A vote for peace abroad, social and economic justice at home

Black Agenda Report's managing editor Bruce Dixon takes a clear-eyed look at what Barack Obama brings to the Oval Office. Dixon sees many warning signs, alarm clocks sounding loudly, suggesting that while the faces will change, the policies are quite likely to remain the same. Unless, WE THE PEOPLE, take steps to hold the incoming administration and congress accountable, to change the things they have been elected to change.

The vote for the First Black President wasn't just about race and racism. For tens of millions, it was a vote for peace abroad, for economic and social justice at home. Barack Obama sold himself to the American people as a transformative political figure.

Despite those who now urge Americans to tone down their expectations, many are prepared to collect on the hopes that swept Obama into office. Those hopes and expectations are what we call the Obama Check.

The question is, can we cash it?

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The First Black President carries with him into the Oval Office the hopes and dreams and aspirations of many people he will never meet, but who imagine they know his heart and intentions. Although these things were not on the ballot, and were kept largely out of the discussions by the media and the candidates themselves, the tens of millions who voted for Obama did so because in the main, they want an end to the war. They want to see the military budget and the prison population reduced. They want single payer national health care. They want a more just economy and they objected strenuously to Bush's --- and Obama's bailout of Wall Street.

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The day Obama takes office, there will be an incredible 1.1 million African Americans behind bars, a proportion eight times that of whites. Before the mortgage market meltdown the wealth of black families was about one eleventh that of whites. Since then, it's fallen off a cliff. Whether we look at education, at wages, at morbidity, mortality, unemployment or mass incarceration the gaps between whites and blacks in the US are wide and still growing. With the nation's First Black President installed, many whites will solemnly assure us that the US is not now, if it ever was, a racist society. The First Black President-elect seems to agree with them, having told us all a year before electing him that we were “90% of the way” to a non-racist society.

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The day the First Black President is sworn in the US economy will still be, in the words of economist Michael Hudson a polite fiction, based on phantom assets, phony profits, inflated valuations, and outright fraud, a house of marked cards where even the bankers know not to trust each other. Millions of families will still face foreclosure, eviction and bankruptcy. Tens of millions more are in debt up to their necks, afflicted with ever-rising interest rates thanks to the tireless efforts of Obama's running mate Joe Biden, sometimes known as the Senator from MasterCard.

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Dr. King told us more than forty years ago that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom." On the day the First Black President, supposedly the fulfillment of King's dream, takes office, the US will be spending more on arms and the military than the rest of the planet combined. But by declaring that he would increase the Pentagon's budget even over what Cheney and Bush spent at the expense of housing, education and whatever else, the First Black President has already stopped payment on this part of the check.

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The day after the election, and the day the First Black President takes office, at least 44 million Americans will have no health insurance at all, and tens of millions more are underinsured. One third of every health care dollar spent in the US goes to maintain private insurance companies, indisputable parasites on the process of health care delivery, making the US health care system the most expensive in the world, even though it takes care of a smaller percentage of its population than any other advanced industrial country.

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The day the First Black President takes office there will be over 800 US military bases spanning the globe, more troops in Iraq than were there in 2005 or 2006, US fleets menacing Iran and intermittently bombing Somalia, and a war in Afghanistan. The First Black President will draw down troops in Iraq to send them to Afghanistan, his threats to Iran are identical to those of George Bush ... and he does not speak of the ongoing US military involvement in the Horn of Africa. Our First Black President, every but as much as Dick Cheney, has embraced the phony “war on terror” as the organizing principle of American life.