9781844677573-the-obama-syndrome-pb

The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

by Tariq Ali

A prescient dissection of Obama’s overseas escalation and domestic retreat, fully updated.

Written early in 2010 and initially published in September 2010, The Obama Syndrome predicted the Obama administration’s historic midterm defeat. But unlike myriad commentators who have since pinned responsibility for that Democratic Party collapse on the “reform” president’s lack of firm resolve, Ali’s critique located the problem in Obama’s notion of reform itself. Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency by promising to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and his economic team brought the architects of the financial crisis into the White House. Small wonder then that the “War on Terror”—torture in Bagram, occupation in Iraq, appeasement in Israel, and escalation in Pakistan—continues. And that Wall Street and the country’s biggest corporations have all profited at the expense of America’s working class and poor.

Now a thoroughly updated paperback continues the story through the midterms, including a trenchant analysis of the Tea Party, and Obama’s decision to continue with his predecessor’s tax cuts for the rich. Ali asks whether—in the absence of a progressive upheaval from below—US politics is permanently mired in moderate Republicanism. Already called “a comprehensive account” of the problems with Obama (The Huffington Post), this new edition is sure to provide a more “powerful boost to Obama dissenters on the left” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Paperback, 156 pages

ISBN: 9781844677573

September 2011

$12.95 / £7.99 / $16.00CAN

Reviews

  • Ali is smart as fire.

    – Ian Epstein, New City

  • Ali remains an outlier and intellectual bomb-thrower; an urbane, Oxford-educated polemicist.

    – The Observer

  • The Obama Syndrome will be a powerful boost to Obama dissenters on the left.

    – Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  • The Obama Syndrome documents the collapse of the Myth into a thousand pieces.

    – Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations

Blog

Tariq Ali: "World in Crisis" Broadcast

On December 6, 2-3 PM EST, Alternative Radio will be broadcasting Part Two of "World in Crisis," a special two-part program and interview with Tariq Ali.

On December 17, 2010 Muhammad Bouazizi, a street vendor in a small town in Tunisia, burned himself to death. He was protesting harassment and mistreatment by state authorities. His death fueled a revolt in Tunisia which toppled the Ben Ali dictatorship. The spark spread to Egypt and within weeks the decades old Mubarak regime was overthrown. The so-called Arab Spring rocked the entrenched old order. Those revolutionary currents have stirred the waters elsewhere. The economic collapse is shaking things up in the U.S. Witness the Occupy Wall Street movement. Americans, fed up and struggling to make ends meet, watch their military bomb and occupy countries from Pakistan to Yemen, are taking to the streets. Citizens are challenging and questioning the status quo. Are we on the edge of genuine change in the structure of power and privilege?

Tariq Ali, an internationally renowned writer and activist, was born in Lahore, Pakistan. For many years he has been based in London where he is an editor of New Left Review. A charismatic speaker, he is in great demand all over the world. In his spare time he is a filmmaker, playwright and novelist. He is the author of many books including The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Pirates of the Caribbean, Speaking of Empire & Resistance with David Barsamian, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, The Obama Syndrome, and On History with Oliver Stone.

By Francisco Salas / 02 December 2011 / post comment

Verso Books at the Occupy Boston Library

Via Stephen Squibb, a photo of Verso titles proudly stacked on the Occupy Boston Library milk crates:

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Books in the photograph:

Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis

Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation, by Sujatha Fernandes

I'm with the Bears: Stories from a Damaged Planet, with contributions by Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, T.C. Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Helen Simpson, and Wu Ming 1, and with an introduction by Bill McKibben

 

The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, by Tariq Ali

Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, by Paul Mason

The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights, by Robin Blackburn

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, by Juan González and Joseph Torres

Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, by Frank Bardacke

 

By Francisco Salas / 03 November 2011 / post comment

"How do the ninety-nine percenters compare with mass protests of the past - and can they succeed?"— Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali, author of Obama Syndrome, has written a piece for the Sunday Herald  on the ninety-nine percent protesters at Occupy sites around the world, but most famously at Occupy Wall Street. In it he compares this fledgling activist movement with the mass protests of the past. A section of the article is reproduced here:      

          "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at," wrote Oscar Wilde, "for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." The spirit of that 19th century socialist is alive among the idealistic young people who have come out in protest against the turbo-charged global capitalism that has dominated the world ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

           The Occupy Wall Street protesters who have taken up residence at the heart of New York's financial distract, are demonstrating against a system of despotic finance-capital: a greed-infected vampire that must suck the blood of the non-rich in order to survive. The protesters are showing their contempt for bankers, for financial speculators and for their media hirelings who continue to insist that there is no alternative. Since the Wall Street system dominates Europe, local versions of that model exist here too. (Interestingly it was the Wall Street occupiers rather than the indignados of Spain or the striking workers of Greece who had an impact in Britain, revealing once again that the real affinities of this country are Atlanticist rather than European.) The young people being pepper-sprayed by the NYPD may not have worked out what they want, but they sure as hell know what they're against and that's an important start.

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By Kishani Widyaratna / 25 October 2011 / post comment

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