Clive Crook, senior editor of The Atlantic, opened his commentary today with, “Obama’s address was surprisingly bad“, and closed with the following observation.
“He (Obama) looked nervous too, don’t you think? It was an unconfident performance. He moved his hands too much. He did not look strong. It was a bad night for his presidency, and he would have been wise to give no speech rather than this speech.”
Here’s what I saw in the man.
Obama on BP from the Oval Office
What struck me most powerfully while watching his speech was a sense that the 48 years-young Obama’s sense of cool self-confident composure is on the verge of a collapse under the weight of impotence. Our audaciously hopeful young leader is coming to the awareness that the presidency of the United States of America is NOT the most powerful position on earth. Neither he nor we-the-people, through his agency as our elected leader, are in control of the ship.
Since the years following World War II, when America was at the height of her global military power, political influence, and moral authority, our nation has been transformed by the success of her economic dominance, into a host nation for the world’s most powerful corporate oligarchies. As the wealth of the nation has been transmuted into the wealth of amoral corporations and their profit motivated shareholders, the power of the presidency and body politic, have become powerless handmaidens to Corporate interests.
In watching the most recent tit-for-tat between BP’s CEO and our president, it became clear to me that it is not that corporatist leadership is smarter, more competent or more right than Obama. It is that in their single-minded voraciousness, they are simply more powerful than Obama and the instruments of government at his command. BP’s Hayward doesn’t lie and cheat out of malice. He lies and cheats because that’s his job. BP exists to produce profit and nothing more than that enters into the calculus of his actions.
BP CEO Hayward
Obama’s audaciousness filled us with the hope that our nation might be steered back onto to a course shaped by our moral compass that embraces compassion for our fellows, environmental responsibility, parsimony, patriotism, and a vision for a better future, but each time he has attempted to wrest the helm from corporate oligarchies, he has been undermined, beaten down and rendered ineffectual by the machinations and maneuverings of oligarchical power.
- Underlying the un-winnable wars of adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the corporate desire to achieve military and political hegemony in the Middle East. Among the most powerful of motives was the desire to make the region safe for exploitation by corporate America. While young Americans have been dying in combat and mercenary corporations have been profiting from government contracts, Obama’s high-minded plans for withdrawal from both theaters of action are already hopelessly mired in equivocation.
- Underlying the economic debacle that Obama inherited from the previous administration’s anti-regulatory polices — the only good government is a dead government — are the unbridled money changing schemes of large corporate interests seeking to leverage the vig and by producing nothing, increase profits at an ever-increasing rate. At every turn, Obama’s efforts to redistribute wealth, rebuild the middle-class and re-regulate corporate greed, have been gutted of substance. His accomplishments have consisted principally of paying a dollar for every nickel won.
- Underlying our rapidly collapsing healthcare system, are the corporate entities that harvest their wealth by acting as middlemen between the essential healthcare needs of the American people and the resources needed to meet those needs. In the face of corporate power, Obama’s healthcare accomplishments have been reduced to shuffling chairs on the Titanic while locking the middlemen even more tightly into the system by which their profits come before American lives.
- Underlying the current BP gusher that threatens our nation and the world’s environment, is corporate willingness, in pursuit of short term gains for shareholders, to turn a blind eye to devastating long-term risks that accrue to the public. Obama’s response reflects the fact that he, like the rest of us, is hostage to the big oil corporations who provide the gunk that turns the wheels of industry. He can no more unchain the American economy from big oil than plug the hole 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean.
In yesterday’s Oval Office speech, I saw a man who is much less hopeful now than before. Young Obama finds himself trapped and impotent against the forces of oligarchy that wield their wealth and power with the single-minded will of ruthless battlefield generals. What he has been unable to address with sufficient audaciousness is that a war is raging right here and right now. It is a war between the innate, mindless greed of powerful corporate oligarchies and the people’s moral authority to do what is necessary to make our nation and the world, a better place.
My sense is that, at this moment, we are adrift in the abyss.
