“I’ll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you.”

It’s nice to know that my voice is the one everyone else is listening to. It certainly doesn’t feel that way.

I wanted a much stronger economic stimulus back in the spring, focused on creating jobs by building a new, “green energy” infrastructure. I wanted at least some of the big banks to be taken over by the government, and thoroughly reformed before being broken up and resold to the private sector. I wanted guaranteed health care for everyone, paid for through a national system like in Britain, France or Canada. I wanted an immediate end to the use of drone aircraft in war, which invariably kills civilians. In fact, I wanted all troops withdrawn from Afghanistan and Iraq, closure of most American bases overseas, and a massive cut in our defense budget. I wanted an end to all those unconstitutional things Bush was doing in the name of national security. I wanted a criminal inquiry into torture, secret prisons, and the illegal war in Iraq. I wanted the U.S. to join the International Criminal Court, and to recognize the Goldstone Report that found Israel guilty of war crimes. I wanted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with a right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel. I wanted full diplomatic relations and open exchange with Iran, Cuba and Syria. I wanted to allow anyone, anywhere in the world who wants to move to the U.S. to be able to do so, unless she has committed a violent crime. I wanted a new era of peace and prosperity worldwide, based on economic justice and respect for human rights — and if that wasn’t possible, I at least wanted the U.S. to try really hard to make it happen, without firing a single bullet.

I know my voice isn’t being heard in Washington, and President Obama isn’t hearing it either. There’s probably good reason for that, because my voice is one of many, and not eveyone agrees. But at least spare me the fatuous talk, Mr. President, because you don’t even know me.

Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and America’s preparations for a “long war” of revenge and conquest. There was heady talk by neoconservatives about America as the new Rome, and a New American Century. When I participated along with tens of thousands of my fellow San Franciscans in mass demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, I felt I was standing up for a better vision of how the world could be, and America’s role in it. In my own mind I was defending the globalist project, and the humanistic vision of the Clinton–Gore years, against the us-versus-them mentality we were coming to know under Bush–Cheney. It didn’t have to be this way, I felt. Surely all people of the world wanted the same thing: democracy, economic prosperity, dignity for themselves and their families. So why couldn’t we build this together? There were good capitalists and bad capitalists, I argued: those who felt that limited resources were something to be fought over and controlled, and those who created new technologies that enlarged the sphere of human possibility. America in the recent past had been a model of this new way. The neoconservatives and their wars of empire were betraying this vision.

I moved to Morocco in 2003 and lived there for three years because I wanted to experience life on the other side of the Islamic–Western divide, but just as importantly, on the other side of the divide between rich and poor nations. I thought a good deal at the time about democratic ideals, because it was clear to me that my Moroccan friends were hoping for changes in their country that would help it to become a society in which basic rights were protected, government was transparent and accountable to the people, and development was pursued in the common interest. I spoke often with my friends about the principles enshrined in the American Constitution, such as a government of checks and balances, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the right not to be held without charges, and of course the rights of freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. I admired my friends’ ambition to build a more free and transparent society, and I insisted that these principles were the essential foundation of any such project.

At the same time, however, the internet was bringing me news almost daily of how America had betrayed its own principles in the name of the “global war on terror” and imperial ambition. Wiretapping without a warrant, a global network of secret prisons, torture, kidnapping of suspected terrorists, assassinations with robot aircraft, funding of death squads and militias, use of white phosphorus on civilians, and the mother of all war crimes, the illegal war itself: it seemed that nothing was off limits to the power-mad, fiercely ideological war profiteers in Washington. My only consolation was that eventually democracy would prevail, the abuses would be turned back, sanity would be restored, and the Constitution would return to force. Perhaps even justice would be done, and the war criminals would be held accountable for their crimes. All it would take would be an election in which the basic decency of the American people reasserted itself, putting in place an administration committed to doing the right thing.

