The first 100 days

The media frenzy last week, in addition to the H1N1 scare, Supreme Court Justice Souter’s announced resignation from the bench after the current court and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s political specter, was Obama’s first 100 days in the White House.

A pundit asks: “What can a president do in 100 days?” “Not much, really,” he answers his own query. The president establishes a mood, sets a tone, air signals about how both state and nation are envisioned. Mr. Obama, by all accounts, has done an excellent job at shifting the core of our ground zero from fear of the alien and the foreigner, despair over the unfathomable mystery of human exigencies, to the audacity of hope in the midst of uncertainty and insecurity, and anticipatory celebration in the promised abundance of experienced chaos and the ever-familiar unknown.

If the scare tactics of the last eight years has been the tone that guided our daily consciousness, a new voice is in the air that does not reduce citizens to being wards of the State clinging to big daddy’s protection, but calls forth citizens’ participation in the affairs of the State and nation, and more importantly, in the creation of individual destinies.

Now we ask the reverse question: How have the people been in the last 100 days of the new Obama presidential dispensation in American life? First, we look at our physical sustenance and maintenance processes—the utilization of resources, production of goods and services, and the distribution of the same.

The key resource is, of course, fossil fuel. With the backdrop of the rhetoric of “peak oil” which that enlightened section of the oil industry has since come to recognize, the search for alternative renewable energy has emerged from the fringes into the mainstream. On the other hand, the influence of the military-industrial complex in guiding the existing global economic order remains clandestinely insidious and devious.

There has not been any shift in policy decisions, let alone change in strategies, so much so that even the allocation of resources on such military installations as Guam is couched in the rhetoric of protection of political freedoms rather than the demand to secure the interests and installations dependent on the strait of Malacca, as well as maintain a coercive threat to those who might be inclined to divest the American-managed multinational corporations of their capital investments in foreign markets. Gunboat diplomacy along the Chiang Jiang river is alive and well in American foreign policy!

The shock on profligate consumerism that is a consequence of the collapse of the financial sector has not dislodged production schemes off their insane supply-directed production patterns, and while the factory closures happening in China and other sourced-production-outlets of the Third World has brought considerable suffering to cheap captive labor, unionized labor in the United States clings to archaic dichotomies of class struggles and power contradictions as is happening in the auto industry, rather than view the economic enterprise as a consultative venture between capital formation and labor/management cooperation, if not forged partnership and/or shared corporate ownership. More importantly, if consumption designs as exemplified by American suburban malls is fueled by hyped marketing and sales through credit rather than savings, then the deep indebtedness to future earnings will continue and the enslavement of future generations will continue with the profligate spending of the current generation.

Resource development and production of consumption goods and services is minuscule in the total engagement of the population compared to the requirement of financial services. When the valuation of value proceeds at geometric proportion, the farmer and factory worker take a backseat way behind the financial wizards of our market management institutions. Prominent of the latter are the personnel of stock markets and banking institutions, which created the current financial crises that drove governments to initiate their economic stimulus packages, and has since been exposed to be nothing but glorified casinos where the odds are stacked in favor of the house.

The reported cost of the content of an 8-oz bottle of cola is less than a cent, but will be worth .35 cents when it leaves the warehouse, and twice that amount in dispensing machines. Do the math and we begin to understand why those dealing with finances in the distribution system overwhelmingly dominate the economic field.

The above is a feeble attempt to describe the tyranny of the economic over the political decision-making procedures (order, justice and welfare) and cultural (wisdom, style and symbols) development processes of the American empire whose present dominance over the economy of the globe is indisputable, though regrettably led by an autocracy of corporations at the expense of the common good of the awakening masses.

Obama’s response on the economic issue was a stimulus package whose benefits were to accrue to the lowest denominator; instead, bailout corporations started meeting first the organizations’ requirements for its management personnel and stockholders so that taxpayers’ monies anomalously is shoring up the welfare of the privileged class before benefits accrue to the consuming class and the general public.

Where Obama’s first steps is vulnerable to authentic criticism, it is in the economic stimulus package, not because his administration is duplicitous but rather, the bureaucratic agencies that were mandated to design the package serve the tentacles of a top-down economic structure where the trickle down of benefits is supposed to come down from the capital investments on the production of goods and services marketed to the cajoled and compliant paying customer. Unfortunately, Obama’s naiveté will not be judged by the parameters of communal forgiveness on inexperience but by the standards of financial accountability and justification of the bottom line.

We decry the shenanigans of Madoff but we are silent when our credit cards and loans slap a 28 percent interest rate on our indebtedness. Our cultural pride is hurt when we have to explain the actions of a Lt. Governor caught with his fingers in the public till, but we do not flinch an eye on the numerous non-English proficient licensed motor vehicle drivers who evidently paid for the privileged of a license.

It is in broadening the political process, and shifting cultural consciousness that Obama is making a noticeable headway, and the 60 percent approval rating, at least, indicates that a majority of us are curious, if not responsive, to the changes brought about in the last 100 days.

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Vergara is a regular contributor to the [I]Saipan Tribune[/I]’s Opinion Section