Representing Obama at the G20

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

November 25, 2008

I NEARLY fell out of my chair when I read that Barack Obama had chosen Madeleine Albright and Jim Leach to represent him at the recent Group of 20 (G20) economic summit in Washington, D.C.

According to a statement by Obama senior foreign policy advisor Denis McDonough, Leach and Albright would "be available [to] meet with and listen to our friends and allies on [Obama's] behalf."

I grew up and became politically aware during the Clinton years, so the return of Albright and Leach is like having a flashback to a recurring childhood nightmare.

Madeleine Albright was Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) during Bill Clinton's first term and secretary of state during his second term. As UN ambassador, she worked hard to deny calling the massacres in Rwanda "genocide." As secretary of state, she helped orchestrate the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999, which killed hundreds of civilians and displaced tens of thousands.

Infamously, she was asked in 1996 by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes about the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iraq during the Clinton era. "We have heard that a half million children have died," Stahl said. "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Then-Secretary of State Albright responded: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

Jim Leach, meanwhile, is the same "Leach" of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which partially repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act.

In a nutshell, Gramm-Leach-Bliley removed the regulatory wall separating commercial and investment banks, allowing for the expansion of the "shadow banking sector," replete with the mortgage-backed securities based on bad debt hidden in off-the-books "structured investment vehicles," which greatly amplified that impact of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

In other words, Jim Leach helped write the legislation that is a major cause of the current world financial crisis.

Officially, the point of the G20 Summit was to assemble leaders of 19 developed and developing countries and the European Union, which together account for about 85 percent of the world economy, in order to figure out how to coordinate efforts to deal with the financial crisis, pull the economy out of recession, and increase regulation to prevent something like this from happening again.

By sending Albright and Leach as his representatives, Obama sent the message that his views on the crisis can be expressed by someone who would justify the mass slaughter of children, as well as by an architect of the financial crisis--and that he trusts these scumbags to "play telephone" and relay their version of events at the summit back to him.

Whatever our varied opinions of the true intentions of Barack Obama, those who seek progressive change cannot but be deeply troubled by the return of the likes of Albright and Leach to the center of U.S. power.

Our response must be to build an alternative--to build a left that demands that the desire of the U.S. ruling class to dominate the Middle East is wrong, and not worth the life of a single Iraqi child, let alone 500,000, and that the solution to the economic crisis is to reorganize our economy to meet the needs of working-class people around the world, not the billionaires on Wall Street or their counterparts in the rest of the G20.

Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.