EcoLogics

First published 13 February 2009; updated 16 December 2009

Several weeks ago an environmental educator and scientist who works in the U.S. sent around an email that celebrated the changes being introduced by the Obama administration. The scientist suggested that things were already looking up, what with real scientists being appointed to high places. As he put it at the beginning of his email, ‘Imagine! National scientific organizations headed by scientists again!!’

The educator was certainly not alone in looking forward to a more hopeful time. Something like a collective sigh of relief could be heard amongst most environmental educators across the globe on the day that Obama beat McCain. Obama’s victory was widely interpreted as the end of the road for what may well go down as the most ideologically-driven presidency since Nixon. Under Bush, big business was given concession after concession at the expense of a variety of local environmental concerns, but also at the expense of the increasingly urgent matter of climate change policy.

The cartoonesque image of an ostrich with a Bush-like head buried in the sand would have been appropriate were it not for the fact that there is ample evidence that the Bush administration engaged in all manner of back-room strategies to undermine the work of scientists with bona fide research—research about climate change, and also about a host of other subjects that Bush and his increasingly hard right-wing advisers regarded as being ‘politically sensitive’. Little wonder that just two years after Bush had taken office, Donald Kennedy was speaking in the Science magazine of ‘an epidemic of politics’ in a variety of science institutions (1).

Over the past few weeks, some have tried to find the silver lining in the Bush administration’s toxic cloud. For example, just this week an article in the International Herald Tribune tried to argue that ‘even those who view [Bush’s] environmental record most harshly acknowledge that he also took significant action. He improved air quality, gave renewable energy a large financial boost, left behind the largest marine sanctuaries ever established and started a dialogue that could help lead to the next international treaty on climate change’(2). This is a sweeping generalisation that is almost certainly false for that very reason. But more to the point, it is a bit like arguing that Bush deserves credit for ‘pacifying’ Iraq; not only is that not true, but its consequentialist logic misses the fundamental issues regarding the illegality of the war, the subterfuge that was employed to launch it, and its disastrous consequences for the country’s people, if not for the entire region.

There is, then, good reason to look forward to a significant shift in the new administration’s policies, and certainly there is some evidence that such a shift is already under way: witness, for example, the naming of competent officials such as Jane Lubchenco to head NOAA and Steven Chu as head for the Department of Energy. Witness also the repealing of a raft of Bush administration measures in areas such as drilling in Utah and in the operation of coal-fired plants. At least by mid-February 2009, it also seemed true that Obama was making ‘all the right noises’ in regard to the urgency of taking swift action on specific climate change policy.

After recognising these positive aspects, it is pertinent to make the case for an even greater vigilance, and more environmental activism during the Obama presidency. There are three general reasons for this. The most obvious is the extreme urgency of swift change regarding climate change policies. Dr James Hansen put the time frame starkly into perspective when he said in an interview for the UK’s Observer that ‘We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead’(3). Early today, Prof James McCarthy echoed this idea in the BBC News website (4).

There are, however, two additional, and somewhat less obvious reasons for both goading the Obama administration into action, and scrutinizing its policies more carefully than ever. The first of these has to do with the ideological consequences of what might be described as the ‘post-Bush effect’. Put simply, Bush’s administration was so driven by a right-wing ideology that it may seem that Obama has only to ‘be Obama’ to do a far better job. Such complacency is not only disingenuous, but dangerous. As the time-scale proposed by Hansen and McCarthy makes clear, nothing short of a revolutionary set of policies will address the environmental crisis; in such a context, just ‘being Obama’ is unlikely to be enough.

