negroponte the National Intelligence Director. In Central America, John Negroponte was connected to death squads that murdered nuns and children in sizable quantities. He is suspected of instigating death squads while in Iraq, resulting in the current insurgency. Instead of calling for Negroponte's prosecution, Obama rewarded him by making him National Intelligence Director. Roll call 107”
“4/21/05: Obama voted for HR 1268, war appropriations in the amount of approximately $81 billion. Much of this funding went to Blackwater USA and Halliburton and disappeared. Roll call 109 [W FOR PRO-WAR VOTE]”
“7/01/05: Obama voted for H.R. 2419, termed ‘The Nuclear Bill’ by environmental and peace groups. It provided billions for nuclear weapons activities, including nuclear bunker buster bombs. It contains full funding for Yucca Mountain, a threat to food and water in California, Nevada, Arizona and states across America. Roll call 172 [W].”
“9/26/05 & 9/28/05: Obama failed and refused to place a hold on the nomination of John Roberts, a supporter of permanent detention of Americans without trial, and of torture and military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees.”
“10/07/05: Obama voted for HR2863, which appropriated $50 billion in new money for war. Roll call 2 [W].”
“11/15/05: Obama voted for continued war, again. Roll call 326 was the vote on the Defense Authorization Act (S1042) which kept the war and war profiteering alive, restricted the right of habeas corpus and encouraged terrorism. Pursuant to his pattern, Obama voted for this. [W].”
“12/21/05: Obama confirmed his support for war by voting for the Conference Report on the Defense Appropriations Act (HR 2863), Roll call 366, which provided more funding to Halliburton and Blackwater. [W]”
“5/2/06: Obama voted for money for more war by voting for cloture on HR 4939, the emergency funding to Halliburton, Blackwater and other war profiteers. Roll call 103 [W].”
“5/4/06: Obama, again, voted to adopt HR4939: emergency funding to war profiteers. Roll call 112 [W].”
“6/13/06: Obama voted to commend the armed services for a bombing that killed innocent people and children and reportedly resulted in the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi… Michael Berg, whose son was reportedly killed by al-Zarqawi, condemned the attack and expressed sorrow over the innocent people and children killed in the bombing that Obama commended. Roll call 168 [W].”
“6/15/06: Obama voted for the conference report on HR4939, a bill that gave warmongers more money to continue the killing and massacre of innocent people in Iraq and allows profiteers to collect more money for scamming the people of New Orleans. Roll Call 171 [W].”
“6/15/06: Obama, again, opposed withdrawal of the troops, by voting to table a motion to table a proposed amendment would have required the withdrawal of US. Armed Forces from Iraq and would have urged the convening of an Iraq summit (S Amdt 4269 to S. Amdt 4265 to S2766) Roll Call 174 [W]”
“6/22/06: Obama voted against withdrawing the troops by opposing the Kerry Amendment (S. Amdt 4442 to S 2766) to the National Defense Authorization Act. The amendment, which was rejected, would have brought our troops home. Roll Call 181 [W]”
“6/22/06: Obama voted for cloture (the last effective chance to stop) on the National Defense Authorization Act (S 2766), which provided massive amounts of funding to defense contractors to continue the killing in Iraq. Roll Call 183[W].”
“6/22/06: Obama again voted for continued war by voting to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (S 2766) for continued war funding. Roll Call 186 [W].
9/7/06: Obama voted to give more money to profiteers for more war (H..R. 5631). Roll Call 239 [W]”
“9/29/06: Obama voted vote for the conference report on more funding for war, HR 5631. Roll Call 261 [W].”
“11/16/06: Obama voted for nuclear proliferation in voting to pass HR 5682, a bill to exempt the United States-India Nuclear Proliferation Act from requirements of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Roll Call 270 [W].”
“12/06/06: Obama voted to confirm pro-war Robert M. Gates to be Secretary of Defense. Gates is a supporter of Bush's policies of pre-emptive war and conquest of foreign countries. Roll Call 272 [W]”
“Obama's voting record in 2007 establishes that he continues to be pro-war. On March 28, 2007 and March 29th, 2007, he voted for cloture and passage of a bill designed to give Bush over $120 billion to continue the occupation for years to come (with a suspendable time table) and inclusive of funding that could be used to launch a war with Iran. Roll calls 117 and 126 [W]...Obama's record shows a minimum of 20 major pro-war votes…”
Wow. I might have worded things a little differently than CYNT at times, but that’s a damning bill of indictment.
