Primary Obama

While the Obama administration has been getting testy about those professional leftists disgruntled with them, it's not that much of a mystery why, as partially outlined here by Glenn Greenwald ("The Profound Mystery of the Enthusiasm Gap", Sept 2): broken promises on immigration reform, gay rights, civil liberties, labor rights, protection of Social Security, government transparency, etc. To Glenn's list I would also add a health care "reform" that keeps the useless private insurance companies in charge, guaranteeing them millions more subsidized customers, dealing away a public option in closed-door deals with insurance companies.

Given that all Democratic base constituencies were betrayed, who has the Obama admin been serving? The finance industry. Please read all of this fairly short piece, "The Oligarch's President" by Charles Ferguson (director of "Inside Job", BS Math, PhD Poli Sci). Here, though, are a few excerpts:

Beginning almost immediately, the president consistently opposed any effort to control financial industry compensation -- even for firms receiving federal aid, as most were in 2009. Then came a long period of total inaction, followed by the toothless Wall Street reform bill passed this summer and the appointment of a former Fannie Mae lobbyist, Tom Donilon, as the new national security advisor.

Most tellingly, there has not been a single criminal prosecution of any firm or any individual senior financial executive -- literally zero -- and, of course, no appointment of a special prosecutor. While we can debate the extent to which fraud caused the crisis, and precisely how much fraud was committed, the answer is clearly not zero. We already know that Lehman and other firms used fake accounting to hide liabilities and inflate assets; that lenders and securitizers frequently knew that the loans they sold and packaged were fraudulent or defective; and, of course, we also now know that Goldman Sachs and other investment banks sold securities they knew to be defective...

It is, in short, overwhelmingly clear that President Obama and his administration decided to side with the oligarchs -- or at least not to challenge them.

What to do? Ian Welsh sums it up well here: "The Primary Obama Movement Begins Today":

Obama and Democrats had a historic chance to fix America. The rich who run America, whom the Supreme Court in Citizens United gave permission to outright buy elections, could have been broken when Obama took power. All that was necessary was to force them to take their losses. Contrary to what apologists for wealth have told you, this would not have meant disaster for the economy, there were ways to protect regular Americans while making the rich take their losses.

Instead Barack Obama, as in so many other ways, continued Bush’s policies, and kept the rich bailed out. The end result has not only been the tsunami of foreclosure issues which still threaten to swamp the banks, has not only been trillions in dollars of taxpayer money being used to keep rich people rich (much more money than was spent on the stimulus), it has been the wholesale transfer of money from poor to rich: an absolute decline in total wages, average wages and median wages of ordinary Americans, while Wall Street pays themselves even higher bonuses than before, gives record money to Republicans and the rich pay themselves more.

Obama must be primaried and he must be primaried from the left

The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down. If the left does not do this, left wing politics and policies will be discredited with Obama. This is important not as a matter of partisan or ideological preference, it is important because left wing policies work. It is necessary to move back to strongly progressive taxation, it is necessary to force the rich to take their losses, it is necessary to deal with global warming, it is necessary to deal with the fact that the era of cheap oil is over, it is necessary to stop the offshoring engine which is destroyin the American middle class.

I have been a supporter of publicly funded campaigns for some time now, since it became clear that Republicans cared only about funneling money to their rich buddies and not dealing with any of the urgent problems our country faces (see Ian's list, above). However, now that it (1) the Roberts court is declaring a key feature of Clean Money Elections unconstitutional (see Davis v. FEC) and (2) Democrats have changed the politics but not so much the policies from the Bush admin, election reform can only be part of a broader effort. I'm not sure how we go about mounting a primary challenge to Obama, but I believe Ian is right. We must.