This leads us to another reason for being critical vis-à-vis the Obama administration’s policies. If it is true that Obama has made the right noises with respect to the environment, a careful reading of many of his policies in other areas, and the team of advisers that he has assembled suggests a president that will be willing to go a long ways in appeasing the Republicans, or rather, the alliance of lobbies that represent the interests of neoliberal institutions. Beyond the extraordinary nomination of Robert Gates as Defence Secretary, it is highly significant, for example, that Obama named Timothy F. Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. Geithner was the former president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and is reported to have played a leading role in trying to manage the financial crisis. It seems clear, on the one hand, that Geithner was not very effective in that role. But even if he was, it is revealing that, according to the New York Times, Geithner ‘largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president’(5). It would appear, in this sense, that in the U.S. as in Britain, politicians are still promoting some of the very people who were most closely associated, by action or inaction, with the neoliberal excesses in the finance sector. This seems not only disingenuous, but manifestly wrong from the point of view of potential conflicts of interest. Some might even argue that it is a recipe for the kind of corruption imputed to the Bush administration, and in Britain, to New Labour.

By way of an aside, it is remarkable to note how consistently most of the media are trying to either downplay, or reconcile the presence of such ancien régime figures with Obama’s signature call for change. To quote just two examples in the New York Times, the paper argued in its background information pages that the new Commerce Secretary, Judd Gregg, was ‘chairman of the budget committee from 2005 to 2007 and is known as a fiscal conservative. He could help President Obama by capitalizing on his relationships with fellow Republicans as well as his contacts in the business community(6).  Ken Salazar, the new Interior Secretary is concerned, was described by the  Times as follows: ‘A few environmental groups may fault him for his pragmatism, and some within the oil and gas industry may disagree with his cautious stance, like favoring a phased approach to opening Colorado’s Roan Plateau to drilling’(7). Again and again, the presence of such figures is represented as a kind of show of strength on the part of Obama, a kind of ‘broad tent’ approach that is able to include, rather than exclude, the opposition. Perhaps it is true that, at least to start with, Obama can simply not afford to ignore the ‘coalition of the right’ in the US and beyond. But the suspicion has to be that the presence of people like Gates, Geithner and of course Gregg may yet be proven to be a sign of Obama’s own conservatism—a conservatism acutely analysed by Gabriel Paquette in the Guardian [8]. More generally, it may also be a sign of the continued hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of this term, of the neoliberal lobby groups that have apparently already ensconced themselves in the new administration.

Far from having consequences for commerce or the economy alone, this ‘broad tent’ approach may mean that Obama will be as prone as the Clinton administration to engaging in the kind of political compromise that arguably led the U.S. to drift further and further to the right, and further and further into the ‘grey’ during the pre-Bush years. The paradox is that, however much Bush was (and remains) a hate figure amongst most if not all environmental activists, there was a terrible clarity about most of his policies, a clarity that more often than not made it possible for environmental activists to smell an environmental rat a mile away (apologies to Muroidea lovers). This did not always make it possible to stop the policies, but it did mean that environmentalists did not often have to spend a lot of political energy trying to unmask dynamics of ideological dissimulation.

With Obama, the situation may be reversed; it may be more feasible to stop some policies, or at least to mediate them, but their implications are likely to be far less obvious, and so potentially just as damaging if and when the neoliberals get their way. For this reason, environmental activists and environmental educators will need to fine-tune their critical faculties, and prepare for what is likely to be a four—or perhaps an eight—year struggle with Obama advisers who are apparently already proving effective at whispering sweet neoliberal nothings into Obama’s ear.

By way of a postscript: If this seems unduly pessimistic to liberal readers on either side of the pond, they might care to reflect on the misguided reception many Britons gave to New Labour, and to Tony Blair during his first years as prime minister.

Update, February 12, 2009, 22:25 GMT: news just in, Judd Gregg has declined the honour of being Obama’s Commerce Secretary. Is the ‘broad tent’ collapsing? Hardly—there are plenty of neoliberals amongst the Democrats. Is this a sign that perhaps Obama is less conservative than this blog has made him out to be? Let us wait and see who is next on Obama’s list of prospective Commerce Secretaries.

