During his weekly address Saturday, Obama said too many Americans are struggling to get by. He said Congress should extend payroll tax cuts that save the average American family $1,000 a year.
President Obama says there is no excuse for "inaction," and he believes Congress will find common ground to move the country forward.
In the Republican Party's weekly address, Senator Pat Toomey blamed the Obama administration's policies for the economic stalemate and slow job growth in the United States.
Toomey said too many government regulations have discouraged businesses from hiring.
I won’t be supporting the Democrats this time around. The real, never-ending threat from the radical Right is no reason to embrace repugnant measures, any more than the existence of Al-Qaeda authorizes violating constitutional rights and international law. And besides, most Lesser Evil arguments rely on a simplistic view of our political system, one that ignores the ways in which the Democrats’ habitual appeasement of the Right only furthers an ever more reactionary restructuring of our economy and discourse. Both of the major parties serve corporate masters, and the menace of fascism isn’t going to fade because we vote for a slightly more genteel approach to gutting the rule of law at home and abroad. Far from being “Lesser” and “Greater” Evils, the two political parties are more like Good and Bad Cops who work us over in tandem. You might prefer the one who doesn’t hit you, but you don’t get to pick. They only come in pairs.
These are my views; they are surely debatable. But rather than argue their merits in detail, I want to consider the implications of the striking lack of debate on the left end of the spectrum–the kneejerk “don’t go there” attitude that I’ve just described, a version of which The Progressive’s Kevin Alexander Gray details in an essay on “Obama and Black America” (”If you dare to tell it like it is, you instantly and unsparingly get bashed and called a ‘hater’”). At least as bad as bashing is the pervasive, eerie silence about this president’s shameful record. As Tom Engelhardt puts it in a blog post entitled “The Militarized Surrealism of Barack Obama,” the fact that the president “regularly prostrates himself before this country’s special mission to the world” while invoking “God’s blessing upon the military” is typically “neither attacked nor defended…but as if by some unspoken agreement simply ignored.” Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald makes similar points in relation to domestic policy, noting liberals’ “stunning silence in the face of Obama’s efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits.”
I believe that this stance among groups of people supposedly adept at critical thinking signals anxiety about something more important than any single presidency. It speaks to how this president confronts us–certainly not for the first time, but now at a deeper, more threatening level– with the brute facts of America’s identity and prospects. Despite all warning signals, it was tempting to have faith in the Obama of 2008 in large part due to the symbolic interaction of two emotion-laden events: the relief of an election that felt like political rebirth after democracy’s near-death ordeal in the Bush years, and the threshold we crossed in choosing an African American president. For many, this election seemed to mean that America had a chance to “be America again,” in the words of Langston Hughes (”The land that never has been yet–/And yet must be”). Thus the natural reluctance of progressives to read the writing on the wall once the new administration got underway.
Facing squarely the huge disconnect between progressive principles and Obama’s policies pushes us to relinquish whatever remains of the comforting illusion that we inhabit a relatively benign and stable political landscape within which to work for positive change. Looking hard at all the reasons not to vote for four more years means pondering whether the unholy alliance of monopoly-finance capital and a permanently hyper-militarized foreign policy has set our country on a malign trajectory that we can’t substantially alter. Perhaps we need to rethink the time-honored leftist move of invoking the Better America we once believed could grow from the seeds of labor struggles, the Civil Rights Movement, and other past democratic glories. (The latest such effort to mobilize a “progressive” nationalism, “Rebuild the American Dream,” was recently launched by former Obama aide Van Jones, with MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and others.)
If the really existing U.S. of A. can’t be reformed, it needs to be abolished. (I mean the republic-cum-empire, of course, not The People–whose ultimate welfare may depend not at all on preserving their status as “my fellow Americans.”) It seems, indeed, that humanity’s very survival may depend, in significant part, on dismantling the hubris and sense of impunity now indelibly inscribed within our national project. What if the beautiful vision of Langston Hughes’s poem–the empowerment of all who’ve been used and abused–is no longer to be furthered by nationalistic means? What about Human Dreams?
“I do not believe/our wants/have made all our lies/holy.” Audre Lorde wrote those lines in “Between Ourselves,” a poem from her classic The Black Unicorn (1978) that questions “easy blackness as salvation.” I don’t pretend to know what she would have to say about the 2012 election. But I cherish what she and her heroic peers in the generation of the Civil Rights movement, Black Power, Second Wave feminism, and lesbian/gay liberation taught me about the political imperative of truth. Say it loud! Come out! Don’t be afraid to name the harshest realities. “Your silence will not protect you.” You can’t know your own strength, or who will stand by your side, until you take that risk.
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