I was back in the U.S. for the 2008 presidential election, and the nearly two years of political maneuvering that preceded it. Progressives, those who seek justice and equality for all people and oppose the idea of American empire, were looking for a candidate, and many thought they had found him in Barack Obama. But even though Obama had opposed the invasion of Iraq before it even began, he did so on pragmatic, not idealistic grounds. “I’m not opposed to all wars,” he said. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Another early warning sign was when he went before AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and spoke of how he had walked on the streets of an Israeli town and found it to be like “a suburb in America.” I liked what he said about regimes like Iran and Cuba—that we should not be afraid to sit down with them, without preconditions, to discuss our differences—and I liked the way he seemed to understand the aspirations of young people in poor countries to improve their lives in ways that Americans take for granted. But in the same foreign policy speech where he spoke of “reaching out to all those living disconnected lives of despair in the world’s forgotten corners,” Obama called for “building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” His rhetoric was quick to defend the idea that America has a unique mission in the world—a “beacon of hope” that shines on the huddled masses—and this mission, though couched in humanistic terms of “recognizing the inherent equality and worth of all people,” still justified American intervention in the affairs of every nation, through military means if necessary.

Even before becoming president, Obama presented a plan to expand America’s fighting force by 90,000—and while he supported military withdrawal from Iraq, it was only to refocus our efforts on what he saw as the “right battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Meanwhile, foreign policy scholar Chalmers Johnson had written a scathing critique of American empire in the form of three books, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis, in which he reminded us of the amazing fact that America has military bases in no less than 130 foreign nations—a network built up to contain the Soviet empire during the Cold War, but in no way diminished since then. What are we still doing there? Johnson asked. To what end? Obama’s project was not to dismantle this network, but in fact to strengthen it, to make it more intelligent and effective, extending American influence even further. For Obama, humanism and dialogue were simply tools in the toolbox of American empire, ones the Bush administration had neglected. I supported Obama through lack of a better choice—of course, electing a president who wants to diminish American power is impossible—but I periodically wondered if my fellow progressives were naive in assuming he was one of us. Since the election, Obama’s willingness to continue many of the worst Bush-era policies—military courts for suspected terrorists, attacks by robot aircraft that inevitably kill civilians, use of the U.N. veto to defend Israeli aggression, and so on—has confirmed my doubts.

Just before the election, the American empire suffered a huge, self-inflicted blow in the form of an economic collapse brought on by uncontrolled speculation by the nation’s largest banks. Obama’s level-headed response to this helped get him elected—he proposed stimulus spending to create jobs, aid to struggling homeowners, regulation of global markets, and long-term reforms in the fields of education, energy and health care—and in this, at least, I was proud to support him. He seemed to understand that American and indeed global development were at risk if they were left in the hands of speculators and profiteers. He seemed ready to use the power of the state—the people’s power—to protect the common good against corporate interests in ways not seen in a generation. Clinton had been a tinkerer, I felt, albeit an effective one—Obama would reform the system from top to bottom. He had a bold, integrated vision, and the moment was ripe for a profound transformation. He would lay the foundation for a new progressive era, much as Roosevelt had done in the Great Depression.

Instead, since taking office, Obama’s reforms have been terribly cautious, and in many ways they aren’t reforms at all. His stimulus spending was the minimum necessary. His handling of the banking crisis has left all the old structures intact, and even the old practices. Wall Street is already designing new speculative products, such as life insurance policies resold in the form of securities—“the earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.” Worse still, Obama’s signature issue of health care reform is shaping up as a huge giveaway to the private insurance industry, rather than forcing them to compete on equal terms with a robust public plan available to everyone, as he promised during the campaign. No wonder the populist right is throwing “tea parties” and talking revolution. They feel it’s business as usual in Washington, with handouts to the very forces—banks and insurance companies—that are squeezing every dime from their pockets. Even Obama’s most ardent supporters are beginning to have their doubts about all the compromising they’ve been forced to do. Obama is beginning to look like a tool of corporate interests—smoother and more thoughtful, no doubt, than Bush, but serving the same ends with greater intelligence. So in economic as well as foreign policy, Obama is reinforcing, rather than dismantling or reforming, the existing structures of exploitation.

Returning now to the globalist project, with which I began this article: I’ve conflated it here with American empire, but it is also the heir to earlier imperial projects, notably the British Empire of a century ago, and the European colonial project in general. In fact, “globalization” is nothing new. For centuries there has existed an international network of financing, trade and military might, designed to extract the resources of faraway lands for the benefit of a tiny elite. In the Clinton years, I persuaded myself that this project had turned democratic—indeed, for its century on the world stage, the American empire has promoted itself as the champion of democracy and opportunity for all peoples. But its record is far from that, and only the willful self-delusions of American public discourse blind us to that reality. From the military interventions in Latin America of the 1920s, to the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, to the support for dictators around the world in the 1970s, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today, America has continually and aggressively intervened in the affairs of foreign nations in the pursuit of its own interests—or more precisely, in the interests of its powerful elites. Obama has in no way deviated from that course. Indeed he affirms it, in two wars and countless “advisory” engagements around the world—and affirming it is a necessary condition for his being president.