Update 16 December 2009

Nearly a year after this post was published, its warnings and predictions seem, if anything, naively restrained. The ‘environmental’ Obama that we have seen in action in the last months has not only proven to be conservative, but is now actively muddying the waters of climate change policy in Copenhagen. Obama is on his way to going down in history as the velvet claw of neoliberalism. He is to George W. Bush and Reaganite neoliberalism what Tony Blair was to the Thatcherite variety of neoliberalism.

References

1) See Science, 31 January 2003, Vol. 299, No. 5607, p. 625. Article available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/299/5607/625, accessed August 24, 2007.

2) International Herald Tribune, February 7, 2009, ‘Obama sorting Bush’s environment legacy’, at http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/07/america/enviro.4-424718.php, accessed February 11, 2009.

3) The Observer, January 18, 2009,‘We have only four years left to act on climate change – America has to lead’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/obama-climate-change, accessed February 11, 2009.

4) BBC News online, February 12, 2009, ‘Obama “must act now” on climate’, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7885036.stm, accessed February 12, 2009.

5) The New York Times, February 9, 2009, ‘Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout’, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/business/economy/10bailout.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Timothy%20Geithner&st=cse, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

6) The New York Times, ‘Jud Gregg’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/judd-gregg, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

7) The New York Times, ‘Ken Salazar’, at http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/new_team/show/ken-salazar, accessed Febuary 10, 2009.

8] The Guardian, January 26, 2009 ‘Obama the Conservative’, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/26/obama-conservative-progressive-agenda, accessed January 26, 2009.

Tell me who your friends are and I will know who you are.

February 4th was the day when the last nails went into the coffin of the hope that Obama represented to peace-loving, and democractic people.

The coffin was several months in the making. When we thought that he stood for a new world order regarding the Middle East, Obama made a hard-right speech last summer to the Israeli Lobby in which he promised AIPAC an undivided Jerusalem. To anyone familiar with the history of Zionism, that is synonymous with saying that Arab groups will not be allowed to claim as their own—and it is their own—the East Jerusalem occupied by the Israelis since the Six–Day War.

No wonder the delegates of AIPAC were surprised and pleased; at the time, not even Israel itself was daring to make that claim in public. To suggest, as the Obama camp did afterwards, that Obama was misquoted or misinterpreted was disingenuous; indeed, it was almost as disingenuous as pretending, at the height of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, that Obama could not offer an opinion on the Israeli assassination of hundreds of civilians or the targeting of the UN HQ in Gaza with white phosphorous shells because George W. Bush was still the president.

When we thought that Obama would take a big broom to the corrupt Washington, and would use it to sweep away the most important symbols of the Bush administration’s war (itself not only an illegal, but a corrupt war), Obama slapped us in the face. He left Gates as Secretary of Defence, and named Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State. However moderate by Bush standards, Robert Gates played a central role in managing the illegal occupation of Iraq, and that makes him a war criminal. Hillary Clinton supported the war, and so was part of the political order that enabled George W. Bush to get away, quite literally, with murder.

Let there be no misunderstanding: of course politics is a ruthless game, and after the election Obama no doubt felt that he needed to do something to include and appease the republicans who voted for him, and the people who voted for Clinton. That, however, does not really contradict the point being made here. Anyone who thinks that there is no link between the rise of the kind of politics represented by George W. Bush and the Clinton administration needs to think again; even after acknowledging that the religious right made a grotesque scene out of the Monica Lewinski affair, it is clear that the Clintons and their coterie were an integral part of the U.S. drift to an increasingly corrupt and right-wing politics—a drift that, as coupled to the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, made it possible for Nixon’s neocons to roar back into power, and to begin to dismantle the U.S. system of checks and balances.