OBAMA’S CORPORATE CASH AND POLICY NEXUS
Foreign policy is not the only area in which Obama contradicts the noble principles, elders and values he invokes. Take campaign finance. The junior Senator from Illinois denounces the corrosive influence of private political cash on U.S. democracy while cozying up to Chicago’s corrupt Big Money Mayor Richard M. Daley (with whom he shares the same high-priced campaign consultant [David Axlerod]) and raking in campaign largesse from the commanding heights of the capitalist class. His top career sponsors include Goldman Sachs, Exelon (a leading Midwestern utility and the world’s leading nuclear plant operator), Soros Fund Management, J.P Morgan Chase & Co., a number of leading corporate law and lobbying firms (including Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, and Sidley Austin LLP), top Chicago investment interests (including Henry Crown & Co and Aerial Capital Management) and the like (Center for Responsive Politics 2007a).
“Tort Reform”
Obama’s reliance on such deep-pockets supporters helps explain why he voted for a business-driven federal “tort reform” bill that rolled back working peoples’ ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations (Sirota 2006; Silverstein 2006). It is certainly part of why he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent (Sirota 2006).
It is undoubtedly related to his vote against a bill that would have killed an amendment to the 2005 energy bill that Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste called “one of the worst provisions in this massive piece of legislation.” Under the amendment, which passed with Obama’s help, U.S. taxpayers are providing millions of dollars in loan guarantees to power plant operators. They “risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default” (Silverstein 2006).
“Incentivizing” Ethanol
Undue corporate surely lurks behind Obama’s constant plugging of federally subsidized ethanol (“E-85”) as an environmentally friendly “alternative fuel.” The supposed “green” fuel E-85 has become “the classic pork barrel cause of every Midwestern politician” (Silverstein 2006). Current and aspiring policymakers are enticed by the promise of campaign support from the legendary Illinois-based political finance player and ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland (Lewis 1996. pp. 10, 116, 118, 121-127).
Whether E85 really contributes to positive environmental change and reduced U.S. “dependence on foreign oil” is questionable, however. As Ken Silverstein explained in a November 2006 Harpers article titled “Obama, Inc.” (Silverstein 2006):
“E85 is so called because it is 85 percent ethanol, a product whose profits accrue to a small group of corporate corn growers led by Illinois-headquartered Archer Daniels Midland. Not surprisingly, agribusiness is a primary advocate of E85, as are such automobile manufacturers as Ford, which donated Pike’s car. The automakers love E85 because it allows them to look environmentally correct (‘Live Green, Go Yellow,’ goes GM’s advertising pitch for the fuel) while producing vehicles, mostly highly profitable and fuel-guzzling SUV and pickup models, that can run on regular gasoline as well as on E85. Since producing most domestic ethanol requires large amounts of fossil fuel, and regular gasoline provides about 30 percent more mileage per gallon than E85, it’s arguably preferable from a conservation standpoint to drive a standard gasoline car rather than a flex-fuel vehicle…”
“It’s beyond dispute,” Silverstein notes, that ethanol “survives only because members of Congress from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite its production.
“It is not,” Silverstein significantly adds, “family farmers who primarily benefit from the program but rather the agribusiness giants such as Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland (for which ethanol accounts for just 5 percent of its sales but an estimated 23 percent of its profits). Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering wrote in a report this year, is based on ‘the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel.’”
“Since arriving on Capitol Hill,” Silverstein observes, “Obama has been as assiduous as any member of Congress in promoting ethanol.”
In an interview with the University of Iowa student newspaper before his speaking event last Saturday, Obama made sure to disagree with charges that ethanol subsidies are costly and unnecessary. “We need,” Obama told student reporter Mason Kerns, “to offer some initial government support, especially for marketing and distribution. Production is high now, but, for example, we hardly have any E-85 pumps. If we can start to incentivize these things, more businesses can install them, and we can lessen our oil dependence” (Kerns 2007).
Those are ADM talking points.
Against Single Payer and “Government Mandates”
Reliance on corporate cash and power is also likely related to Obama’s opposition to the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the curious grounds that such a welcome social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry (Sirota 2006) and that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates” (Klein 2006).
The last comment is fascinating. As Noam Chomsky noted last year:
“A large majority of the [u.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee ‘everyone’ the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply’; a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting’; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was’” (Chomsky 2006, p.225).
