Listen / Read
Currently, depending on whose opinions you sample, Obama is either a raving socialist (conservatives), infallible (moderate liberals), or a neocon imperialist (leftists). There aren’t many politicians who receive relentless denouncements from both extremes of the political spectrum and yet secure unconditional hero worship from the centre. But Obama is no ideologue, and it’s quite possible that his populist ability to please most of the people most of the time will continue for a while yet.
Whether Obama is awful or great, he knows who voted him in and who he hopes will again, and it wasn’t the EU. Some degree of protectionism is inevitable. Too much is a worrying prospect. Some commentators have suggested international economic governance, so that efforts to deal with the (as Gordon Brown loves to remind us) global economic crisis might be treated as such. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but the the likelihood of effective international cooperation seems low. Governments are already shitting their pants after events in Iceland. A globally coordinated solution would require national governments to agree to sacrifices their citizens would bear the brunt of. United we may have boomed, but as we go bust we will surely divide.
And Akhandadhi Das is worried about the environment, poverty, and socio-economic inequality. You can’t help but get the feeling, with all these things thrown into the mix, that there’s a perfect storm brewing. Time, place, and circumstance are all aligned for some bad juju. Climate change is accelerating faster than expected, global resources like food and oil and water are running low, and billions of people are going to find themselves struggling to get by after years of working their arses off, only to see an elite minority reap and squander their rewards. Economic strife has caused unrest and conflict before, so what will result from globalized economic strife compounded by global scarcity?
Hopefully Obama will save the day. Or start a nice cathartic world war.