If you think this is harsh, and that there is no continuity between the Clinton years and the Bush years, consider how many Democrats have had to be excluded from Obama’s administration, or have had to give up their new posts days if not hours after accepting them. Or look at the rise of Rahm Emanuel, the man whom Obama chose as his chief–of–staff. Emanuel, a former Clinton apparatchik, is not only Zionist—we return to the Israel Lobby—but a hardcore neoliberal and Iraq War apologist, a man with a history of virulent, some might say violent loyalty to those in power (EcoLogics is mindful of the oft-quoted passage, cited in Emanuel’s Wikipedia entry, that in the 1996 election ‘Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting ‘Dead! … Dead! … Dead!’ and plunging the knife into the table after every name’.)

Emanuel is just one, albeit a particularly aggressive, example of the kind of Clinton-era operatives that now permeate the Obama administration. This is as much a sign of the Clintons’ lingering power, as it is of Obama’s obvious lack of discomfort with this political caste. It signals not just a return to Democrat business as usual, but a complete contradiction of most of the things that Obama reportedly stood for.

The list of contradictions to Obama’s carefully nurtured image of a peace-loving democrat could go on and on, but EcoLogics will mention just two more events, both of which came to light on February 4th. The first was analysed in yesterday’s blog (Obama, Miliband, and Torture), and involves Obama’s deception vis-a-vis the U.S.’s policy on torture and extraordinary renditions. It now seems likely that where Bush went for out–and–out torture (torture practiced almost publicly, and publicly defended by Dick Cheney), Obama is going back to the older modus operandi of discrete torture, torture practiced subtly but denounced in public, as opposed to torture practiced routinely if not crowed in public. If any political realist is reading this and thinking, ‘get real, it was always thus’, then you’ve just made EcoLogics’ point: Obama does not stand for democratic change, he stands for a change back to what the U.S. stood for before Bush came to power.

The second and last event is the one that involves the crowning insult to anyone who is a political liberal, let alone anyone committed to the political left. The event was announced in an unfortunately titled article in the Guardian yesterday, ‘Barak Obama makes Tony Blair his unofficial “first friend”‘ . The article reported that Obama said that “I want to thank my good friend Tony Blair for coming today [to the annual National Prayer Breakfast], somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish. And we are very grateful to him.”

‘Somebody who did it first’?! ‘Dedicated leadership’? ‘An example for so many people’?! Is Obama referring to the fact that Blair has condoned Israeli State Terrorism? Or is he referring to the fact that Blair was the man who, along with George W. Bush, deliberately deceived the world about Iraq’s so-called WMDs? Or perhaps he refers to Blair the man who brought to power the likes of Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett, both of whom were forced to quit in corrupt disgrace, but who then weaseled their way back into power? Or perhaps Obama refers to Blair the man whose virulent neoliberalism took the UK where Thatcher herself never dared to go, the man whose political partnership with Gordon Brown led to the current economic collapse—a collapse which, however linked to similar policies in the U.S., is also home–grown. The depression (in Brown’s own words, yesterday) is an economic calamity for which Blair must shoulder a significant portion of the blame: it was in Blair’s years as prime minister that the markets were allowed to run wild, and it is still Blairites that are pushing for even more privatisation, even more radically neoliberal reform. Oh, and let us not forget, while we’re at it, that Blair took up a post as an adviser in none other than J P Morgan.

Viewed from these perspectives, Blair did ‘do it first’, if by this one refers to the British prime minister who did away with some of the UK’s most fundamental civil liberties, and the man who looked the other way when Britain’s biggest–ever protest march took place to repudiate the Bush–Blairite conspiracy vis-a-vis Iraq, and the man who ushered in corporate clientelism on a scale that even the Tories never quite managed.

EcoLogics is emphatically atheist, but the expression ‘God help us all’ is the only one that seems capable of expressing the horror that begins to be felt by true democrats at the prospect of a U.S. president who is increasingly proving to be an ideological replicant of the very people he so persuasively trounced in the primary, and then in the national, elections. Perhaps we should adapt the saying quoted at the outset of this post: tell me who your advisers are and I will know what kind of a president you are.

