Our First Black President ran saying he was going to change the very mindset that made imperial wars inevitable, (of couse he didn’t use the word “imperial’) but as soon as he wrapped up the nomination, he embraced fictitious Bush-Cheney war policies like “the surge,” along with the rationales for wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. The “antiwar Obama,” if he ever existed outside our imaginations, is dead, and now we have a Democratic “war president,” with all the unconstitutional powers grabbed by his predecessor and a few more, and a black face.
Our 1870 political strategy makes us unable to discern an enemy when he is a professed Democrat, all the more a Democrat with a black face.
Is our political strategy delivering jobs?
The short answer is Democratic political leaders don’t even know what a program of delivering jobs would look like. Most Americans, if pollsters asked what the WPA and CCC of the 1930s were, can’t tell you. It’s no longer part of the popular memory. So here’s the capsule version.
In the last Great Depression, the federal government revived the economy by simply writing checks and putting millions of unemployed Americans to work digging new subway lines, (the State Street subway tunnel in Chicago, for one example) building thousands of brand new state of the art public elementary and high schools throughout Southern California with features like music rooms, indoor gymnasiums and showers, and multipurpose auditoriums, things seldom seen outside wealthy private schools up till that time. They built public parks and swimming pools and nature trails along with roads and bridges.