Obama's Address: Smooth? Yes. Transformative? No.

By Dave Lindorff

Barack Obama’s first address to Congress provided Americans with
yet another example of competent speechmaking, and I suppose, given
that we’ve just endured eight painful years of oratorical farce, being
able to listen to your president without wincing is something.

The problem is that the way forward proposed by the president as
laid out in this address was almost always half-hearted, wrong-headed
or doomed.

Obama declared at the outset of his address that the economic
crisis was the major issue confronting the country, and while one could
argue that this crisis is merely a symptom of much bigger issues, like
the nearly completed deindustrialization of the nation, the death grip
of militarism, and the growing political power of corporations, one
could also concede that there is an urgent need to deal with the
deepening recession.

But clearly, the proposals offered by the president for tackling
the crisis are not up to the task. He spoke primarily of the need to
“get banks lending” again, explaining that this would require pouring
still more hundreds of billions of dollars into these failing
institutions. You’d think that with a whole stable of bankers at his
elbow, the president would by now have heard from at least someone that
this is nonsense, but apparently not. Nobody in the White House or the
Cabinet seems to want to point out to the boss that the reason banks
aren’t lending is because most people—and companies—aren’t interested
in borrowing. The economy is tanking and assets are sinking in value by
the day. Why would anyone want to borrow to invest in such an economy?
Furthermore, even if someone did? want to borrow, banks will
not want to lend unless they think there’s a reasonable prospect of
having the money repaid. That means they want to see income, they want
to see a full order book, they want to see, in the case of a mortgage,
an asset that is fairly valued. None of this exists.

That’s why the first $350 billion that was given to the banks last
fall was simply pissed away and lost, not lent out, and it’s why the
same thing is likely to happen to the next $350 billion Obama is
preparing to give away. It won’t matter if he establishes a monitoring
system for the second tranch of the Troubled Assets Relief Program
bailout funds, or a mandate that they be used for making loans.

What is needed to fix this crisis is job security, and the only way
to create that is by creating jobs. Obama talks of creating 3-3.5
million jobs, but most of these won’t even be created, even in smaller
numbers, until the end of this year, by which time the official rate of
unemployment could be above 9%, and the real unemployment rate above
20% (that would be including people who’ve given up looking for work,
or who are involuntarily working part time).

If the president really wanted to kick-start the economy, he would
have announced a massive government program to directly hire the
unemployed, by both the federal government and state and local
governments (through block grants to the states), which would put
people to work right now as teachers’ aides, park workers, school
crossing guards, library assistants, companions for the elderly, city
and rural clean-up crews, housing renovation project workers, mural
painters, etc. If he wanted to get really creative, he could establish
teams of people, working under skilled contractor supervisors, to serve
as an army of disaster relief workers, who could speed to the scene of
future disasters to help local residents rebuild. Millions of
out-of-work people could be put productively to work with far fewer
dollars than what is about to be shoveled out to contractors to
construct or repair bridges and highways a year from now or more.

But that’s just the start of the problem with Tuesday’s address to
Congress. Obama then turned to what he said were the nation’s three
great challenges—energy, health care and education. He’s right that
these are all serious problems, but his solutions are not up to the
challenge.

On energy, he proposed spending $15 billion on research and
development and for programs to improve efficiency. If he really wanted
to reduce US reliance on foreign energy, and to significantly reduce US
greenhouse gas emissions, though, instead of funneling money to huge
corporations and utilities, he would have called for a major national
program, through tax credits, to subsidize the retrofitting of homes
with geothermal heating systems. These systems, which use the earth’s
internal heat to warm water, can reduce the use of oil for home heating
to zero, could be installed for as little as $10,000 per home on
average if done in volume, and would pay for themselves over time. A
federal tax credit of $5000 would probably be enough to convince many
homeowners to do it, and the work would provide endless numbers of jobs
across the country to plumbers and plumbers’ helpers and well drillers,
besides massively reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Heck, he could
kill two birds by calling for a massive training program to train
unemployed people to do geothermal conversion work. Credits could also
be offered to massively expand the installation of home rooftop solar
water heaters, again a major potential source of employment for
laid-off workers.

