‘That’s Not Change…’
June 25, 2009
Joseph Biden’s best moment in the 2008 presidential campaign was his address to the Democratic National Convention. As Biden hammered at the Republican candidate, he found a catchy refrain which the conventioneers picked up and chanted with him: “That’s not change, that’s more of the same!”
His ticket won the election and now, as I watch the Obama Administration in action, I keep hearing Joe’s refrain, almost taunting: “That’s not change, that’s more of the same.”
In Steve Klinger’s commentary, “Obama must be pressured to separate principle from expediency,” he examines several left-wing criticisms of the current President. There is one area he did not touch, perhaps because the topic’s scope could not be contained in one column. Trade policy has crucial implications for the shared future of human beings.
Obama the candidate opposed the free trade agreements that characterized the Clinton and Bush presidencies. The extraction of resources for private enrichment, the displacement of human communities, and the unjust, sometimes violent treatment of labor organizers, indigenous people, and other plaintiffs seemed to shock his conscience.
Obama the President is pushing hard for FTA’s the candidate deplored, particularly with Panama, Columbia, and South Korea. He was conspicuously silent when the Peruvian government, citing its own free trade pact with the United States, rammed through a series of undemocratic decrees opening the Amazon to international corporate exploitation. On June 5, the government opened fire on protesters who blocked roads and staged sit-ins in a massacre that exposed, once more, the dark side of globalization.
The President now embraces a paradigm of economic viability and human progress that tolerates murder, winks at tyranny, and considers the earth a box of goods rather than an organism.
There is Joe Biden’s voice again: “That’s not change…”
Algernon D’Ammassa
Deming, NM
nogate@gmail.com
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