If you like cynicism in politics, you’ve got to love Barack Obama. There’s nothing naïve or fanciful about the way he says one thing to one audience and another thing to a different voter or funding group. It’s all about cold calculation under the perverse, narrow-spectrum, and “winner-take-all” rules of the United States’ corporate-crafted elections system.
ہمیں "1960 اور 1970 کی دہائیوں کی زیادتیوں" سے بچانے کے لیے ریگن کی تعریف کرنا
Speaking recently to the privileged editors of the Reno (Nevada) Gazette, the supposedly (so the Fox News crowd insists) left-wing Obama sought to give “conservatives” (1) reason to jump on board his “movement” for “Hope,” “Unity,” and “Change.” He found it useful to give special praise to a leading historical enemy of peace, justice, and racial equality – Ronald Reagan. Here is a precious quotation from the self-described “progressive” Obama, courtesy of YouTube:
“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing”
زبردست.
جیسا کہ لبرل بلاگر میٹ سٹولر نے نوٹ کیا، اوباما "ریگن کے بنیادی فریم سے اتفاق کرتے ہیں کہ 1960 اور 1970 کی دہائیاں 'زیادتیوں' سے بھری ہوئی تھیں اور وہ حکومت بڑی اور غیر ذمہ دارانہ ترقی کر چکی تھی۔ وہ زیادتیاں، بلاشبہ، حقوق نسواں، صارفین کے حقوق کی تحریک، شہری حقوق کی تحریک، ماحولیاتی تحریک، اور جنگ مخالف تحریک تھیں۔ ایک بے حساب بڑی لبرل حکومت کے آزادی پسند مخالف نظریے کو نظریاتی قدامت پسندوں نے ڈیزائن کیا تھا،" سٹولر بجا طور پر کہتے ہیں، "ان 'زیادتیوں' کے خلاف ردعمل کا فائدہ اٹھانے کے لیے۔"
سٹولر نے بجا طور پر مشاہدہ کیا، "ریگن ایک دھوپ والا پرامید نہیں تھا جو متحرک انٹرپرینیورشپ کو آگے بڑھا رہا تھا، لیکن ایک سمجھدار سیاست دان قدامت پسندوں کو اقتدار تک پہنچانے کے لیے شہری حقوق کے رد عمل کا استعمال کرتے ہوئے" (1A)۔
Obama knows that very well but he’s not about to say it to “conservatives” whose endorsement he’s seeking in Nevada.
ناانصافی اور عدم مساوات کو چیلنج کرنے پر بادشاہ کی تعریف کرنا
Speaking last Sunday to a predominantly black audience in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta(2), Obama’s message the message was very different. Obama had a different hero in mind – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped lead the movement that provoked the white “backlash” that Reagan rode to power. After 1960, Ebenezer was the site of many sermons by the famous leader in the struggle for black equality.
Preaching at Ebenezer one day before the national Martin Luther King holiday, Obama had his eyes on the upcoming “black primary” in South Carolina. More than half of South Carolina’s registered Democrats are African-American.
As Obama and his handlers know, black political sentiments stand well to the left of the majority white opinion Obama is trying to win over in his bid for the White House. Those sentiments are also well to the left of the predominantly white corporate and imperial power-brokers Obama knows to hold the keys to the ultimate establishment job – the U.S. presidency.
اور اسی طرح گزشتہ اتوار کو اپنے ایبینیزر تقریر میں، رونالڈ ریگن کی کوئی تعریف نہیں کی گئی، جو سیاہ فام کمیونٹی میں قابل فہم طور پر غیر مقبول ہیں۔ 1960 کی دہائی میں "زیادہ سے زیادہ" پر کوئی مارپیٹ نہیں ہوئی تھی، جب کنگ اور اس کی تحریک نے قانونی علیحدگی کا خاتمہ کیا اور گہرے جنوب میں سیاہ فام ووٹنگ کے حقوق حاصل کیے تھے۔
اوباما نے کنگ کی یاد کو "ہمارے سامنے آنے والے مشترکہ چیلنجز - جنگ اور غربت، ناانصافی اور عدم مساوات" پر توجہ مرکوز کرنے کے لیے کہا۔ اوباما نے ڈاکٹر کنگ کی "مارچ کرکے جیل جانے اور دھمکیوں کا سامنا کرنے اور اپنے خاندان سے دور رہ کر قیادت کرنے پر تعریف کی۔ انہوں نے جنگ کے خلاف موقف اختیار کرتے ہوئے قیادت کی، "اوباما نے کہا، "یہ اچھی طرح جانتے ہوئے کہ اس سے ان کی مقبولیت میں کمی آئے گی۔ اس نے ہمارے معاشی ڈھانچے کو چیلنج کرتے ہوئے قیادت کی، یہ سمجھتے ہوئے کہ اس سے گہری تکلیف ہوگی۔
اوباما نے مزید کہا، "وہ تبدیلیاں جن کی ضرورت ہے، وہ صرف کناروں پر چھیڑ چھاڑ کرنے کا معاملہ نہیں ہے، اور وہ اس صورت میں نہیں آئیں گے جب سیاستدان ہمیں صرف یہ بتا دیں کہ ہم کیا سننا چاہتے ہیں۔"
بادشاہ راضی ہو جاتا۔
"ہمارا [شاندار] فری مارکیٹ سسٹم"
لیکن اوباما کے پالیسی ایجنڈے کو بار بار اور درست طریقے سے عسکریت پسندانہ طور پر "انکریمنٹلسٹ" کے طور پر بیان کیا گیا ہے - جو "کناروں پر چھیڑ چھاڑ" کا مظہر ہے۔
And it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Obama was telling his black listeners in Atlanta what he thought they wanted to hear while he is content to say something else entirely to more privileged audiences.
