Honduras And The US US Administration

The news today is that the Obama administration is getting increasingly frustrated with the government of Honduras. That government took power four months ago in a coup. Protests in the country have been strong and the de facto government there has seemed helpless as its sinks deeper into a national crisis and gets little or no help internationally.

One of the causes of frustration for the Obama administration is the lock-step push by the far-right in this country to support the coup in Honduras. The new Honduran government, which hardly governs, has been lobbying in the US and has hired a PR firm here to represent its interests. They may not have had to bother. Hate radio deejays keep comparing the government of President Manuel Zelaya to the Venezuelan and Cuban governments. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina supports the coup and leading Republicans are using their influence to hold up important State Department appointments as a pressure tactic. It has been left to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to argue the administration's case and pressure the coup leaders to step down or step aside. The American military establishment reflexively supports the coup while the administration is looking for a deal.

This lobbying by an illegitimate government, unnecessary as it may be, should raise serious concerns across the political spectrum precisely because it echoes through the right wing agenda here.

One gets the impression that the far right, here and in Latin America, was expecting something different. The coup leaders may have expected more regional support and may have coordinated their actions with the far right here in order to turn or weaken the Obama administration. The far right here may have had similar regional expectations. A quick pro-coup solution to the crisis would have met their needs, but a protracted struggle in a polarized country also gives them a political model to adapt internationally. They also hope for a domino effect of falling governments and destabilization, particularly as Latin America moves left and as American capitalism remains in crisis. The immediate driving forces here, I think, are the corporations doing business in Honduras. It may well turn out that the accusations of Colombian-Venezuelan revolutionary ties made some months back were deliberately floated by these forces in anticipation of blocking international solidarity with Honduras.

The ability of Republicans to block appointments is what concerns me here. Granted the lack of inertia in the US government when new administrations come in, the current administration is still missing dozens of key people whose appointments are being held up by the folks who want to see this administration fail. Missing people in the State Department, the Office of Legal Council, Health and Human Services and the Labor Department means that work isn't getting done and that the government cannot function with even a cautiously centrist agenda. Since many of the people whose appointments are on hold are relatively liberal there is reason to believe that the administration could still move in the right direction if it did not have to deal with this roadblock.

We are left to speculate how much better life might be with a pro-choice head of the Office of Legal Council, a Health and Human Services bureaucracy that enables healthcare for all, a State Department bureaucracy which does not take a bomb-'em-first approach to international diplomacy and a Labor Department solicitor who is pro-worker. For that matter, we are still speculating on what it might be like to have an administration and a Democratic Party that rallies us to push through a progressive program over the objections of the far right. Obama sends the wrong signal when he tells Democrats that he doesn't mind mopping up other people's messes but doesn't want to be told that he's not mopping fast enough.