How will we get the change we need?

THE POLITICAL mood in the U.S. wavered between hope and fear as President Barack Obama prepared for his February 24 speech to Congress.

Tens of millions of people are hopeful that help is on the way, thanks to the passage of Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill that extends unemployment benefits, provides a modest tax break for working families and ramps up spending on infrastructure projects to create desperately needed jobs.

At the same time, however, there's growing apprehension about the further downward spiral of the economy.

As concerns mount over the teetering banking system, the number of people trying to claim unemployment benefits remains at sky-high levels. And while Obama was able to force the Republican opposition in Congress to accept a larger stimulus package than it wanted, the White House made big concessions at the outset by focusing more than one-third of the legislation on tax cuts. The final version of the bill reduced some of the most urgently needed spending provisions, such as aid to budget-strapped state governments.

Perhaps Obama is content to call the stimulus plan a victory and will move on to other proposals for more government spending. He was absolutely correct to say, as Congress considered the legislation:

At this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money, which leads to even more layoffs.

But to have that effect, government spending will have to be much greater. "I've gone through the [Congressional Budget Office] numbers a bit more carefully; they're projecting a $2.9 trillion shortfall over the next three years," economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on his blog. "There's just no way $780 billion, much of it used unproductively, will do the job."

The Republicans are screaming that the stimulus package will lead to higher government budget deficits--never mind the fact that George W. Bush turned a government budget surplus into a deficit with his $1.3 trillion tax cut for the rich and a $1 trillion war in Iraq. Obama rightly pointed out their hypocrisy:

My administration inherited a deficit of over $1 trillion, but because we also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression, doing a little or nothing at all will result in even greater deficits, even greater job loss, even greater loss of income and even greater loss of confidence.

Obama could have seized this opportunity to bury his opponents for their retrograde economic and political policies, and champion the need for bigger and bolder government spending to preserve social services and create jobs.

Instead, however, Obama has thrown his enemies a lifeline in the form of the "Summit on Fiscal Responsibility"--a phrase long used as political cover by conservatives in both parties who want to cut social spending programs, especially Social Security and Medicare.

Apologists for Obama claim that the summit is really a clever political maneuver--a way to get political cover for repealing Bush's tax cuts for the rich in the name of reducing the budget deficit. But the "fiscal responsibility" crowd is out to corral Obama into accepting a bipartisan commission to draft a plan to "contain" spending on entitlements--for example, raising the retirement age for Social Security and limiting Medicare coverage. As Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out:

The commission idea is being pushed by Pete Peterson, the billionaire investment banker and former Nixon cabinet member behind the movie I.O.U.S.A. Though it is premature to assume that the administration has agreed to give an independent (read: unelected and unaccountable) commission such power over our most important government programs, the buzz has caused understandable dismay among advocates gearing up for a universal health care offensive who now face the prospect of again playing defense on Social Security...

Comprehensive health care reform would get at the root of the problem: our highly inefficient quasi-market-based system. The U.S. spends twice as much as a share of GDP as other industrialized countries with less favorable outcomes, including longevity.

COMPREHENSIVE REFORM is exactly what's needed--not just to establish health care for all, but to create jobs with living wages, build decent schools for kids, and pay for it all by taxing the astronomical wealth of the financiers and CEOs who have caused an economic catastrophe.

But despite Obama's decisive election victory, the debate over how to achieve these changes is only just beginning.

Part of the problem is that the very word "reform" was hijacked by free-market fundamentalists who assured us that less government is always better. Think of Bill Clinton's welfare "reform" that eliminated a federally guaranteed minimum income to the most vulnerable in society. Obama himself was able to get elected by promising "change" without offering many details.

The question now is who will drive the U.S. political agenda. The discredited but still powerful CEOs and Wall Street titans want to use Obama as a shock absorber--someone who will grant some mild concessions to working people, while leaving capital's wealth and prerogatives intact. For example, Obama hasn't altered the terms of the Bush administration's loans to the auto industry, which requires unionized autoworkers to accept even more concessions on pay and benefits.

Bankers are also catching a break, Obama's CEO pay cap notwithstanding. Although the nation's biggest banks are insolvent, the Obama administration keeps spending hundreds of billions to prop them up, rather than nationalizing them outright and ordering them to resume spending.

Likewise, the Pentagon and Corporate America is counting on Obama to salvage a long-term occupation in Iraq and "win" the war in Afghanistan, with the aim of preserving U.S. imperial power.

But at the same time, tens of millions of working people see Obama as a vehicle to achieve real change--and expect improvements in their lives as the result of his policies.

Many people accept the idea that the Iraq war is all but over, and they are reluctant to see a wider U.S. involvement in Afghanistan that will surely lead to greater civilian casualties and the deaths of more U.S. troops. The antiwar sentiment that fueled candidate Obama's campaign will inevitably come into conflict with the "realism" of President Obama's foreign policy.

WHAT HAPPENS next, therefore, depends on organization and struggle.

Organized labor, for example, is taking Obama at his word when he promises to sign the Employee Free Choice Act that would make it easier for workers to join a union. Corporate America, however, is fighting back with a vast anti-union campaign to try to block the measure.

Similarly, advocates of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all type program are intervening in the debate over Obama's proposed health-care reform, which would preserve the parasitical role of private insurance companies.

But achieving real change will require much more than mounting a series of single-issue campaigns. The scale of the economic crisis is so great that a sweeping, radical transformation is needed--and that means the left must put forward its own vision of social justice and equality, based on the interests of working people.

What's needed, in other words, is a class-struggle left--mass movements rooted in workplaces and communities that can fight on many fronts, from organizing unions and fighting budget cuts to demanding taxes on the wealthy to meet social needs.

The potential for such organizing can be seen in the struggles of recent weeks--the solidarity movement for the occupation of the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago in December, the national protests against the anti-gay Proposition 8 referendum in California, the protests against Israel's horrific war on the people Gaza.

While it's impossible to predict where or when the next struggle will take place, it's clear that the time to organize is now.

Building a class struggle left also means reviving the socialist tradition in the U.S. And this is an opportune time given the enormous ideological crisis facing the defenders of the capitalist system. As the world sinks into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a debate on alternatives has already broken out.

So while we mobilize against the attempts of capital to make us pay for their crisis, we also have to put forward a vision of the kind of world we're fighting for--a democratic society run by working people, based on human need rather than profit.