to a culturally global humanity.
Yes, a black president was a sign from above for someone who grew up in the ’60s like me. In the past century we, the good communists (yes, there are good communists; I met a lot of them), had tried to emancipate the world from violence, war, exploitation. Certainly, we did not succeed. The bad communists were unmistakably more influential than us.
We had not succeeded, this is true. The socialist way has been trashed by totalitarian Bolsheviks and by subservient social-democrats.
Now was it the turn for someone like Obama? Maybe so, I told myself.
The force of events seemed to be ripe; the first black president was in the right situation to be led to do what people like me have failed to do in the twentieth century.
War has proven to be a horrible thing that generates more horrors, a defeat for everybody. And Obama was fully accredited to say so, after saying no to the invasion of Iraq conceived by the Bush regime, unlike his opponent in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who did not dare to reject the patriotic call. He seemed, therefore, in the position to prevent future wars.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the crisis of subprime mortgages, in my expectation, set the conditions for changing the regime of financial capitalism.
He came to the fore with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, and this was not irrelevant. Why should a politician say that, ‘Yes We Can’? Is not America already the most powerful country in the world? Is not the president of the United States already the most powerful man on Earth? Is not politics the dimension in which power is exerted?
So why would he need to remind us that ‘Yes We Can’?
Those three words were not an obvious declaration at all. That was a very strong statement, evidence that the man was smart and had zeroed in on the true problem. Obama knew that Americans wanted to be reassured on this point: we can. We have power therefore we can. Despite everything, we can: we can come out of the spiral of war, we can close Guantanamo, we can cancel the barbaric legacy of the Bush years, we can thwart the invading power of finance, we can end the history of racism and violence of the American police.
Nowadays, as I write these lines, eight years have passed from the pledge that was as much an exorcism as a promise.
The exorcism has failed, the promise has not been kept.
‘By any objective measurement, his presidency has been perhaps the most consequential since Franklin Roosevelt’s time,’ wrote Timothy Egan.1
‘To be fair’, wrote Paul Krugman,
Some widely predicted consequences of Obama’s re-election didn’t happen. Gasoline prices didn’t soar. Stocks didn’t plunge. The economy didn’t collapse, in fact the US economy has now added more than twice as many private-sector jobs under Obama that it did over the same period of George Bush administration, and the unemployment rate is a full point lower that the rate Mitt Romney promised to achieve by the end of 2016.2
Undeniably Obama has been the most consequential president of the United States for a long time. Nevertheless, war is scaling again, more dangerous and demented than ever. Guantanamo is still there, more shameful than ever. Weapons are still on sale in every American town, despite the rampages at Columbine, Newton, Aurora, and who knows how many more. Rates of polluting emissions are growing while climate change is far from receding and Americans do not seem prone to reduce energy consumption. And the American people are more intolerant than ever, more quick to hate. The American unconscious is raucously reacting to the scandal of a black president, and an obtuse, violent form of racism is spreading, while the number of black people killed by police has clearly shown that black lives do not matter so much. White middle-aged workers are swamped by unemployment and hyper-exploitation, by depression and by loneliness. Heroin is raging in rural areas and overdoses are killing more than ever.
After the rescue of the banking system, notwithstanding the rise in taxes on high incomes and the remarkable results in the creation of jobs, workers are still paid less and less in America, as they are everywhere in the Western world.
Every second day someone speaks of recovery and of job creation. The truth is unemployment is on the rise all over the world except in America, but in America labour is more and more precarious, less and less rewarded.
During the Obama presidency a new social movement emerged in America which peacefully occupied public spaces such as Zuccotti Park, in close proximity to the New York Stock Exchange, where they named themselves Occupy Wall Street. And there was no happy ending. Just one year after the occupation of Zuccotti Park, Hurricane Sandy whipped through Manhattan and devastated its poor residents and those of its neighbouring boroughs. Some Occupy Wall Street activists created Occupy Sandy, an effort to provide organized relief efforts, implying by their action that we have been left only catastrophes to occupy.
Today if you go to Zuccotti Park, beware of police: gatherings of more than three people are forbidden.
Everywhere social life is pillaged by those who hold the financial levers, wherever society is unable to defend itself against those who would pillage.
And identitarian aggression is spreading everywhere. White racism is clearly resurfacing in the US, where KKK-like aggressions against black people have become a daily litany.
I had trusted Obama, but now, as his second term expires, I’m sad to say that his performance has persuaded me that political hope is over. At a certain point, Obama changed his philosophy from the hopeful ‘Yes We Can’ of 2008 to a cynical ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’.
Okay, I told myself, ‘Don’t Do Anything Stupid’ is a pragmatic compromise considering the complexity of the contemporary world. Then, I witnessed the final sinking of his presidency when the Supreme Court rejected a plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in the United States. And then, his administration’s unconscionable cooperation with the president of Mexico in the act of deporting Central American refugees.
Obama and Peña Nieto have cooperated for two years to intercept desperate Central American refugees in southern Mexico, long before they can reach the U.S. border. These refugees are then typically deported to their home countries – which can be a death sentence.
The American–Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the U.S., including 50,000 unaccompanied children. Obama spoke with Peña Nieto ‘to develop concrete proposals’ to address the flow. This turned out to be a plan to intercept Central Americans near Mexico’s southern border and send them home. Washington committed $86 million to support the program. Although Obama portrayed his action as an effort to address a humanitarian crisis, he made the crisis worse. The old routes minors took across Mexico were perilous, but the new ones adopted to avoid checkpoints are even more dangerous.
The victims of this policy, deported in some cases to their deaths, are refugees like Carlos, a 13-year-old with a scar on his forehead from the time a gang member threw him to the ground in the course of executing his uncle.
In the last five years, Mexico and the U.S. have deported 800,000 people to Central America, including 40,000 children, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Last year, Mexico deported more than five times as many unaccompanied children as it had five years earlier, and the Obama administration heralds this as a success.3
Is my hero a coward? Is Obama a cynical and cruel careerist who gave away his principles and his moral values in exchange for his position? I don’t
