GUARDIAN.CO.UK - December 21, 2009 - When friends of mine learn that I have broken my deal with Barack Obama, and no longer support the "light of the world" (as one English friend calls him), they passionately rally around his presidency, almost pleading with me to give him more time, to keep the faith, and asking, moreover: what choice do we have?
A calling to account is not the same as "a lazy cry of betrayal". There's nothing lazy about it: since day one of the inauguration, many of us have been shocked to see Obama going into reverse on his campaign pledges faster than Lewis Hamilton in an F1 car.
The president may have failed to protect low- and middle-income Americans from the Wall Street predators who created our financial mess – indeed, they are his closest advisers.
He may have brusquely fired or exiled some of his most progressive staff as unwanted baggage. And his attorney general is starting to act like one of George Bush's henchmen: attempting to protect the previous administration's torture enablers, such as the infamous lawyer John Yoo. Obama's most recent Oslo speech, accepting the Nobel peace prize, on the heels of his caving in to his captor generals in sending 30,000 more soldiers into the Afghan bloodbath, was chilling in its implications, extending a long tradition, going back to Woodrow Wilson, of war-making for liberal, "humanitarian" reasons. No wonder politicians such as Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and a whole museum-load of neocons welcomed his Oslo "pragmatism" as "hardheaded and pro-American".
Where Obama is succeeding is in dividing what remains of the American left between a majority of Obama-no-matter-what-he-does partisans and a minority of undeniers like myself.
As I write, Obama is desperate to rally support for the corpse of the health bill he emasculated with the help of pharmaceutical and insurance lobbyists. He's been dreadful on jobs, neurotically passive where he should be pounding the pulpit, Roosevelt-style, and pouring money into shovel-in-the-ground work.
As president he's got enormous leverage to whip Congressional "centrists" into line – an off-year election is coming up, and candidates need his party's money. But Obama in office has turned out to be strangely aloof and distant from people's real anxieties. We thought we were electing a community organiser in the Saul Alinsky mould and what we have is a Harvard law professor in the line of John Kennedy's "best and brightest" who dragged us into Vietnam.
My personal breaking point, after months of jaw-dropping astonishment at Obama's betrayals, was his refusal almost alone of the world's leaders to ban child-killing landmines and cluster bombs. His state department announced this shameful policy on Thanksgiving eve, as if to hide it from public notice. Obama is continuing Bush's policy of refusing to honour an international antipersonnel landmine ban – the Ottawa treaty – signed by 158 nations.
It's so cruel and pointless. Mostly the victims are the rural poor, many of them children of the same age as the president's two daughters. They die from shock or blood loss far from any hospital; and the survivors suffer amputations and blinding.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/21/obama-landmine-ban-betrayal
RELATED:
Why The Mine Ban Treaty Is So Important:
Prior to the Mine Ban Treaty (MBT), there were more than 25,000 new landmine casualties every year. But after the treaty was created, new landmine use was drastically curbed.
As a result, last year only 6,000 new casualties were reported, and the rate is still dropping. Yet the U.S. is not among the three quarters of the world’s nations — including most of the U.S.'s closest military allies — that have signed the MBT. U.S. participation is crucial to the ultimate effectiveness of the treaty. Learn more!
http://www.banminesusa.org/policy/body.html