بادشاہ: "ہمارے معاشی نظام میں کچھ غلط ہے"
یہ سچ ہے کہ کنگ نے "ہمارے معاشی ڈھانچے کو چیلنج کیا۔" اس کے بارے میں مزید واضح کرنے کے لیے ان طریقوں سے کہ اوباما کبھی ہمت نہیں کریں گے، جمہوری سوشلسٹ کنگ نے اخلاقی جواز سرمایہ داری کو چیلنج کیا اور "معاشرے کی خود ساختہ بنیاد پرست تعمیر" (2A) پر زور دیا۔
King also contrasted the endemic poverty and inequality evident in capitalist America with the much lower poverty levels and greater equality of more social-democratic European states. “Maybe something is wrong with our economic system,” King told an interviewer, observing that (in historian David Garrow’s words) “in democratic socialist societies such as Sweden there was no poverty, no unemployment and no slums” (2B).
اوباما: "ہمارا سب سے بڑا اثاثہ" - سرمایہ داری
But in his remarkably power-friendly campaign book The Audacity of Hope (New York: 2006), Obama praised the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation – the United States – for the glorious workings of its savagely regressive capitalist system. “It takes a trip overseas,” Obama said, “to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate,” Obama added, “but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources…our free market system.”
اس کے بارے میں کیا خیال ہے؟
Never mind the terrible outcomes of America’s distinctively anti-social and incidentally heavily state-protected “free market system” and “business culture.” Those unfortunate results include the marvelously “efficient,” climate-warming contributions of a business-dominated nation that constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population but contributes more than a quarter of the planet’s carbon emissions. Other notable effects include the innovative generation of poverty and deep poverty for millions of U.S. children while executives atop “defense” firms like Boeing and Raytheon rake in billions of taxpayer dollars for helping Uncle Sam kill and maim untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, and Palestinian civilians.
Obama’s Audacity left it to what he considers the lunatic left fringe to note the American System’s “efficient” allocation of half the nation’s wealth to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of the common good to private profit. “Unreasonable” Marxists, anarchists and “conspiracy theorists” were left to observe that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal “individual initiative” from millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of imbecilic and soul-crushing operations conducted for such increasingly unbearable stretches of time – at stagnating levels of material reward and security – that working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great “democracy” Obama trumpets as the Founders’ great legacy.
یہ اس بات پر منحصر ہے کہ آپ کہاں جاتے ہیں۔
As for “a trip overseas” showing how good life is in the U.S. for “even our poor”…it depends on where the “overseas” trip takes you. If it brings the traveler to much of the rest of the industrialized world, where state (so-called “free market”) capitalism’s inherent tendencies towards wealth inequality and corporate rule are considerably more tempered by social-democratic programs and popular movements, the comparison is generally less than flattering to the United States, reminding the minimally attentive societal observer that the United States’ “unmatched prosperity” is doled out in harshly regressive ways that create relatively high percentages and numbers of poor and uninsured households, drastically long working hours, rampant economic insecurity and generally inadequate and under-funded public services alongside simply spectacular opulence for the privileged few (3).
Of course, one does not have to cross “seas” to appreciate the distinctions indicated here. A trip across the Rio Grande to the proximate “Third World” nation Mexico will yield many examples consistent with Obama’s praise of the United States’ grand “prosperity.” But a trip to Canada is counter-intuitive for Obama’s narrative, revealing considerably lower poverty rates and broader economic security partly reflecting the fact that Canada possesses a single-payer health insurance system that entitles the janitor as well as the company executive to quality health coverage.
اینگل ووڈ کے لوگوں کو بتائیں
It would be interesting to hear how Obama’s paean to “our” glorious “system of social organization” (so-called “free market” capitalism) would go over in a storefront church or community center in the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. Part of Obama’s former Illinois Senate district, Englewood is one of 15 Chicago community eras where more than a quarter of the children are growing up at less than half of the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level(4). But, of course, Obama would be unlikely to glorify the profit system in one of those neighborhoods, where people live at the bottom of the wonderful American System’s steep and intersecting hierarchies of race and class. He says one thing to poor and/or black people and another thing to rich white folks, knowing full well that the latter are immensely more powerful than the former.
"مساوات میں خطرہ"
Talking to blacks in Ebenezer Church, Obama seemed to get worked up against economic disparity. But in The Audacity of Hope, targeting a more mainstream professional and white audience, he actually praised the Great White Fathers of the U.S. for understanding that “there are seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality. For if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order,” Obama asked, “how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?”
اوہ.
یہ کوئی تعجب کی بات نہیں ہے کہ اوبامہ کو سینٹرسٹ ریپبلکن نیو یارک ٹائمز کے کالم نگار ڈیوڈ بروکس (4A) کی پسندوں نے "ہیملٹنین" کے طور پر سراہا ہے۔
’’کسی نے نہیں پوچھا؟‘‘
ZNetwork کو مکمل طور پر اس کے قارئین کی سخاوت کے ذریعے مالی اعانت فراہم کی جاتی ہے۔
عطیہ کیجیئے