We live in a world where power relationships are what matter, and no matter how much humanizing rhetoric we use, the fact remains that this is a bloody game. Directly or through its sponsorship of local forces, America has been responsible for millions of deaths on every continent since World War II. It’s not that the American empire is worse than any other, but precisely that it is no better. It is the nature of empires to work this way, and the current focus of imperial expansion is the Islamic world. What astonishes me is how it is possible for Americans to continue to believe in our civilizing mission as bringers of democracy and opportunity to faraway peoples, while our armies are spreading destruction in the service of corrupt regimes. Iraq was recently ranked as the most corrupt government in the Arab region, while Afghanistan is the second most corrupt in the entire world, after only Somalia. Meanwhile we provide exceptional support for the state of Israel, in the form of direct financing for whatever weapons they choose, while turning a blind eye to their program of ethnic cleansing in Palestine—even when the Goldstone Report on last year’s war in Gaza, accepted by all but eighteen of the world’s nations, accuses them of “direct attacks against civilians” and targeting “the people of Gaza as a whole.”

Whenever we read or think about these strategies of domination and conquest, we do so through the filter of our own supposed humanitarian intent. But how can such a logic stand up to scrutiny? The only way is to demonize our victims, taking away their humanity. Those weren’t women and children who died under our missiles at a wedding party, they were Al Qaeda or Taliban terrorists. If there were women and children involved, it was their fault for harboring terrorists. Israel used this same logic when fighting Hezbollah in 2006, and again when fighting Hamas in 2008. They aren’t really people like us—like “a suburb in America” as Obama said of the Israeli town he visited—they are dangerous, angry people, crazed by an ideology that values death over life. To defend our humanistic values against such a threat, we have no choice but to use the most severe measures. Our bombs and bullets are a reflection, not of our own inhumanity, but the inhumanity of our enemy. They made us this way!

This line of thinking first appeared in the American psyche during the Indian Wars of the 19th century. It was an era of frank territorial expansion, or “Manifest Destiny” as it was called then—meaning that God had given America the right to occupy the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To justify our massacre or subjugation of the people already living there, they were painted as savages who knew no scruples in war. They would slaughter our women and children if they could, so we had no choice but to slaughter theirs. They had no army or uniforms, so we were at war with an entire race. I am indebted to a recent article by Arthur Silber for pointing out that in America’s first war beyond its shores, this thinking and these tactics were translated to the world stage. In the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902, America seized the Spanish colony of the Philippines as its own, but the Filipinos fought bravely for their independence. Hundreds of thousands died in this conflict, and an American general gave the order to kill everyone over ten. This was justified with rhetoric familiar to us both from the Indian Wars, where most of the officer corps had gained their battlefield experience, and from the “global war on terror” today. “It is not civilized warfare,” said the Philadelphia Ledger, “but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality, and we are giving it to them.” Mark Twain, at the time America’s most celebrated writer, wrote an eloquent protest against this hypocrisy, but the war was popular with the American people. Later the same rhetoric was used against Germany in World War I, Japan in World War II, and in Vietnam, which American soldiers called “Indian Country.”

In 2004, neoconservative luminary Robert D. Kaplan wrote an article proclaiming that the whole world is now “Indian Country” and that Americans must be prepared to fight “dirty little struggles” against “small clusters of combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts and jungles.” We will encounter “warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah.” Such thinking is now the common wisdom of America’s top generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, so the connection of the Indian Wars to the “global war on terror” is complete. America is engaged in nothing less than a war of imperial domination around the globe, which requires demonizing whatever popular, local forces may stand in our way. It is Manifest Destiny all over again, only this time on a global scale. American force has the right to assert itself wherever it pleases, because it America’s mission to bring light to the darkness. Unfortunately, whether he realizes it or not, this is the meaning of Obama’s “beacon of hope.”

Where lack of resources is the rule, ignorance will breed.

Where injustice rears its head, lack of resources feels like destiny.

How to break this ugly circle?

