Tag: Barack Obama

Eyes wide open

This post from David Sirota on Open Left jives with a column I wrote earlier today for next week’s Packet papers.

Sirota points out that President-elect Barack Obama has people his cabinet with centrists and corporate types, that he “is actually EMPOWERED to do what he’s doing because he took advantage of progressive movement weaknesses and used a vacuum to organize a movement around himself.”

That’s why he feels no hesitation in campaigning against the war, for Wall Street regulation, and against NAFTA, and then appoint a Cabinet filled with Iraq War supporters, free market fundamentalists who deregulated Wall Street, and a NAFTA-loving U.S. Trade Representative. It’s why one of his top aides saw no risk in writing a screed using Fox News talking points to tell the “left wing” of the Democratic Party to STFU. Because Team Obama ate part of the left, and organized it around the celebrity, charisma and leadership of one man – and the progressive movement that is organized around issues like the war, the economy and trade is still too weak to change the dynamic. Put another way, the forces of money and power that want Obama to embrace militarism, free market fundamentalism, corporate-written trade deals and general bashing of the Dirty Fucking Hippie still have more structural influence than the forces that want the opposite.

The Obama phenomenon, as a phenomenon, poses some dangers if we proceed assuming Obama is a left-liberal out of the Ted Kennedy/Paul Wellstone/Russ Feingold mold. Obama is not and never has been, though there remains a chance that circumstances and sometimes progressive rhetoric will result in progressive politics — especially if we on the left approach his administration with eyes wide open and are willing to hold nothing back.

There’s a real chance for “real change” – but that chance requires us to accept a daunting reality if we are to make something out of this moment. This isn’t to say Obama’s policies will be as conservative as his appointments. Not at all – as I’ve said ad nauseum, we should wait to withhold policy judgment until he makes explicit policy declarations (and the few that he’s made are pretty progressive). But it is to say we have to appreciate the structural realities in front of us , and work from those realities, if we are to really achieve “change we can believe in.”

Rather than treating Obama as a Dear Leader, insisting every move he makes – no matter how troubling – is Teh Awesome, and pretending all of his Cabinet appointments are ultra-progressive ponies with a Secret Plan, it’s far more productive to simply acknowledge what’s really going on, and work off it constructively – sometimes in opposition to Obama other times in tandem.

Bottom line: As Saul Alinsky told us decades ago, in order to be most effective, we have to start with where the world is – not where we want it to be.

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Jackson must answer questions raised by environmentalists


PEER — the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — is taking aim at former state Environmental Commissioner Lisa Jackson (pictured at Monday’s press conference in Washington), Barack Obama’s nominee for administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

PEER and several other environmentalists, according to Pro Publica, are critical of Jackson, who lives in East Windsor, for being “too close to industry, with(holding) information from the public and fall(ing) well short of the pledge she made when taking office in February 2006 to fix the state’s beleaguered toxic waste program.”

(T)wo years into Jackson’s tenure, the new system for cleaning up New Jersey’s 16,000 abandoned toxic waste sites still hasn’t been deployed.

“She identified this as her highest priority, but she never followed through,” says Jeff Ruch, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER. “This failure to perform risk-based ranking for determining cleanup priorities has contributed to the belated discovery of contaminated schools and day care centers.”

It’s not at all clear, however, that Jackson is responsible — a June report on the Superfund program found that the the state and the EPA have been slow to develop cleanup plans for the state’s sites. But much of the information in the report details information that occurred before Jackson came into office.

Many prominent New Jersey environmental advocates say that Jackson inherited most of the department’s problems from previous commissioners, and from staff cuts made by former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, who went on to become EPA administrator herself under President Bush.

“The department in charge of hazardous waste used to have 270 people, now they are down to 150,” says Tittel.

What does all of this mean for the EPA should Jackson take over? It’s difficult to say. But there appears to be enough criticism from environmentalists to create reasonable doubt — the kind of doubt that the Senate has a responsibility to probe — and Jackson has a responsibility to dispel — before the East Windsor resident should be allowed to take the lead of the EPA.

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Another centrist joins Obama’s team

Another paragon of the system joins the Obama economic team — welcome Paul Volcker, as chairman of the new Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Obama says the new advisory board

will be responsible for bringing fresh thinking and “vigorous oversight” to the administration’s efforts to jumpstart and reshape the nation’s economy.

“The reality is that sometimes policymaking in Washington can become too insular,” Obama said. “The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking–and those who serve in Washington don’t always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working for people, and which aren’t.”

His argument sounds good, but why not diversify these appointments — bring in some labor movement folks, or those who work on antipoverty efforts rather than the bureaucrats and Wall Street-types he’s tapped so far? It’s a good question that Obama has yet to answer.

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