I’ll state my argument quite simply: The recent enthusiasm over the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, which was expressed resoundingly in this publication Friday as in most other media sources worldwide, seems rather unjustified. A McCain victory, of course, would have been terrible for both the United States and the world, but I’m afraid that Obama’s ascendancy is only marginally better in this sense. To illustrate my point, I’ll briefly examine Obama as regards Africa and the global environment, two concerns that were explored in viewpoints in the previous issue of THE HOYA (“Obama Can Also Bring Change to Africa” and “Obama’s Biggest Job Will Be Helping the Environment,” www.thehoya.com, Nov. 7, 2008).To begin with, it’s not at all fair to expect Obama to “continue to improve the United States’ already strong dedication to developing Africa,” as Anthony deWolfe would have it. It’s rather strange to claim in the first place that the United States has had any such strong historical dedication: We need only look at the government’s collusion in the assassination of quasi-socialist Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and its support for the murderous (but “anti-Communist”) kleptomaniac Mobutu Sese Seko who followed him, or its long-standing support, alongside many American businesses, for apartheid South Africa, to disprove this – unless we quite absurdly believe Mobutu and apartheid South Africa to have promoted “development” in any meaningful sense of the term.oreover, and more generally, U.S. support for, and advancement of, neoliberal globalization has proven rather disastrous to most African societies. Its structural adjustment policies have led to the dismantling of what little public social services existed before and generally imposed an economic model that responds to economic profit instead of human welfare or need; that the results have been socially disastrous is not surprising.The mere fact that there can exist such things as the “neglected diseases” that plague Africa, like other regions of the world, or that millions of those infected with HIV have no access to antiretrovirals largely because their material poverty cannot create effective demand for the profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies that might otherwise produce such drugs, speaks to the real poverty of this dominant approach – one that Obama does not seem to be at all critical of.Indeed, Obama represents much of the profoundly mediocre status quo with regard to the environment as well. It’s perhaps true, as Shea Kinser hopes, that his administration, allied with a Democrat-majority Congress, will pass legislation that better protects the environment than has been the case in the past eight years, or, for that matter, since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. While Obama’s stated commitment to the development of new “green jobs” is perhaps a step in the right direction, the fact of the matter is that the environmental crisis looming is not one amenable to solving through mere reform – the core of the problem is structural and cultural.The importance mindless consumerism holds for many Americans, together with our society’s unquestioned commitment to an economic system based fundamentally on growth (capitalism), is the problem here. Under this system, nature, like human beings, is merely something to be exploited for profit, and when the livelihoods of most of those who live within this framework depend upon the perpetuation of such profit, the unsurprising result is unchecked environmental degradation. As a result, the progress Somerset Perry sees in the development of a cap-and-trade system that “accurately reflects the true cost” of carbon emissions – however it is that we could calculate such a cost – might well be nullified by scale effects: Continued consumption and growth will likely render these marginal gains irrelevant.Short of the development of a new, more rational economic system together with the reversal of the imposition of ecocidal Western economic models on the rest of the world, there can be no rational hope, it seems, for avoiding ecological catastrophe in the near future. It is clear, of course, that this project is not on the agenda of the Obama administration. The question of whether it’s too late to avoid cataclysmic change is a more ambiguous one since, at our current 387 parts per million of CO2 (or, accounting for methane and other greenhouse gases, 430 ppm CO2-equivalent), we are too quickly approaching a point of no return.Given all this, it should be clear that Obama certainly does not represent progress in any meaningful sense of the term, let alone “change we can believe in.” His recent appointment of Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the Israeli military, as his chief of staff is characteristic in this sense; The grip that Zionism is to be expected to have on Obama’s presidency, then, belies deWolfe’s naïve claim that Obama represents a “leader” that “[a]ll who have been marginalized and oppressed” can “identify with and believe in.”Obama’s politics of weak reformism and compromise with many of the disconcerting realities of the status quo should not come as a surprise, for he is a creation of the system. If our hopes for the future are not to be bereft of meaning, we must consciously resist that system – together with its creations who, while perpetuating the dispossession of the world’s oppressed and the destruction of the planet, present themselves as champions of change.Javier Sethness graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 2007.”