Not long ago, I wrote an article called “Why Is Morocco Stuck?” in which I blamed Morocco’s lack of progress on two things: “the political and economic system, and the mentality of the people.” This provoked the following exchange with one of my readers, which I think is worth reproducing here.

reader: You’re naive to say it’s the people’s responsibility. Take those magazines that always get slammed illegally but soundly by the authorities. That’s terror against a corporation, and the authorities don’t fear public opinion. So what do you think can happen to individuals put in the same situation? Simply worse.

I won’t say we’re stuck, we’re just slow. Some people just have to bear with it because change is progressive. I think you’re being naive, but also impatient. I believe that if Morocco becomes a lot better in the future, with democracy and clean streets, you probably won’t like it.

eatbees: You mention the dangers involved when individuals speak out, but my point is that people need to take this risk in large numbers, because the authorities can’t use their techniques against millions at the same time. Yet this requires a change in mentality.

For the moment, the majority accepts things the way they are. They’re ruled by “fear and ignorance” as a friend of mine says, and the authorities get their way. But African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, or those living under communism or third world dictatorships (Chile, Philippines, South Africa…) changed things by no longer accepting the way things were, and the regime was unable to put down this new mentality.

So the situation in Morocco is first of all the responsibility of the authorities, but it’s also the responsibility of the people, because the people accept it—and in many cases, actively collaborate! As a guy I know recently put it, “The mafia is us. We’re all part of the corrupt system in one way or another. It won’t change until we change ourselves.”

I don’t know why you say, “If Morocco becomes a lot better in the future, with democracy and clean streets, you probably won’t like it.” If a traditional beach is destroyed to put in fancy apartments and cafés for the rich (and launder their money from trafficking) then it’s true I won’t like it. But if Moroccans are able to choose their own leaders and plan their own destiny, and this results in cleaner streets, better schools and a more modern lifestyle, why wouldn’t I like it?

reader: Maybe you don’t say it, but it’s what I think. I can imagine cities after getting modernized, turning to be exactly the same as Casa or Rabat, which you and I dislike.

eatbees: There’s good and bad forms of modernization. Casa has its good points and bad points. What I like there is the freedom there, and the autonomous culture among young people. What I don’t like is the chaos, pollution and lack of planning.

Too often in Morocco, modernization is what I call “bastard modernization,” which is either bricolage to serve the needs of the moment, with no thought to sustainability; or projects designed to enrich the interests of well-positioned individuals without serving the needs of the people from the bottom up.

Maybe any developing nation has to start this way. I guess the U.S. began with bricolage too, and evolved its ideas of citizenship and humanistic development later. But there have been so many theorists studying how to integrate economic development with concerns for the environment, sustainability, local tastes, and a healthy quality of life. What I’d love to see in Morocco is development driven by the choices of citizens, aided by experts, and designed for high quality over the long term. I don’t think that would turn out like Casa today!

Examples of bricolage go from the most simple, such as using laundry detergent to wash floors and dishes rather than buying a specialized soap for each task, or making folded cones out of old newspapers to hold the roasted nuts sold at neighborhood stands; to the more complex, such as installing a light switch in an awkward location because that’s as far as the wire will reach, or sharing shirts and pants with one’s brother so each can have a wardrobe instead of a single garment, or the system of “grand taxis” which allow Moroccans to travel to places buses won’t go, so long as they’re willing to squeeze six people into a space meant for four, and wait until enough people gather who are going to the same place. The ultimate example of bricolage is the Moroccan shantytown built from rocks and scraps of metal; or on a less desperate level, the sort of neighborhood where homes are built as the owners can afford them, a floor or two at a time, with empty lots in between waiting for their neighbors to pull together enough money to begin their own project.

Bricolage is the opposite of professionalism, which has standards and procedures for everything. I used to like Moroccan bricolage, considering it an art form, a sign of an irrepressible free spirit and the Moroccan genius for improvisation. In the West where everything works as it should, we are in danger of losing our spirit of self-reliance, and becoming paralyzed should things ever actually break down. Moroccans, however, deal with broken-down systems on a daily basis, so their sense of improvisation is finely tuned. I considered this a competitive advantage.