Obama’s health care plans, as they’ve been explained, are a recipe
for failure. There is no way that this nation’s health care cost and
access problems can be solved that includes the insurance industry as a
part of it. The key to solving them is having the government become the
paymaster, as every other modern society in the world has long since
realized. While Obama was whizzing through Canada, he should have
stopped at a local Canadian health clinic and asked the locals how they
like their health care system. He would have gotten an earful! There is
no need for him to convent meetings of “business and labor, experts and
health providers” to figure out what to do. Instead of trying to
reinvent the wheel, he need only ask some Canadian health officials to
come down and set up a version of their system here. For that matter,
he could ask the executives at Canadian subsidiaries of US companies
operating in Canada—they love the Canadian health care system too!

Finally, on education, the president missed the point. It’s true
that education in the US is a disgrace, that it is grossly unequal in
both availability and quality depending upon the race and class of the
local students, and that the educational standard of the nation as a
whole is in decline. But simply pouring money into schools and into
college loan programs won’t solve all this. One answer is to end the
crazy idea of having local government be the primary source of funding
for education. A second problem is that Americans have been discovering
that getting an education is no ticket to success. Jobs are being
shipped overseas so fast these days—including good jobs like
engineering and math, and lately even law—that it makes no sense for
students to borrow a king’s ransom to pay tuition and learn a trade. If
they’re lucky people who earn a PhD in physics may end up managing a
Burger King outlet. Worse yet, those Americans who decide to pursue
education for reasons of passion rather than earning potential are also
often dismayed to learn that subjects like literature, art, music and
other “soft” subjects are not valued at all in our crass, commercial
society. In China, talented students fight to enroll in state-run
conservatories to study the arts. In Taiwan, the government just opened
a striking new high school and university of the arts. In Europe,
students study musical instruments as part of their state curriculum.
Here in the US, meanwhile, school districts are killing off their art
and music programs, and focusing on the “Three Rs” (forget creative
writing). Even history gets short shrift.

If the president wants to revive education, he should stop talking
about it as a job-training program, and start talking about it as the
essence of a civilization. Instead of men in uniform being honored in
the Capitol peanut gallery during his speech, or at least along with
them, he should have invited some teachers so he could ask them to
stand up and take a round of applause. (Even Connecticut Senator Joe
Lieberman, the turncoat Democrat who backed Obama’s opponent John
McCain last fall, and who looked like he was sucking on a lemon as the
president spoke, would have had to clap then.)

Finally, of course, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And here Obama was particularly disappointing, though this was no
surprise. He promised have most US troops out of Iraq by August
2010—but not all. US forces will continue to be there, fighting and
supporting fighting, indefinitely. Meanwhile, instead of coming home,
many American soldiers will simply be moved to Afghanistan, where Obama
is expanding the war, with plans likely to have 60,000 troops there by
this summer, and no doubt far more by the time Iraq has (hopefully)
wound down. If the president thinks he is going to help cut the federal
deficit by ending the war in Iraq, as he claimed in his address, he
doesn’t know much about accounting. The War in Afghanistan will
certainly eat up any savings he gets out of Iraq, particularly if it
leads to a wider conflict in Pakistan.

It was finally, both tragic and ironic that the most forcefully
delivered line of the evening was shamelessly and without citation
lifted by the president from his predecessor. His assertion that "The
United States of America does not torture" was a repeat of an identical
statement made by President George W. Bush, and since Obama has merely
told the military to abide by the military field manual in that regard,
and has declined to prosecute the torture crimes of the past
administration, it is just about as empty.

No amount of smooth talking gets around it: this was not the program of a “transformative” presidency.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net