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Año VI |
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A new Uncle Tom?
Atilio Borón • Página 12
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
On the eve
of the U.S. election, Noam Chomsky said that Barack Obama “was a white
man who took too much sun”. Much as his words were frowned on by ‘trendy
and knowing’ intellectuals worldwide, the ideological formation of and
interests defended by those who were recently asked to find a way out of
the present crisis seem to prove the warning issued by the great MIT
linguist was fully justified.
Indeed, requesting help from Paul Volcker –ex FR chairman under Reagan–
Warren Buffett –a megaspeculator of the world’s financial casino–
Lawrence Summers –a former World Bank official and successor of Robert
Rubin as Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury– or others like J. P.
Morgan Investment Bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon and ex-IMF manager Timothy
Geithner, the current NY Fed president, sounds like the wrong thing to
do for someone who spent his entire campaign tirelessly beating the drum
for change and vowing to make the transformations America was
increasingly asking for. These names make up the world of high finance,
and they’re all directly responsible for the economic crisis weighing
down on the world today which, no less importantly, has vested even more
power in the most aggressive conglomerates of capital everywhere. Obama
is bound by his mandate to listen to other voices and navigate by other
stars, a message he’s definitely ignoring.
Instead of meeting with Wall Street, he should have paid heed to top
leaders of the social movements that put him in the White House; trade
unionists who have been persecuted for years, even in Clinton’s time;
heterodox economists such as Paul Krugman, John K. Galbraith Jr. or
Robert Solow, to name a few, for whom the return of the market Taliban
who fueled the present tragedy is already cause for concern. His search
for a ‘two-party deal’ to cope with the crisis and his choice to talk
with those who brought about the disaster in the first place are
equivalent to asking the fox to watch over the coop. Obama has little,
very little time, to define what his government will be like. The
worst-case scenario would be that the ‘Black’ of the White House –hailed
by a thoughtless media as the pioneer of a new historic era– will end up
wearing the hat of what is contemptuously described as an ‘Uncle Tom’, a
black person regarded as being humiliatingly subservient to his masters.
It’s still too soon to say, but he’d better ponder Chomsky’s words and
try to avoid such a pitiful mistake.
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