When I expressed these feelings to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, he objected that bricolage is in fact an obstacle to development. He is an adept at web design who believes in doing things the right way. He pointed out that bricolage is a response to a lack of resources; and he seemed to feel that adapting things to tasks for which they aren’t really suited is an unhealthy mentality. He pointed out that in the West, when we improvise—as in the famous case of the first PC, cobbled together in a garage in Silicon Valley—we do so within a system where everything works and the material resources are readily available. Bricolage, however, is a desperate response to a system in disrepair. My friend sees it as a sign of Moroccans’ misfortune, not as something to celebrate. Perhaps it is even a factor in perpetuating the breakdown, by accepting it as normal and multiplying it into the future. More professionalism is needed in Morocco, my friend would argue. The solution is to reform the broken-down system and do things the right way in the first place. However, this requires a material investment that is not being made; and bricolage is an engrained habit that will be hard to break.

If we define bricolage as a lack of appropriate resources, we can see it as the curse of the Moroccan economy and of society as a whole. An educated woman who works as a civil servant recently gave me an example. It’s well known that Morocco produces many college graduates who are unable to find jobs at the professional level. As she put it, thanks to a flawed educational system that isn’t in sync with the needs of the market, a lot of these graduates are unqualified for the jobs they seek. “They don’t even know how to write a simple letter.” As a result, they are forced to look for work as waiters, cab drivers, carpenters or house painters, where there is already plenty of competition and they aren’t qualified either. “Such jobs tend to require either manual skill or brute force, and they don’t have it.” So what do they do? She gave the example of a young man who goes into business as a subcontractor, rounding up work crews for construction projects. Each morning he goes to the place where day laborers wait looking for work, and transports them to the site. He pays them and takes his percentage, all of it under the table, without taxes or benefits of any kind. This is bricolage in the domain of employment. It’s true that a college graduate has found work, and is giving work to others, but it isn’t a sign of health in the Moroccan economy. To the contrary, he isn’t working in the field he trained for, he isn’t contributing his taxes to the national budget, and there is no security in what he’s doing of the sort that would allow him to plan for his future or start a family. The moment he gets sick and is unable to work, he will find himself without income, unable to support himself.

What sort of economy treats bricolage as a normal thing? It can be argued that such an economy is based on exploitation. Rather than investing its resources in the material well-being of its workers, the Moroccan economy prefers to take advantage of a population desperate for work and struggling to survive from day to day. A friend of mine gave the example of a shop that sells trifles like nuts and candy, where a man might work for as little as 500 dirhams a month, or two dollars a day. Such workers spend their entire lives in the shop, sleeping there at night, opening it in the morning, cooking their meals there, and never leaving even to drink a coffee in a popular cafe. If they are frugal enough, even with that meager income they can send money back to their families in the countryside, or save enough over the years to open a shop of their own. But the shop owner is taking advantage of them in the same way that employers in Europe and the U.S. take advantage of immigrant labor, paying a wage that others are unwilling to accept, and driving down wages for everyone in the process. Another example is a computer repair technician I knew in Tangier, who earned about $250 a month despite having a specialized skill. The money he earned wasn’t enough to pay his monthly expenses, and he was always borrowing from his boss or falling behind on his rent. Worse, after two years on the job he was still being paid under the table, so he had no benefits and no job security. I advised him to talk to his boss and try to negotiate a better deal, but he refused, saying, “He’ll simply tell me there are plenty of others like me, waiting at the door for a chance to take my place.”

So bricolage in Morocco isn’t the same as improvisation in a developed nation. It isn’t exotic, romantic, or an art form. It may be the sign of an inventive spirit, but more essentially it’s a response to a dysfunctional and even exploitative system. I now accept that my friend is right, and bricolage is an obstacle to Morocco’s development. Rather than eternally struggling to make the best of what is available, Moroccans should learn to demand the best resources for the task. This will require investment across all levels of society, and a transformation in the way Moroccans think, so they no longer accept a life built from scraps as normal.

