Street has been critical of the Obama administration from the beginning. I think he makes a strong case for his position, but your mileage may vary.
http://www.zcommunications.org/remembering-obama-by-paul-streetRemembering Obama
Reflections on Race, Class, Empire, and the First Black President (and a Comment by Allan Nairn*)
By Paul Street
THE MACHNE STILL “SET ON KILL”
Sometimes you run across an eloquent statement that rings true and false at one and the same time. Look, for example, at the following comment made by the courageous left journalist Allan Nairn in response to the left broadcaster Amy Goodman’s request that he provide a brief overview of the Obama administration’s first year last January:
“Well, I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism, the cultural blow. And he accomplished that on Election Day. That was huge. This is one of the most destructive forces in world history, and by simply—by virtue of becoming president, Obama did it major damage.”
“But once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so.”<1> There is something very valuable and powerful in this remark, made on Goodman’s television show “Democracy Now!” I am referring to the richly ironic way in which Nairn simultaneously acknowledges (A) the historic nature of the fact that a black family now resides in the White House – in the top office of the historically arch-racist U.S., and (B) the first black president’s chilling commitment to that nation’s continuing murderous imperial militarism.
This is an important duality to grasp and Nairn puts it very well. Anyone who doubts that Obama has “kept
set on kill” should consult the impressive record of murder and mayhem that the winner of the latest Nobel Peace Prize has already built across South Asia and in the Middle East.<2>
EXCEEDING BUSH
Still, I think there are seven key problems with Nairn’s declaration <3>, which I find insufficiently critical on numerous interrelated levels.
First, “kept the machine set on kill” is probably an understatement. As the left U.S. foreign policy critic Edward S. Herman has noted, Obama has very possibly “exceed Bush’s bullying and power-projection.” As Herman explains:
<edit>
Fourth, Nairn could and probably should have made the same ironic point on Obama’s domestic record. Obama has kept the “corporate-managed democracy’s” <9> state-capitalist policy machine set on “cha-ching” for the rich, powerful, and parasitic Few. The first black president has of course acted in firm accord with what Herman and David Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money,” which exercises a deadly behind-the-scenes veto power over any who would seek “to change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime.”<10> From labor law non-reform to financial non-regulation to the climate issue and so-called “health reform,” Obama has repeatedly espoused and acted in accord with what the novelist and political essayist Kevin Baker has termed “a 'pragmatism' that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests.”<11> As the perceptive Marxist analyst David Harvey observed on Goodman’s “Democracy Now" one year ago, "what trying to do is to reinvent the same system" - to "reconstitute the same sort of capitalism we have had over and over again over the last thirty years in a slightly more regulated, benevolent form" that doesn't "challenge the fundamentals."<12>
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