Check out these two new pieces from Noam Chomsky, in his first major response to the elections. Just to give this diary a personal touch, Chomsky is a long-time Mumia supporter (featured in the new British film on Mumia), and when he visited Philly in 2002 he told me about Mumia:
We have to keep in mind that it’s one case that is symbolic of something much broader.... The U.S. prison system is simply class and race war. Class and race correlate in the US so much that it is hard to distinguish them. The whole incarceration movement is a neo-liberal program to get rid of "unnecessary" people. Take a look at the way the prison population has gone up since 1980. Before it was approximately the same as the rest of the industrialized world. Now it’s five to ten times as high. During the Clinton years it went up about 50%. Mumia Abu-Jamal and other prisoners are the kind of people that get assassinated by what’s called "social cleansing" in US client states like Colombia....These are policies of class and race war. The Mumia’s case is just one illustration of that. Its an important case, but is also a much more general phenomenon.
Read the rest here: http://hbjournalist.googlepages.com/...
You can read the full transcript here at Democracy Now!:
http://www.democracynow.org/...
Then, check out this essay at Z Net, where he convincingly argues that Obama is already heading in the wrong direction which his new staff choices, so popular pressure is badly needed now, so we can get the most out of Obama. Read the full essay here:
http://www.zmag.org/...
The Election, Economy, War, and Peace
November 25, 2008 By Noam Chomsky, Z Net
The Administration
Turning to the future, what can we realistically expect of an Obama administration? We have two sources of information: actions and rhetoric.
The most important actions to date are selection of staff. The first selection was for vice-President: Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion among Senate Democrats, a long-time Washington insider, who consistently votes with his fellow Democrats but not always, as when he supported a measure to make it harder for individuals to erase debt by declaring bankruptcy.
The first post-election appointment was for the crucial position of chief of staff: Rahm Emanuel, one of the strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion among House Democrats and like Biden, a long-term Washington insider. Emanuel is also one of the biggest recipients of Wall Street campaign contributions, the Center for Responsive Politics reports. He "was the top House recipient in the 2008 election cycle of contributions from hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry." Since being elected to Congress in 2002, he "has received more money from individuals and PACs in the securities and investment business than any other industry"; these are also among Obama's top donors. His task is to oversee Obama's approach to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, for which his and Obama's funders share ample responsibility.
In an interview with an editor of the Wall Street Journal, Emanuel was asked what the Obama administration would do about "the Democratic congressional leadership, which is brimming with left-wing barons who have their own agenda," such as slashing defense spending (in accord with the will of the majority of the population) and "angling for steep energy taxes to combat global warming," not to speak of the outright lunatics in Congress who toy with slavery reparations and even sympathize with Europeans who want to indict Bush administration war criminals for war crimes. "Barack Obama can stand up to them," Emanuel assured the editor. The administration will be "pragmatic," fending off left extremists.
Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, Clinton's chief of staff. The leading figures in his economic team are Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, both enthusiasts for the deregulation that was a major factor in the current financial crisis. As Treasury Secretary, Rubin worked hard to abolish the Glass-Steagall act, which had separated commercial banks from financial institutions that incur high risks. Economist Tim Canova comments that Rubin had "a personal interest in the demise of Glass-Steagall." Soon after leaving his position as Treasury Secretary, he became "chair of Citigroup, a financial-services conglomerate that was facing the possibility of having to sell off its insurance underwriting subsidiary... the Clinton administration never brought charges against him for his obvious violations of the Ethics in Government Act."
Rubin was replaced as Treasury Secretary by Summers, who presided over legislation barring federal regulation of derivatives, the "weapons of mass destruction" (Warren Buffett) that helped plunge financial markets to disaster. He ranks as "one of the main villains in the current economic crisis," according to Dean Baker, one of the few economists to have warned accurately of the impending crisis. Placing financial policy in the hands of Rubin and Summers is "a bit like turning to Osama Bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism," Baker adds.
The business press reviewed the records of Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, which met on November 7 to determine how to deal with the financial crisis. In Bloomberg News, Jonathan Weil concluded that "Many of them should be getting subpoenas as material witnesses right about now, not places in Obama's inner circle." About half "have held fiduciary positions at companies that, to one degree or another, either fried their financial statements, helped send the world into an economic tailspin, or both." Is it really plausible that "they won't mistake the nation's needs for their own corporate interests?" He also pointed out that chief of staff Emanuel "was a director at Freddie Mac in 2000 and 2001 while it was committing accounting fraud."
Those are the actions, at the time of writing. The rhetoric is "change" and "hope."