Even though I’ve been away from Morocco a long time, the details of buildings, dress and behavior are instantly familiar to me, and the rhythms of life envelop and somehow comfort me. I guess this makes it hard for me to fully relate to a statement like Mohammed’s that “Morocco is a hard place to live in,” even though the evidence is all around me. Last night a discussion broke out between Mohammed and another friend as to whether Morocco is a “horrible” country as Mohammed put it, or merely a “cruel” one as my other friend said. My friend defended the idea that a country can be cruel without being horrible, which led to the question of how Morocco can be cruel and generous at the same time. I pointed out that Moroccans feel a moral obligation to help each other, even strangers, while Americans tend to feel that other people’s problems are none of their business. My friend feels that if Morocco ever succeeds in developing itself to the European level, this generosity will disappear because it’s a holdover from Morocco’s communal past. In fact, he feels that this type of generosity is actually an obstacle to Morocco’s development, because it goes against individualism which is a necessary condition for progress.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m at the Gnawa Festival, which attracts eccentric young people after all, but there seems to be a wider range of self-expression in Morocco than I’ve seen in the past. I’ve seen a punk with a mohawk and a Ramones T-shirt, an emo with a buzz cut and long locks falling into his eyes, chin goatees, specially cut sideburns, afros, dreadlocks, even the occasional piercing or tattoo. The question is whether all this will lead to expression on any other level, as happened in the 1960s in the West when youthful self-expression mutated into political struggle. I suspect that most of my friends here would say definitely not. In fact, they would call such expression a ruse, a false freedom, a distraction from the real problem which is, as Mohammed put it, that the rich run the country in their own interest. Just as it always has, power in Morocco comes from the top, so nothing ever happens here unless it’s in the interest of the power elite, the Makhzen.

In this vein Mohammed mentioned an article he’d written in which he traced Gnawa back to its historic origin as the music of slaves, and proposed that modern promoters of Gnawa are creating a new generation of slaves, in this case the slaves of globalization, the global consumer economy that in Morocco profits only the rich. As we watched an open air concert I proposed, “So the rich want to turn Morocco into a show for foreigners to get their money, rather than developing the country in the interests of its people,” and he replied, “That’s it in a nutshell.” The Makhzen is happy to see the young poor of Morocco amuse and distract themselves with hairstyles and such, because they expect that’s as far as the self-expression will go. Meanwhile they could care less about the future of these young people, at best seeing them as props in the show they’re putting on, a show called Morocco.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

That’s the problem with you people, you’re just too hungry! Taking food from the rich people’s tables and holding your hands out for more. Now where have I heard that before?

“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.

“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”

So far, apparently, Veoh is the only company to take this drastic step. But if you wake up one day to find your favorite sites like YouTube or Facebook blocked, don’t blame your local dictator — at least, not yet. Instead, blame capitalism. Or better yet, blame yourselves! You’re downloading content without being good consumers.

This interview is half an hour long, but it is lively and, for anyone concerned about the financial crisis in the U.S., well worth watching.

William K. Black, a former regulator who helped resolve the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, speaks to journalist Bill Moyers about our current financial meltdown. In his view, we are living through the consequences of a deliberate, coordinated, criminal fraud involving mortgage lenders, investment banks and rating agencies, all of whom conspired to make huge profits by repackaging worthless loans as safe, secure investements. People who knew what they were doing made a lot of money lying to the rest of us, and what’s remarkable is that most of these people are still running their institutions today.

What’s worse, the government is helping to enable the fraud in two ways. First, it is feeding the institutions tens of billions in taxpayer dollars to keep them alive, and second, it is helping them to conceal the true nature of the crisis from the American people. Despite Barack Obama’s promises of change on the campaign trail, his treasury secretary Timothy Geithner is, in Black’s words, a “failed regulator” who should have blown the whistle on this fraud while he was head of the New York Federal Reserve, but did not; and national economic advisor Larry Summers is one of the architects of the late-1990s deregulation that made this catastrophe possible in the first place. Black, an Obama supporter, feels that his presidency will be ruined unless he quickly reboots with a new economic team committed to cleanup rather than coverup.

In a similar vein, Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein has just written an article in which she describes the disappointment felt by Obama supporters when they see their man sell out to failed ideologies, in both economic and foreign policy. She calls on us to stop waiting for Obama to deliver the change on his own, and start pushing back from below.

If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce enough to produce programs capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding.

Let me try to be clear about this. We hired you to make sweeping changes, not to be a servant of the status quo. Yet on the economic crisis in particular, you seem to be a prisoner of a complacent, self-serving orthodoxy that is preventing you from doing what needs to be done. Increasingly, you are seen as serving the interests of privileged elites, rather than the interests of those who elected you. You listen to the representatives of those elites, like Larry Summers, not to those who understood the problem early on, like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini or Nassim Taleb. It escapes our understanding why this should be so. In the face of the most grave crisis of our lifetimes, why are you paralyzed? Given that you promised an administration whose decisions would be based on facts and sound analysis, why are you ignoring what is obvious to the rest of us, that our nation’s economic policy is held hostage to the whims of the very people who brought this disaster upon us?