February 4th, 2009 may well go down as the day that it finally began to dawn on the good people of Britain that Barak Obama does not really stand for change. The date is made all the more richly ironical by the fact that this was also the day in which the Guardian and other media circulated a picture by Nicholas Khamm/AFP/Getty Images which showed David Miliband, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, ’shoulder petting’ with Hillary Clinton. Just days earlier, the New Labour media machine also let it be known that Brown was first on the list of Obama’s post-inaugural presidential telephone calls—this no doubt as part of an effort to cream off some of the Obama veneer for the embattled Brown, and to suggest that the UK will continue to be essential to the U.S..

Alas, on February 4th—if not long before—the truth began to make itself ruthlessly known, in the form of a judgment by two of the UK’s senior judges regarding the case of Binyam Mohammed, a British resident held in custody at Guantánamo Bay. Like the rest of the Guantánamo detainees, Mohammed has been tortured, but efforts to disclose the nature and extent of the torture have been blocked by David Miliband, who claims that the U.S. has threatened retaliation if the ugly details are made public. As an article in the Times put it,

“The US has threatened to withhold intelligence from the UK if evidence of the alleged torture of a British resident held at Guantánamo Bay is made public.

Details of how the “terrorist” detainee was allegedly tortured — and what UK intelligence services knew about it — must remain secret because of the American threats, the High Court ruled yesterday.

Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said lawyers for the Foreign Secretary had told them that the threat by the US still applied under President Obama“(emphasis added).

EcoLogics suspects one of three scenarios:

1) it is true that the threat has been made, and Miliband and the rest of New Labour are rightly concerned (though this blackmail does not justify the cover-up);
2) it is not true that the threat has been made, and Miliband and the rest of New Labour are trying to hide the UK’s dirty role in Bush’s renditions;
3) a strange mixture of the above: the US has grumbled, and New Labour has bigged-up the grumble to the judges (presumably to cover its ally and/or to hide its own role in the torture).

Whatever the case, Miliband will now find himself in the humiliating position of having to deny that any threats have been made. Rather more importantly, everything now seems to point in the direction of continued US-UK cover-ups, and arguably, more torture.

There is circumstantial evidence that this will be the case. First, if Obama really were serious about putting an end to torture, it would be easy enough for the new US administration to come forward with a mea culpa vis-a-vis Mohammed, e.g. a ‘yes, we admit that it happened, and it was vicious, but it was the Bush administration that did it. This is what happened’. The absence of such a mea culpa —and indeed Obama’s refusal to go after Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration’s war criminals—suggests the beginning of the kind of de facto process of exculpation that was instituted in Argentina by Alonsín and Ménem, and which initially allowed some of the hemisphere’s most vicious thugs to go scot-free. As Argentina realised years later, one doesn’t put an end to the crimes and corruption of police states by letting their agents off the hook.

Then again, it is not really necessary to speculate on the basis of the absence of policy in Obama’s administration. Anyone who looked carefully at the news about Obama’s allegedly new stance on torture will have noticed that Obama inserted a number of ‘loopholes‘ in his new policy—as noted by the hyperlinked website, these loopholes cunningly create states of exception under which the Obama regime will allow torture to continue. Amongst other devices, the administration will differentiate between ‘armed conflict’ and ‘counterterrorism operations’. Torture is not allowed in the former, but it is not excluded in the latter context.

Anyone who thinks this is reading too closely between the lines will have to explain why there will still be ‘extraordinary renditions’. As denounced by the LA Times,

“Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.”

Obama all change? EcoLogics believes the American expression for such nonsense is ‘Bullshit’.

Update, 16:03 GMT. How artfully Miliband has dissimulated the real issues by claiming that this is entirely a matter of trust amongst intelligence agencies. His arguments remind EcoLogics of a point made long ago by the sociologist Max Weber, who noted that anyone who goes too far in the direction of an ethics of responsibility (to colleagues, constituencies, etc.) is on a course for abject corruption.