Feels Like a Monday

"I would learn power's currency," Obama wrote of his move from community organiser in Chicago to Harvard Law School, and then bring that knowledge "back to where it was needed... like Promethean fire". 

  alJazeera

Talk about your swelled head.

Unlike Prometheus, Obama has set the house ablaze with his fire, proving once again that power in the hands of the wrong person is a deadly proposition. (And he may have forgotten the price Prometheus paid.)

He ran on a platform of "hope" and "change". But the only long-term change for which Barack Obama might well be remembered come November 7 will be to have breathed new life into an imperial machine that was fraying at the seams when he first took office. 

Last throes?

Whatever Obama believed, it's clear that gaining power within a thoroughly corrupt and violent system does not empower people to change it. The strategies for achieving and then bringing home power that Obama learned as a young community activist have little currency in a political-economic system in which the power of workers and organised labour has been severely diminished and the government is in good measure literally owned by corporate interests.

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It's well known now that Obama bailed out banks and major corporations which were most directly responsible for the financial crisis that exploded in 2007, while offering far slimmer relief to the ordinary Americans for whom he once dreamed of stealing the fire of political and economic power. Militarily, the President has succeeded in fulfilling the unrealised strategic goals of the Bush administration to transform the US military and security complex into a leaner and far more efficient killing machine that maintains "full spectrum dominance" over all existing or potential adversaries and all technologies or methods that could be deployed to challenge US power.

And perhaps most important, Obama has outshone his predecessor in curtailing the most basic rights and freedoms Americans and anyone else might have to challenge, resist or even hope to transform the system. In a June column, I tried to lay the many ways that the current administration has "fused" together intelligence gathering, untrammeled prosecutorial powers, and extrajudicial murder and imprisonment as core means of ensuring its policies face no robust challenge from citizens or their representatives.

The situation has become even more dangerous, as the Federal courts have supported the administration's attempts to suppress any challenges to laws that could lead to indefinite detention of American citizens without trial for engaging in constitutionally protected activities while the Supreme Court has refused to hear appeals to convictions based on secret testimony of anonymous witnesses whom defendants were prohibited to cross examine.

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The "disposition matrix" that has been developed is a "next-generation targeting list" that supposedly pairs the name of every suspected terrorist with all the possible ways in which that person can be disposed of, whether through drones, special operations, local government actions or capture. The development of this matrix signals recognition that the US will be disposing of perceived enemies for years to come, with no end in sight. 

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How did a community organiser-turned-Constitutional law professor-turned-public servant become the chief custodian, enabler and enforcer of a matrix of policies that so clearly violates the most basic principles of the Constitution he's sworn to uphold?

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Let's face it; hope and change probably never had a chance.

But we can imagine what might have happened if instead of spending four years designing a new playbook with 50 ways to dispose of potential enemies Obama had spent his efforts developing a new playbook with 50 new ways to fight poverty, global warming, environmental degradation and authoritarianism.

Easy enough. He wouldn't even be in the running for the 2012 prize.

But he also would have marked out a new space for resistance and protest that could have inspired activists both inside the United States and abroad to work together to begin building elements of a new global order.

Perhaps.

A new global order requires acts of resistance anyway. We would have to start by stepping out of the two-party voting structure. Futile, did somebody say? So environmental activists and the ACLU should just go home and find real jobs? Occupy protests should never have taken place?  For all they've changed things.

To be sure, his Presidency might have gone down in flames, but if people had actually seen a president who cared little for his political future and was willing to sacrifice it for the chance to bring out fundamental change in the system, Obama might have inspired the kind of uprising among the middle and working classes that would have truly threatened the US and global elite, forcing them to make the compromises necessary to recalibrate the global system to reflect a balance of power that not only serves the interests of a far greater percentage of the earth's population, but of earth itself as well.

Because Jimmy Carter's presidency left just such a lasting legacy, eh?

In a world with givers and takers, the takers always get it all. There's no other way for that to come out. Resist if you want. Don't if you'd rather not. Suit yourself. Until a new age of spiritual evolution – or your next life on another planet – this is what we've got. I'm with Sartre: No Exit. Sadly, we usually only realize that after we've expanded the population. Hormones trump wisdom every time. That was a clever factor in Hell's creator's planning. Welcome to Hell. The Gods of Prometheus still sit on Olympus.

...and hey, do what you want...you will anyway.