And does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards? Should the U.S. maintain the illegal operation of Iraq and pour half of its federal budget into “defense” because of all the soldiers and other workers who find employment in imperial wars and the military-industrial complex? How about the people who manufacture cigarettes and the violent video games that do so much to fuel school shootings and military enlistments? How about people working for the gun industry and the Gun Lobby, which an excessively “cautious Obama refused to challenge after the latest domestic U.S. gun atrocity at Virginia Tech (ABC News 2007)? Does the “progressive” Senator really need to be reminded of the large number of socially useful and healthy alternatives that exist for the investment of human labor power at home and abroad – wetlands preservation, urban ecological retrofitting, drug counseling, teaching, infrastructure building and repair, safe and affordable housing construction, the building of windmills and solar power facilities and…[the list goes on and on]?
Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006 (Center for Responsive Politics 2007b). His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, is a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006 (Sweet 2007a).
LOBBY BAN LOOPHOLES
One day after Obama denounced Big Money control of U.S. politics in Iowa City, the Los Angeles Times reported that Obama “raised more than $1 million in the first three months of his presidential campaign from law firms and companies that have major lobbying operations in the nation’s capital.” Campaign finance expert Stephen Weissman observes that this raises troubling questions about the practical relevance of Obama’s much-ballyhooed pledge to turn down donations from “federal lobbyists.” As reporter Dan Morain explains, “some of the most influential [lobbyist] players, lawyers and consultants among them, skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers. Obama’s ban does not cover such individuals” (Morain 2007).
Thus, to give one example, Obama received $33,000 in the first quarter of 2007 from the Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird, which maintains a large lobbying division in Washington. Obama’s $33,000 came bundled from a number of “consultants” employed by the firm.
Also deleted from Obama’s “lobbyist ban” are state lobbyists. Obama took $2000 from two Springfield, Illinois lobbyists for Exelon, which spent $500,000 to influence policy in Washington last year and gave $160,000 directly to Obama.
Obama has also received $170,000 so far this year from financial giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, who together spent $4.6 million on federal lobbying in 2006 (Morain 2007).
BIG (DECEPTIVE) TALK ABOUT “SMALL DONATIONS”
Morain also reports that Obama received more than two-thirds (68 percent) of his first quarter 2007 fundraising total “from donations of $1000 or more.” Obama has “played up populist themes of [campaign finance] reform,” trumpeting his “large number of small donations” and claiming (in the Senator’s words) to be “launch[ing]a fundraising drive that isn’t about dollars” (Morain 2007). But his astonishing first-quarter campaign finance haul of $25.7 million included $17.5 million from “big donors” ($1000 and up) – a sum higher than the much more genuinely populist John Edwards’ (Curry 2007) total take ($14 million) from all donors (Campaign Finance Institute 2007). According to Chicago Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet (Sweet 2007b):
“Obama talks about transforming politics and touts the donations of ‘ordinary’ people to his campaign, but a network of more than 100 elite Democratic ‘bundlers’ is raising millions of dollars for his White House bid. The Obama campaign prefers the emphasis to be on the army of small donors who are giving -- and raising -- money for Obama. In truth, though, there are two parallel narratives -- and the other is that Obama is also heavily reliant on wealthy and well-connected Democrats. ‘Bundlers’ are people who solicit their networks for donations and, at the elite giving levels, often get some assistance from campaign fund-raising professionals. Each of the 138 Obama bundlers promised to raise at least $50,000, and many are from Chicago, not surprising since Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker is the national finance chairwoman. Among those from the city are major Democratic donors Lou Sussman, who was John Kerry's chief of fund-raising in 2004; Betty Lu Saltzman, one of Obama's biggest boosters; personal-injury attorney Bob Clifford; Capri Capital CEO Quintin Primo; activists Marilyn Katz and Michael Bauer, Ariel Capital's John Rogers and Mellody Hobson. Hollywood moguls David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg; a string of Harvard Law School friends; Broadway producer Margo Lion, and Bill Kennard, managing director of the Carlyle Group, are among the other bundlers.”
The hypocrisy is many-sided. Last week Sweet reported that Obama had received large donations from at least eight executives at Island Def Jam, a hip-hop recording firm that markets rap artists Obama has accused of “degrading their sisters” with sexist slurs (Sweet 2007c).
For what it’s worth, his wife received $51,200 in 2006 for attending a few board meetings of TreeHouse Foods, a giant firm where she was made a director after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate (Sweet 2007a). The granting of high-pay and do-little board posts to the spouses of politicians is a longstanding tool of the “old,” corporate-dominated politics that Senator Obama claims to reject. TreeHouse Foods has not responded to my queries regarding Michelle Obama’s qualifications for her position on the company’s board and the timing of her elevation to that position.