Two opinion pieces today make this point more eloquently than I could, one by Frank Rich in the New York Times, the other by William Greider in the Washington Post. Their appearance on the same day is coincidental, but they are really companion pieces. I assume that you’ve read them both, and considered their arguments. I’m writing to you now to second their urgent appeal. Both pieces make the point that you have a choice before you, between the will of the people and the will of the elites. Until now, inexplicably to many of us, you’ve tried to avoid a rupture with the elites, even though their failed, self-serving policies got us to where we are today. But time is running out, and having it both ways will no longer be possible. If you wish to salvage your presidency and its promise of transformative change, you need to convince the people that you are on our side, working for those who elected you.

In his article, “Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?” Frank Rich writes:

Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed….

Of course most Americans don’t know how A.I.G. brought the world’s financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

They know that the corporate bosses who may yet lay them off have sometimes been as obscenely overcompensated for failure as Wall Street’s bonus babies…. Since Americans get the big picture of this inequitable system, that grotesque reality dwarfs any fine print. That’s why it doesn’t matter that the disputed bonuses at A.I.G. amount to less than one-tenth of one percent of its bailout…. These prominent players are just the handiest camera-ready triggers for the larger rage.

In his town-hall meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., on Wednesday, [Obama] described the A.I.G. bonuses as merely a symptom of “a culture where people made enormous sums of money taking irresponsible risks that have now put the entire economy at risk.” But rhetoric won’t tamp down the anger out there…. We must have governance to match the message.

To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck….

Why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.

In his own article, “Obama Told Us to Speak Out, but Is He Listening?” William Greider takes the argument a step further.

During the campaign, Barack Obama beckoned Americans to put aside their cynicism about politics and re-engage as active citizens. They are now doing so with red-hot anger…. The president is now trapped between these two realms—the governing elites who decide things and the people who are governed. Which side is he on…?

Something fundamental has been altered in American politics. Encouraged by Obama’s message of hope, agitated by darkening economic prospects, many people have thrown off sullen passivity and are trying to reclaim their role as citizens. This disturbs the routines of Washington but has great potential for restoring a functioning democracy. Timely intervention by the people could save the country from some truly bad ideas now circulating in Washington and on Wall Street….

During the past nine months, gigantic financial bailouts amid collapsing economic life made visible the crippling divide between governing elites and citizens at large. People everywhere learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. “Where’s my bailout,” became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide….

Elite opinion wants to empower the Federal Reserve to act as the “super-cop” protecting the financial system against systemic risk in the future…. A new regulatory regime that puts the secretive central bank in charge of everything…would effectively legitimize the existence of a corporate state. This concentrated power would be neither socialism nor capitalism, but a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst qualities of both systems….

Barack Obama can resist all this, if he chooses, but he seems conflicted. Obama’s approach so far is devoted to restoring Wall Street’s famous names, and his economic advisers tell him this is the “responsible” imperative…. Obama evidently agrees. He does not seem to grasp that the tone-deaf technocrats are leading him into a dead-end.

The president needs to hear a second opinion—millions of them.

So far, Mr. President, there is no sign that you are hearing the essence of what we are saying. Those who stole our retirement savings and brought the world to the brink of collapse must to be held to account. The corrpution and self-dealing must stop. But more than that, the whole inequitable system must be remade, on entirely different principles—transparency and prosperity for all, rather than speculation and insider advantage. Is capitalism the engine of progress for everyone, or just a few? We await the proof.

Meanwhile I sit here despairing, as the man we elected to bring change to Washington morphs into a servant of the status quo—a status quo which you admit has failed thoroughly. So why do you still listen to its architects, and ignore those who warned against its abuses? I believe your heart is in the right place, and your mind grasps the problem, but something is holding you back. I’m aware that you are cautious by nature, even conservative in the sense of “conserving,” but there are times when the only way to conserve is to cut away what is rotten. This is one of those times. Your ability to do so rests on the confidence of the people, and that confidence, while vast, is not infinite. Allow me to join my voice to those urging a change of heart before it’s too late.