Doug Henwood started his Jan 22th show by broadcasting segments of Obama’s inauguration speech selected to highlight the pro-militarism nationalist market driven neoliberal ideology he shares with the old boss followed by a Martin Luther King speech. Henwoood says he is throughly sick of comparisons between Obama and King.
Doug Henwood started his Jan 22th show by broadcasting segments of Obama’s inauguration speech selected to highlight the pro-militarism nationalist market driven neoliberal ideology he shares with the old boss followed by a Martin Luther King speech. Henwoood says he is throughly sick of comparisons between Obama and King.
It’s about 7 minutes into the show. Henwood selects 260 words from the speech and then plays a 1967 MLK speech, one year to the day before his assassination. Henwood’s show is well worth subscribing to, if you use iTunes you will find it here. He starts off each week with a short analysis of the state of the US economy (he used to be a stock broker) which is very useful as he’s not prone to the ‘final crisis, death knell of capitalism’ hysteria that infects so much of marxist analysis of the economy. I’ve been following the show for about two years which is of course the period during which the US and the world economy has passed from boom to bust and I’ve found that segment really informative as each stage progressed.
The rest of the show is more hit and miss. Because Henwood is in New York City he is ideally placed to grab almost anyone for an interview as they pass through promoting a book or whatever. The rest of the show consists of two or three such interviews and depending on the interviewee sometimes they are fascinating and sometimes dull.
The inability of many leftists to accept that Obama is less than perfect is interesting to observe. When I forwarded an article from the (London) Times on Obama OKing drone missile strikes that killed 3 kids in Pakistan it was suggested that this meant I had to be a McCain supporter! Likewise while people have been (rightly) cheered by his statement on Roe v Wade there has been silence over the cutting of several hundred million funding for family planning from the Health segment of his bailout package.
It’s obviously to be expected that he will have a honeymoon period while people are simply relieved that Bush has gone, Clinton after all had the same. But anyone genuinely committed to anti-imperialist or pro-choice politics has to be clear that Obama is already or soon will be the bad guy we are organising against. Bush is gone, Obama is in power, time to move on.
As I watched the inauguration on the web I updated my Facebook status with a quote from Ricardo Flores Magon, the Mexican anarchist revolutionary who died in a US jail in 1922;
“Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )