Bangalore: the visit of President Barack Obama to fuel an emerging Indo-US relation in many ways. Obama, who is a ‘not-so-privileged’ African-American background, it is said to feel “some kind of personal relationship” is a great story of India in 1900. Component, however, economic and trade has underlined the emphasis of his historic visit to India, Indo-US relations into a new career. Many raised eyebrows, and if this will be plenty of both, or Obama returns home deals in your pocket to give at least in India?

India is a large potential market for U.S. exports; the president will boost trade and investment relations better. It would take initiatives to remove all obstacles such as outsourcing controversy in the War of the changes to improve trade ties with India’s largest trading partner of the United States 14 The recent increase in visa fees, which Indians feel is very discriminatory, it could also be part of the agenda for discussion. While India should express concern about rising protectionism in the United States after the economic slowdown, the U.S. India may seek to open key sectors such as defense of livestock, retail multi-brand and financial resources to foreign investors.

In an attempt to double its exports in the five years he hopes to stimulate growth and job creation, Obama will push the administration to improve bilateral trade in goods and services with India, which is 50 billion U.S. dollar at present. It is obvious that Obama will press India to open its massive untapped business opportunities that will benefit both countries. “India is truly one of the most important new economic relations with the United States, both multilaterally and bilaterally. We work very closely with India in the G-20”Sub-Adviser Michael Forman national security was cited by Reuters.

The future of outsourcing is a hot topic under discussion, given that Indian companies are the second largest investor in the fastest growing in the United States will support about 57,000 jobs. In this way, contributing to a relatively balanced world trade will benefit both countries. India underlines the fact that the easing of controls on U.S. exports in high technology and dual-use items to boost bilateral relations and eventually benefit both. “We believe that the abolition of the provision of export control of dual-use high technology and dual inspire even more confidence in bilateral relations and understanding,” the minister said Nirupama Rao mentioned IANS.

Besides the economic dimension, there are critical interactions on topics such as energy, education, infrastructure, aviation, space, defense and biotechnology. weight growing recognition of India in the global economy, the Obama administration is looking to India as a strategic partner of choice in the region and around the world and therefore considers this visit as one of the most important bilateral economic relations emerging. However, based on the history of our relationship with the United States, many believe that India should give proper thoughts and seek expert advice before signing any agreement with the United States.

A few say that the problem with us progressives as this time of crisis is that we do not have an alternative paradigm to pit against the discredited neoliberal paradigm. I disagree. I think the elements of the alternative based on the values of democracy; justice, equality, and environmental sustainability are there and have been there for some time, the product of collective intellectual and activist work over the last few decades.

The Politics of Failure

The key problem is, in my view, the failure of progressives to translate their vision and values into a program that is convincing and connects with the people trapped in the terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis. This is a process that is preeminently political, that is, a fluid enterprise where one translates one’s strategic perspective into a “tactical program” – for want of a better word – that take advantages of the opportunities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the conjuncture to construct a critical mass for progressive change from diverse class and social forces.

It is therefore important for us to look at the political experience of the global progressive movement in order to understand why our side has been derailed and how we can fight back to political relevance. The experience of the Obama presidency in the US is, in my opinion, rich in this regard. In the American political context, Obama is a social democrat, and his candidacy was supported by the broad left. There was no illusion that he was anti-capitalist, but there were expectations that he would initiate a program of recovery and reform similar in ambition to Roosevelt’s New Deal. The electoral base that brought him to power was full of potential, being one that cut across class, color, gender, and generational lines. His ability to bring this base together on a message of change achieved what was then thought to be impossible – the election of an Afro-American as president of the United States – and showed how social and political structures can be made to bend by smart political leadership.

Two years after his spectacular electoral victory, President Barack Obama and the Democrats face a rout in the US polls in early November. Indeed, Obama and his party remind one of a rabbit on the railroad track that is hypnotized by the light of an oncoming train. What happened? Whereas Obama seemed to do all the right things in his quest for the presidency, he seemed to make all the wrong moves as chief executive.

His prioritizing health care reform, a massively complex task, has been identified by many as his key blunder. I think this decision certainly contributed to the debacle, but there were a number of more important factors that relate mainly to his handling of the economic crisis, which was the primordial concern of the electorate.

Six Reasons behind the disaster
First of all, as the Times of London commentator Anatole Kaletsky has pointed out, Obama took responsibility for the crisis. In his quixotic quest for a bipartisan solution, he made George W. Bush’s problem his own. This was something Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan never did. They took no responsibility for the economic problems of the 1970’s, heaping the blame totally on their liberal predecessors and eschewing any bipartisan alliance with those they considered their ideological enemies. This tough stance towards ideological foes was also characteristic of Roosevelt, who did not hesitate to slam – and slam hard – those he termed the “economic royalists.”

Second, in so far as Obama and his lieutenants picked a group to portray as villains, this was Wall Street. Yet saying the financial elite brought on the crisis while bailing out key Wall Street financial institutions, ranging from Citigroup to AIG, on the grounds that they were “to big to fail” involved Obama in a terrible contradiction. The least that he could have done was to remove the existing boards and top managers of these organizations as a condition for government funds. Instead, unlike in the case of GM, they were retained and continued to collect sky-high bonuses to boot.

The strong sense of a disconnect between word and deed was exacerbated rather than alleviated by the Democrats’ financial reform. The measure did not have the minimum conditions for a reform with real teeth: the banning of derivatives, a Glass-Steagall preventing commercial banks from doubling as investment banks; the imposition of a financial transactions tax or Tobin tax; and a strong lid on executive pay, bonuses, and stock options.

Third, Obama had a tremendous opportunity to educate and mobilize people against the fundamental factor that brought on the crisis: the neoliberal or market fundamentalist approach that deregulated the financial sector. While Obama did allude to unregulated financial markets as the key problem during the campaign, he refrained from demonizing neoliberalism after he took office, thus presenting an ideological vacuum that the resurgent neoliberals did not hesitate to fill. Probably a major reason he did not launch a full-scale ideological offensive is that his key lieutenants for economic policy, National Economic Council head Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary

Tim Geithner, had not broken with neoliberal thinking.

Fourth, the stimulus package of $787 billion was simply too small to have a significant effect, that it is, to bring down or hold the line on unemployment. Here, Obama cannot say he did not have good advice. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate, and a whole host of Keynesian economists were telling him this from the very start. For comparison, the Chinese stimulus package of $580 billion was much bigger relative to the size of the economy than the Obama package. For the White House now to say that the employment situation would now be worse had it not been for the stimulus is, to say the least, politically naïve. People operate not with wishful counterfactual scenarios but with the facts on the ground, and the facts have been rising unemployment, with no relief in sight.

Politics in a time of crisis is not for the fainthearted, and the middle-of-the road approach represented by the size of the stimulus was the wrong response to a crisis that called for a political gamble: the deployment of the massive fiscal firepower of the government in the teeth of the predictable howls of anger from the right.

Fifth, Obama and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke deployed mainly Keynesian technocratic tools – deficit spending and monetary easing – to deal with the consequences of the massive failure of market fundamentalism. During normal downturn these countercyclical tools may suffice to reverse the downturn. This was, however, a very serious collapse that standard Keynesianism could address in a very limited way. Besides, people were looking not only for relief in the short term but for a new direction that would enable them to master their fears and insecurities and give them reason to hope.

In other words, Obama failed to locate his Keynesian technocratic initiatives within a larger political and economic agenda that could have fired up a fairly large section of American society. This agenda could have had three pillars: 1) the democratization of economic decision-making, from the enterprise level to the heights of macro-policymaking; 2) an income and asset redistribution strategy that went beyond increasing taxes on the top two per cent of the population; and 3) the promotion of a more cooperative rather than competitive approach to production, distribution, and the management of resources. This agenda of social transformation was hardly too left and could have been accommodated within a classical social democratic framework. People were simply looking for an alternative to the Brave New Dog-eat-dog World that neo-liberalism had bequeathed them. Instead, Obama offered a bloodless technocratic approach to cure a political and ideological debacle.

Related to this absence of a program of transformation was the sixth reason for the Obama debacle, which was his failure to mobilize the grassroots base that brought him to power. This base was diverse class-wise, in generational terms, and in terms of ethnicity but it was united by palpable enthusiasm, an element that was so evident in Washington, DC, and in the rest of the country on inauguration day in 2009. With his preference for a technocratic approach and a bipartisan solution to the crisis, Obama allowed this base to wither away instead of exploiting the explosive momentum it possessed in the aftermath of the elections. At the eleventh hour, Obama and the Democrats are talking about firing up and resurrecting this base. But the dispirited and skeptical troops that have long been disbanded and left by the wayside rightfully ask: around what?

The Right Makes the Right Moves
In contrast to Obama, the right understood the demands and dynamics of politics at a time of crisis, as opposed to politics in normal times.

While Obama persisted in his quest for bipartisanship, the Republicans adopted a posture of hardline opposition to practically all of his initiatives.

Unlike Obama and the Democrats, the right posed the conflict in stark political and ideological terms, between left and right, between “socialism” and “freedom,” between the oppressive state and the liberating market, using all the catchwords and mantras they could dredge up from American bourgeois ideology.

Finally, in contrast to Obama’s neglect of the Democratic base, the right eschewed Republican interest-group politics, with Fox News, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party movement stirring up the right-wing base to “capture” the Republican Party and drive a no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics. Here it is useful to adopt Arno Mayer’s distinction between conservatives, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries to understand what has happened to the Republican Party in the last few weeks, with the string of successes in the primaries by the Tea Party movement. In Mayer’s terms, the counterrevolutionaries, with their populist, anti-insider, and grassroots-driven politics are displacing the conservative elites that have long held sway in the Republican Party.

With their anti-spending platform, the Republicans and Tea Partiers that might capture the House and the Senate in November will probably bring about a worse situation than today. In which case, some argue, Obama and the Democrats might get a second chance to repeat Bill Clinton’s victory at the polls in 1996 owing to the political overreach by the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich after their triumph in the midterm elections of 1994. But this is, in my view, a desperate illusion. These generation’s counterrevolutionaries and their backers are skilled in the politics of blame, and they are likely to be successful in painting the worsening situation as a result wholly of Obama’s “socialist policies,” not of drastic cuts in government spending.

Instruction for the Left
so what lessons can progressives derive from the Obama debacle?

First, the problem lie not so much in our lack of a strategic alternative as in our failure to translate our strategic vision or paradigm into a credible and viable political program.

Second, politics in a period of crisis is different from politics in a period of normality, being more fluid and marked by the volatility of class, political, and intellectual attachments.

Third, politics is the art of creating and sustaining a political movement from diverse class and social forces through a flexible but principled political program that is able to adapt to changing circumstances.

There is no such thing as an objectively determined situation. The art of politics is using contradictions, spaces, and ambiguities of the conjuncture to “bend” structures and institutions and create a critical mass for change. Class, economic, and political structures may condition political outcomes; they do not determine them. Member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines representing Akbayan and senior analyst of Focus on the Global South.

Candidate Michel Martelly was called to a surprising ambassadorial meeting in Haiti and could not attend the Afro-American Cultural Center-sponsored talk and panel discussion. Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, a Yale-educated, Haitian-American musician best known for his work with the hip-hop trio The Fugees, who had been scheduled to speak with Martelly, stepped in as main speaker. Michel, who is also an official supporter of Martelly, spoke about the junction of his music career and activism and how they influenced his current views on Haitian politics.

“I could not simply stand by and watch Haiti take a course off a cliff,” Michel said of his feelings following the Jan. 2010 earthquake that devastated the nation. “What Haiti needs is not just a leader. It needs someone to motivate them to want to change — and that leader is Michel Martelly.”

Martelly is one of 19 candidates vying for the presidency of Haiti this November. He has his own musical background: he was formerly a recording artist known as “Sweet Mickey.” Another former candidate, who withdrew this August after being deemed ineligible to run, is Michel’s cousin and former bandmate, Wyclef Jean. Jean, along with Michel, is a Grammy award-winning recording artist. His charity, Yéle Haiti Foundation, which raised money for earthquake relief this year, has come under fire for questionable book-keeping.

Michel had much to say about Jean and his candidacy. While he said he admires Jean’s advocacy work in Haiti, Michel said he does not think Jean is the best candidate for president.

“As much as Wyclef can do, he can’t do it all,” Michel said. “He’s not Superman; he’s not the Messiah.”

Following his speech, Michel participated in a discussion moderated by political science graduate student Sheree Bennett GRD ’11 and Haitian TV personality Jacques Napoleon, during which students asked Michel about other issues facing Haiti. Michel said Haiti needs to root out corruption in its government, which he described as “the most corrupted” in the world.

The event was held to draw attention to the recovery effort in Haiti and the country’s current political situation, said Vanessa Obas ’11, president of Klib Kreyol, a Haitian student organization. Obas worked this semester with Ashley Edwards ’12, president of the Yale chapter of the NAACP (YNAACP), to bring Michel to campus.

Dean Rodney Cohen, director of the Afro-American Cultural Center, said that new plans are being made to bring Martelly to campus later this semester.

“Michel Martelly was and is very excited about coming to Yale to discuss his quest for the Haitian presidency,” Cohen said.

Still, Martelly’s absence did not detract from the appeal of the event for students.

“I’ve been listening to The Fugees since their album ‘The Score’ dropped in 1996, so being able to work with Pras has been an incredibly rewarding experience,” Edwards said. “I’m still star-struck.”

Students interviewed after the talk had mixed feelings about Martelly’s candidacy. Chelsea Allen ’12 said that she felt Michel made a compelling argument as to why experience, which Martelly lacks, is in fact a weakness given the corrupt political environment of Haiti.

Others felt more ambivalent about Michel’s speech. Alexandra van Nievelt ’13 said she felt that while Michel spoke engagingly and honestly, he did not convince her about Martelly’s suitability.

“It’s difficult to feel comfortable about Martelly’s political abilities, regardless of his good intentions,” she said.

This discussion is one of a series of events planned by the YNAACP, Klib Kreyol and the Yale West Indian Student Organization — with the support of the Afro-American Cultural Center — to sustain awareness of the still-desperate condition in Haiti, Obas said.

Obama has just lost his closest advice-giver and chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is making the strange transition from national to municipal politics. His substitution, the quiet Washington insider Peter Rouse, head of the Obama-Biden 2008 transition team, is the antithesis of his sharp-tongued predecessor. “Pete was affectionately known as the 101st senator,” effused Obama. He is also losing his closest adviser David Axelrod (pragmatist Emanuel described their difference as prose versus poetry) and director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers.

Why are Obama’s three closest advice-givers all Jewish goodbyes? There is no pat answer. Axelrod is no friend of Summers, and suggested in an email the latter would be more comfortable in the “cafeteria at Goldman Sachs”. He claims he is homesick. Obama’s Keynesianism probably finally got to Summers. Emanuel, a former congressman, a talented ballet dancer, son of an Irgun terrorist, and an Israeli soldier during the first Gulf war against Iraq, leads us to the real answer.

As a very, very strong Zionist (dual citizen? sayan?), he is Israel’s canary in the White House. Israel boycotted Obama’s UN speech at the Millennium Goals Summit in September, and has subjected Obama to dose after dose of humiliating treatment, the latest when Netanyahu asked for the pardon of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard (serving a life sentence) in exchange for a temporary halt in settlement expansion. Netanyahu defiantly visited Pollard in jail in 2002 and he is celebrated as a hero in yearly commemorations in Israel. There seems to be an eerie replay of 1991, the last time the White House seriously tried to stop the settlements. The Israel lobby abandoned Bush then and destroyed him in the 1992 elections.

The writing is on the wall: Obama is a one-term president. That is if he is even allowed to finish his first term. Obama was never popular in Israel. Now there are even threats against his life as a result of his stance on settlements and his reluctance to attack Iran. Loud protests in front of Netanyahu’s residence witness crowds burning effigies of Obama “the new Pharaoh”, “the descendant of slaves” who must be put in his place.

Obama, son of a Kenyan Muslim and American expat radical, is facing equally vicious bigotry by non-Jews. He is attacked at home by Americans of more traditional backgrounds who call him a communist and are incensed by his unusual origins and his unrepresentative entourage. Apocalyptic movements and rightwing “patriotic” militias, which grew under Clinton but abated under Bush junior, are increasingly rapidly under Obama, and more staid but equally frustrated Americans conduct political “tea parties”, confused and desperate for both stability and real change.

For despite the radically different appearance of Obama’s “change” administration (including the colourful Emanuel), his policies have provided neither stability nor any real change. They are remarkably like those of his predecessor. The unwieldy and disappointing healthcare reform aside, the bankers and generals have been given just about whatever they ask for, Guantanamo stays open and torture continues. US troops stay in Iraq and Afghanistan. The economic morass Obama inherited from Bush merely deepens.

And what is Emanuel’s legacy? According to critics, he was responsible for scuttling the real public healthcare option, leaving it in the hands of private insurers. He was courted by a litany of Wall Street officials and business leaders from day one. Emanuel’s White House calendar was filled with the likes of Comcast VP David Cohen (who just happened to have mergers pending), Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman, who showed up three times in two months.

Is it any wonder that Rahmbo, as he is affectionately known for his ruthless strong-arm tactics in the political ring, is now jumping ship just before it sinks in the November elections? He is clearly betting that his friendship with Chicago’s darling, America’s first black president, will see him to victory.

But, why the municipal ring? Yes, his “friend” Obama is toast. But is it possible his sudden interest in local politics is because he realises presidents, senators and the like have very little real power to make decisions anyway? That a mayor can at least leave a visible legacy — bike paths, community centres, parks? Or is he just bored, looking for a challenge where he can flex his muscles anew, flit gracefully across the political stage yet again as prince charming seducing the sleeping Miss America?

Whatever his motives, Rahmbo epitomises the shallowness, the effeteness of American politics today. The president of the most powerful nation on earth is powerless. A stuffed shirt. A photo op. A cultured Afro-American presiding over the most brutal empire the world has every known. Emanuel “made him” and has decided to leave him to his fate, to yet again play games with the US media and political circles, like a virtual performer orchestrating a grand reality game.

Pundits are mixed in assessing his chances. His strongest supporters are Chicago’s white moneyed class and the business community, who favour Emanuel’s run because of his history as a Washington power broker, says political analyst Charles Dunn. “His pockets are overflowing with IOUs” and he will be able to call in past favours, giving him a huge advantage over his many competitors.

But he has little appeal to the 35 per cent of Chicagoans who are black and the 28 per cent who are Hispanic. His challengers are predominantly minority candidates, including James Meeks, a state senator and Baptist minister, and Chicago City Clerk Miguel del Valle. Many minority leaders, including several aldermen, have already made statements saying they will not support Emanuel’s candidacy. The field is very much open. In fact the call among those unhappy with machine politics in the Chicago is “Abre” — “Anyone but Rahm Emanuel”, which translates into Spanish as “Open”.

As a Jew, Emanuel is very much a supporter of minority rights, but these real minorities understand that Jewish support for them from the likes of Rahmbo is only skin deep, so to speak. CNN’s Hispanic host Rick Sanchez shocked Americans last week for saying as much on air. Sanchez is constantly ridiculed by Jewish TV satirist Jon Stewart, and finally fought back; calling Stewart a “bigot” with “a white liberal establishment point-of-view”, saying CNN and the media are largely run by Jews and elitists. Of course, he was immediately fired, but no one can dispute the truth behind his outburst. Says analyst Peter Myers, “Other minorities are accorded status only on condition that the Jewish minority remains number one.”

