The US election results announced today are a significant milestone in many respects.

Beyond the obvious landmarks such as Barrack Obama’s ethnic background and the strong shift in voting trends from Republican to Democrat, today’s events herald a resurgence in many of the fundamental ideals and beliefs that the US has purported for many years, but has failed to live up to. Concepts such as freedom and liberty have throughout most of the post-war years been subverted by a series of administrations for the purposes of US hegemony, to the detriment of people the world over.

And the result has been that those of us living and working outside the zone between the big apple and the big orange have increasingly viewed the foreign policies of successive US governments with a growing level of distrust and cynicism. In recent years especially, we have often heard the US government use words such as “freedom” and “liberty” in situations where the actions that follow those words are the diametric opposite of what is claimed.

The Bush administration has been particularly guilty of this type of hypocritical spin; whenever Dubya used these words, you just knew that he and his White House cronies were about to perpetuate another crime against these concepts, such as the Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay and the infamous Patriot act.

But Dubya and his cohorts are still merely the latest in a long line of US administrations who have talked the talk and then done exactly the opposite. Most previous US presidents have been much the same, waxing lyrical about freedom while implementing foreign policy that suppresses countries, cultures and governments who are not willing to bend their beliefs to favour the business interests of corporate America.

But as with any democracy, the ultimate faults of the leadership are (at least partly) the fault of the voters.

Someone once wrote: “We get the government we deserve”. This has been particularly true in many of the G8 democracies in recent years, where a combination of self-interest, media spin and voter apathy has resulted in leadership which rarely reflects the interests, hopes and aspirations of the many and instead provides a system for the filthy rich to get richer…and always at the expense of the rest of us.

The election of Barack Obama therefore represents something more fundamental and noble than a mere shift in the political status quo or the fulfillment of important aspirations of African Americans. It represents a desire and hope by the millions of voters who have been disenfranchised by the likes of Bush and the big business lobbies, to make the long-held US ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy mean something more than just empty terms trotted out by grey-suited government mouthpieces.

Obama’s campaign pledges include:-

• Closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention center, rejecting the Military Commissions Act and adhering to the Geneva Conventions.
• Withdrawing US troops from Iraq in a controlled manner.
• Removing the political factors influencing the US intelligence network, which directly led to the Iraq war.
• Properly safeguarding all nuclear material under US control within four years, stopping development of new nuclear weapons and strengthening nonproliferation treaty legislation.
• Increasing regulation of the financial industry, reforming the bankruptcy laws and improving consumer credit protections.
• Acknowledging the impact of climate change and committing to begin moving the oil-addicted US economy to more sustainable alternatives.
• Implementing policies to ensure that key government posts are filled, based on experience and expertise in the applicable field, instead of political affiliation and cronyism.
• Restricting the power of special-interest lobbyists, bringing an end to no-bid government contracts and disclosing contractor lobbying publicly.
• Fighting for an independent watchdog agency to oversee the investigation of congressional ethics violations.
• Working to make sure China plays by international rules.
• Providing universal health care to all Americans who need it.

Mr Obama certainly has his work cut out for him; he will shortly inherit the heaviest national debt in US history, a faltering economy with spiraling unemployment and poverty and keeping even a good portion of his pledges may prove difficult or even impossible. Still, with a Democrat majority in Congress and a Republican-controlled senate with a fairly narrow majority, it may very well prove possible for the White House to push through many of the proposed reforms…

But the mere fact that the pledges are being made (and supported by the voting public who turned out in record numbers) is a very positive sign.

For the first time in years, there appears to be a ray of hope that the US will start to move away from it’s doomed policies of unwarranted political and military interference, Ivy-League cronyism and commercial usury and start moving back to the kind of nation that it’s founding fathers and presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy had the vision and foresight to commit their lives to.

In his book: Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Noam Chomsky argued that the last surviving obstacle to the total domination of repressive regimes is public opinion.

I reckon he was right.

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