REINFORCING RACISM DENIAL
And then there’s Obama’s racial equivocation. Obama’s effort, quite pronounced in his Iowa City speech, to link his campaign to the legacy and inspiration of the Civil Rights Movement stands in disturbing relation to an argument he makes in The Audacity of Hope. In a chapter titled “Race,” Obama tries to reassure the white voting majority by claiming that “what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts.” Equally soothing to the master race is Obama’s argument that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country.” Part of the reason for this “push back” – also known as denial – is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work-ethic of the inner-city black poor (Obama 2006, pp. 245, 247, and 254-56).
Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in “post-Civil Rights America,” deeply woven into the fabric of the nation’s social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of “past” racism. Never mind that the long centuries of slavery and Jim Crow are still historically recent and would continue to exercise a crippling influence on black experience even if the dominant white claim that black “racial victimization” is a “thing of the past” was remotely accurate (Feagin 2000; Brown et al, 2003; Street 2007h).
White fears that Obama will reawaken the unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights are further soothed by his claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream” (Obama 2006, pp. 248-49). That’s a curious judgment since blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Street 2007b).
Martin Luther King Jr., whose name Obama invoked at least three times in Iowa City, would be displeased.
Obama’s conservative comments on race are nicely calibrated for the superficially anti-racist ethos of the post-Civil Rights era. He helps whites feel good about their alleged racial enlightenment while making it clear that voting for the technically black Obama does not mean embracing substantive action against structurally and institutionally entrenched racial oppression. He masterfully appeals to White America’s tendency to congratulate itself for rejecting crude and primitive bigotry (“I am not racist because I watch Oprah and am thinking about voting for Obama”) the Barockstar”) while continuing to blame impoverished blacks for their own plight and turning a blind eye to the massive damage societal racism continues to inflict on black-Americans (Street 2007h).
“BROTHER’S AND SISTER’S KEEPERS?”
The willingness of some whites to embrace Obama is reinforced by his willingness to embraces the vicious neoliberal attack on the nation’s disproportionately black public family cash assistance recipients and former recipients. If the $26 million Senator is so big on how Americans should be “our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers,” why does he claim in The Audacity of Hope that “conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare”? The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, the “populist” Obama claims, “sapped” inner-city blacks of their “initiative” and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including “independence,” “income,” “order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples’ lives.” He argues in Audacity that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is “the single biggest that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty” (Obama 2006, p. 256).
But there’s no social-scientific evidence for the “conservative” claim that AFDC destroyed inner-city work ethics or generated “intergenerational poverty.” Numerous studies show that the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner-city poverty and “welfare dependency” (Handler 1995; Jencks 1992, pp. 204-235; Stier and Tienda 2001, pp. 166, 177, 206). Research demonstrates that black teenage pregnancy reflects the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation’s inner-city and suburban ring ghettos (Gordon 1995, pp. 123-125). It also shows that welfare “reform” (elimination) predictably (Street 1998) has deepened misery for millions of truly disadvantaged former public assistance recipients (Street 2000). It has done this even while the federal government has continued to grant billions in public subsidy to corporate war masters like those associated with leading Obama fundraiser Bill Kennard’s notorious military-industrial Carlyle Group (Pilger 2002, pp.9, 109) and the heavy Obama funder Henry Crown and Company. The Crown firm owns a large stake in the heavily Pentagon-reliant aerospace firm General Dynamics (Chicago Indymedia 2007).
Democrats should be really excited about this guy. He's like Reagan in the sense that he's an outstanding spokesman for the ideology he represents. You guys have Obama, and my side is stuck with Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. 
Too early to start dancing in my skimpies, but this win will go a LONG way toward an Obama Presidency. Big win for America tonight. Obama's victory is great for both Repubs and Democrats.
Too early to start dancing in my skimpies, but this win will go a LONG way toward an Obama Presidency. Big win for America tonight. Obama's victory is great for both Repubs and Democrats.
Too early to start dancing in my skimpies, but this win will go a LONG way toward an Obama Presidency. Big win for America tonight. Obama's victory is great for both Repubs and Democrats.
But if he takes this road, he'll lose me and I'll vote for Springsteen again.He knows this and will never go negative. He's way too smart for that.
I still believe.TM
