Mittwoch, 21. Januar 2009

Barack Obama : The New Hope ?

Many lines have been written since Barack Obama’s election.
The majority of US society vote for a change that also the world is expecting from the most powerful president in the world. It doesn’t mean that the world will be safer now, because terrorism is still a real threat, but it will be less tension with the Arab countries. Some people want to compare him with Kennedy someothers that he will achieve MLK's dream.
One of the first decisions on office was to sign orders to close Guantanamo detention facility in one year, as well as ban torture from CIA prisons. This is a sign that the new US administration want to address the relations with the Arab world, but also with Cuba and most of the Latin-American countries. It also bring the US back to the Geneva convention.
Also concerning with foreign policy, George Mitchell, who has recently been appointed as Obama’s Middle East envoy, was taking conversations with the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and Egypt as mediator, to assure that Hamas would stop sending rockets in Israeli territory while Israel would withdrawn its troops from Gaza.

But not everything can be related to foreign affairs. Obama takes power in one of the most critical moments of modern history. The world financial crisis is putting in danger the capitalist system and the US administration needs to move fast.
Lately we have heard of a new phase of the global crisis, the term deflation, which was used in some manuals of many liberal economists, but now it is a fact.
Increase of unemployment rate -> less money to the families to expend -> reduce of consumption ->reduce of demand-> prices decrease -> reduce production -> companies release people-> increase of unemployment rate …. and so on…. This can develop into an endless loop that can bring the western economies into collapse. The market needs now new regulations. The era of neo-liberalism is coming to the end.
To avoid all this to happen, the US government designs a rescue plan which need the support of the republicans which intend to help the industry and therefore to save jobs and bring stability in the US market. Europe is having his own rescue plan, banks and finance institutions need support, which is unfair if in the end this is paid by the tax payers, but on the other hand it is done to save the whole system

Obama wasn’t elected to save the world, but it’s true that there a new opportunities that can’t be missed again. His social reforms will need to wait for a while and that can bring frustration to some Obama’s supporters, but the world needs urgent solutions. Maybe crisis can also bring new oportunities and this is what a government needs to do.