From change to continuity

ONE OF the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realizes the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama?

Having campaigned with "Change you can believe in," President-elect Barack Obama has named his A-team. It includes Hillary Clinton, who voted to attack Iraq without reading the intelligence assessment and has since threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran on behalf of a foreign power, Israel. During his primary campaign, Obama referred repeatedly to Clinton's lies about her political record. When he appointed her secretary of state, he called her "my dear friend."

Obama's slogan is now "continuity." His secretary of defense will be Robert Gates, who serves the lawless, blood-soaked Bush regime as secretary of defense, which means secretary of war (America last had to defend itself when the British invaded in 1812). Gates wants no date set for an Iraq withdrawal and "well north of 20,000" troops to be sent to Afghanistan. He also wants America to build a completely new nuclear arsenal, including "tactical" nuclear weapons that blur the distinction with conventional weapons.

Another product of "continuity" is Obama's first choice for CIA chief, John Brennan, who shares responsibility for the systematic kidnapping and torturing of people, known as "extraordinary rendition."

Obama has assigned Madeleine Albright to report on how to "strengthen U.S. leadership in responding to genocide." Albright, as secretary of state, was largely responsible for the siege of Iraq in the 1990s, described by the UN's Denis Halliday as genocide.

There is more continuity in Obama's appointment of officials who will deal with the economic piracy that brought down Wall Street and impoverished millions. As in Bill Murray's nightmare, they are the same officials who caused it.

For example, Lawrence Summers will run the National Economic Council. As treasury secretary, according to the New York Times, he "championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the...instruments--aka toxic assets--that have spread financial losses [and] refused to heed critics who warned of dangers to come."

There is logic here. Contrary to myth, Obama's campaign was funded largely by rapacious capital, such as Citigroup and others responsible for the sub-prime mortgage scandal, whose victims were mostly African Americans and other poor people.

Is this a grand betrayal? Obama has never hidden his record as a man of a system described by Martin Luther King as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Obama's dalliance as a soft critic of the disaster in Iraq was in line with most establishment opinion that it was "dumb." His fans include the war criminals Tony Blair, who has "hailed" his appointments, and Henry Kissinger, who describes the appointment of Hillary Clinton as "outstanding." One of John McCain's principal advisers, Max Boot, who is on the Republican Party's far right, said: "I am "gobsmacked by these appointments. [They] could just as easily have come from a President McCain."

OBAMA'S VICTORY is historic, not only because he will be the first Black president, but because he tapped in to a great popular movement among America's minorities and the young outside the Democratic Party.

In 2006, Latinos, the country's largest minority, took America by surprise when they poured into the cities to protest against George W. Bush's draconian immigration laws. They chanted: "Sí, se puede!" (Yes we can!), a slogan Obama later claimed as his own. His secretary for homeland security is Janet Napolitano who, as governor of Arizona, made her name by stoking hostility against Latino immigrants.

On election eve, reported Gallup, most Obama supporters were "engaged" but "deeply pessimistic about the country's future direction." My guess is that many people knew what was coming, but hoped for the best. In exploiting this hope, Obama has all but neutered the antiwar movement that is historically allied to the Democrats.

After all, who can argue with the symbol of the first Black president in this country of slavery, regardless of whether he is a warmonger? As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, Obama is a "brand" like none other, having won the highest advertising campaign accolade and attracted unprecedented sums of money.

The brand will sell for a while. He will close Guantánamo Bay, whose inmates represent less than one percent of America's 27,000 "ghost prisoners." He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: "They have nowhere else to go."

Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of "continuity"?

In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicized by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It is as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.

First published in the New Statesman.