Robert L. Terrell

These are portentous times for the United States. There are many things to be grateful for, including the current ascendancy of mainstream liberal politics in the nation’s capitol.  The stock market is slowly edging upwards, and panic about the possibility of total financial collapse appears to be subsiding.      

The Obama administration is setting a new course for the nation in many important areas, including its admirable commitment to functioning within the letter and spirit of international laws pertinent to the treatment of prisoners of war.  Given these developments, the public remains broadly optimistic regarding the inspiring new president’s chances for overall success.  As a result, President Obama is receiving strong support across the political spectrum.

Nonetheless, there is tremendous unease throughout the land.  People from all walks of life, and from every section of the nation, are deeply frightened about what the future may hold.   The millions of people who have lost their jobs during the past two years due to the global financial collapse are prominent sources of that fear.  The tens of millions of homeowners who are proving incapable of making their mortgage payments are additional sources of fear.  Bank foreclosures, short sales, and families being evicted in unprecedented numbers, add to the pervasive sense that the economic system that has sustained so many for so long is in decline, if not undergoing a comprehensive, slow motion collapse.

Fear is also being engendered by the staggering amount of money lost during the past couple years in savings, investments, and overall financial viability.  The domino-like collapse of major industries, financial institutions, and corporations that have historically served as bedrocks of the economy, and the so-called” American-Way-of-Life,” is engendering additional fear. The hundreds of thousands of people being thrown out of work each month because of the shrinking national economy only serve to increase the conviction, which is shared by many, that, as Chinua Achebe surmised, things are falling apart.   

Homeless people, proliferating shantytowns, street side beggars, soup kitchens, and senior citizens scavenging bottles and cans from trash bins are among the most obvious signs that there is real basis for being afraid. Moreover, such broadly dispersed, chronic misery, suffering and desperation are undeniable evidence indeed that something is terribly amiss in our society.

As indicated above, the Obama administration is doing its best to cope coherently with the broad array of crises it inherited from the largely discredited group of torturers, clueless ideologues, and fiscally irresponsible dunces who dominated the federal government during the eight-year reign of its predecessors.  Unfortunately, most indications up to this point are that the Obama administration is committed to salvaging as much of the pre-recession financial system as possible.  Thus, they are trying to resuscitate a system that was in many ways criminally inadequate long before the onset of the current recession.

Liberals are currently expending much time and resources in their effort to get the new administration to adopt a social agenda, and an economic strategy, that will eliminate many of the most egregious shortcomings and abuses of the largely discredited Bush administration.  In order to accomplish these goals, Liberals often assert that President Obama should emulate Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Thus, they are advocating the implementation of social safety net programs of the sort that came to be known during Roosevelt’s era as the “New Deal.”

We desperately need such programs, and if they are established, much of the gratuitous suffering which poor people are routinely subjected to in this still extremely wealthy society can be substantially mitigated.  Thus, there are many good arguments to be made in favor of the agenda being advocated by Liberals during this period of fear and desperation. 

But I am firmly convinced that the Liberal agenda will ultimately prove inadequate.  This is primarily due to the fact that it does not adequately address the most important sources of the nation’s current economic collapse.  The most important shortcoming of the current Liberal agenda for change is that it generally disregards the crippling impact of the monstrously expensive global empire currently administered by the U.S. government.

Given this, my best sense is that the Obama team will best serve the nation’s long term best interests if they begin to devote less attention to FDR’s reforms and more to those embraced by Mikhail Gorbachev at the time he realized that the Soviet Union was undergoing a slow motion collapse of the sort currently underway here in the United States.