Compounding Emanuel’s difficulties is the expected candidacy of Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who is white (but not Jewish), and well-liked among black and Latino voters because of his highly publicised refusal to evict renters of foreclosed buildings and his prosecution of the owners of a historic black cemetery who illegally exhumed 300 bodies for profit.

Is any of this of any conceivable importance? Do the departures of Emanuel, Axelrod and Summers portend a more even-handed policy on the Middle East — a defiance of Israel in the remaining two years of his one-term presidency? Will he suddenly cut Israel’s massive aid budget and insist it withdraw from occupied lands? Will (largely Jewish) bankers and other elite miscreants be subpoenaed and jailed for their many crimes, as happened to an earlier Chicagoan, Moses Annenberg, who was jailed for tax evasion in the 1930s under president Roosevelt?

I mention Annenberg, because he was a Jewish Chicago media magnate and underworld figure brought down by a president who still wielded some power. His son Walter Annenberg continued in his father’s less-than-pristine footsteps, but covered them with the Annenberg Foundation, lavishing money on “good causes”. He rightly realised he could use a liberal facade and his newspapers to make or break politicians, rather than be broken by them.

Like Obama and Emanuel, Annenberg’s story is the stuff of legend. His publishing empire grew and grew, he was Nixon’s ambassador to the UK and so charmed the Queen that she made him an honourary knight (Americans disdain such unseemly titles). All the time he was “conservative” Ronald Reagan’s “best friend” according to Nancy Reagan.

The “liberal” Barack Obama first gained political prominence as an activist with the Annenberg Foundation’s Education Challenge. Annenberg, who died in 2002, would be delighted to know his charitable works in Chicago helped choose the first black president, whose “Israel first!” chief of staff would go on to become the city’s first Jewish mayor, putting the real minorities in their place America. Is this odd move of Emanuel a sign of the end of any hope to stop the Israeli whirlwind, or can a brave, principled Dart prick the Zionist balloon and bring the circus to a stop?

President Barack Obama predicted on Thursday his embattled Democrats would hold onto their congressional majorities in the November elections if they can reawaken enthusiasm among electorate who helped sweep him into office.

Obama made the case for Democratic optimism in a pair of contrasting political fundraisers — an elegant $30,400-a-plate dinner for wealthy donors and a hip-hop rally for younger supporters.

With less than five weeks to go before the elections, Obama’s Democratic Party faces losing control of one or both chambers of Congress largely because of voter anxiety over high unemployment and an anemic economic recovery.

Obama scoffed at opinion polls showing an “enthusiasm gap” in favor of Republican opponents in the November 2 midterm elections and insisted Democrats can still turn the tide.

“I need you to be fired up; I need you to stay fired up!” Obama shouted to a wildly cheering crowd of about 3,000 young people in a concert-like setting at Constitution Hall.

At the more subdued dinner for big contributors at an exclusive townhouse, Obama hailed the “euphoric” reception he got from more than 20,000 university students at a rally in Wisconsin this week, an event aimed at reaching out to younger voters who helped propel him to victory in 2008.

“If we can duplicate that same kind of energy and motivation and focus, then I’m absolutely confident we can not only maintain our majorities in the House and the Senate but we can continue to deliver for middle-class Americans,” he said.

Obama also sought to temper the message he has recently sent to liberals that they should stop complaining about his failure so far to accomplish everything on their wish lists.

He said Democrats were a “big tent party” and as a result “sometimes we’re going to have some vigorous arguments.”

“I said this in an interview a while back: part of being a Democrat I guess is kind of looking at the glass half-empty sometimes,” Obama said.

“But you know what? Now is the time to remind ourselves of what we have accomplished and to recognize that all those things that remain undone will not get done unless we are just as focused, just as energized,” he added.

He used the pep rally-style gathering later that night to hammer home criticism of Republicans, who he said wanted to bring back failed Bush-era economic policies if they regain control of Congress. Republicans accuse Obama of pushing wasteful spending and disappointing job creation.