Courageous and/or Calculating? For Real Change From Obama, Popular Pressure Required

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5825/courageous_and_or_calculating_for_real_change_from_obama_popular_press/

Monday April 12 10:52 am


President Barack Obama speaks during a Washington D.C. rally celebrating the passage and signing into law of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act health insurance reform bill, on March 23, 2010. (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)


By Roger Bybee

It was a truly remarkable moment, symbolizing the contradictions of Obama presidency's thus far. Signing legislation at a ceremony March 30 in Arlington, Va., President Obama showed both his courageous Rooseveltian side and his calculating Clintonian side.

With a single signature, Obama simultaneously finalized Republican-inspired healthcare reform, and approved an unrelated but attached provision that reformed the student loan program by booting parasitic bankers out of the picture.

In that instant, Obama exemplified why so many people in labor and among progressives feel confused, impatient or even demoralized. Obama at some moments confronts the greed and arrogance driving Corporate America, but at other times—seemingly inexplicably—he capitulates to these forces.

But perhaps we ought to be focusing less on Obama's psyche and more on the degree of mobilization of popular sentiment relative to the highly-developed and sophisticated corporate efforts. Thus far into the Great Recession, the emergence of mass movements has been much less than most progressives expected, as many Americans seem to have lost any sense of their economic rights and the ability to exert power through collective action.

With progressives unable to mobilize popular forces in huge numbers against bank bailouts, home foreclosures and plant closings or for a single-payer healthcare plan, Obama faces substantial pressure only from the corporate side, as social-movements scholar Frances Fox Piven argues in an interview in my forthcoming In These Times piece on healthcare reform.

Sometimes Obama's ambivalence toward the needs of working America has been visible in his treatment of a single issue, like the "bailouts" of GM and Chrysler. Yes, Obama preserved two corporations central to the life of Midwest factory towns, but he also allowed his economic advisors to force the closing of dozens of U.S. plants. Moreover, Chrysler used bailout money to transfer work from Wisconsin to Mexico. As the result of the bailout's terms, both auto firms will now rely on more cars produced offshore by cheap, repressed labor in China and Mexico rather than in the United States.

FULL story at link.