He is by all accounts an exceptionally intelligent man, intellectually accomplished and, considering his years, an unarguably astute politician. Barak Obama is doubtless all of that. But a Miracle Man he is not and, to be fair, he has made no such claim either. The problem, however, is the apparent disconnect between his words and his deeds.

Obama campaigned single-mindedly for ‘Change You Can Believe In’, remember? If memory serves, he never claimed then that he would work miracles if and when in office. Now that he’s got there, his actions seem designed to achieve the impossible. That, by and large, is what miracles are all about; miracles defy the fundamental laws of nature, they even reverse the irreversible. In short, resurrect the dead. ‘Globalization’ is dead, brain-dead, yet is being kept on life-support by Obama et al. No one dares mention it, though that’s what they are collectively praying for: a Miracle.

Addressing a joint session of Congress on February 24, Obama proclaimed "We will rebuild, we will recover, we will emerge stronger than before", and added that America was "the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history." [Proof only that Obama can still dream on.]

Inevitably, the Bubble Economy burst within the short span of a couple of decades; the unconscionable pursuit of quick profits left millions of lives in ruin. It’s necessary to underline the obvious: the dream of a thriving global economy finally turned into a nightmare thanks to the machinations of George W. Bush’s diabolical henchmen during his eight-year-long pseudo presidency.

The global economic system has failed in every dimension: financial, environmental, and social, says Dr. David Korten in his just published Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth: "And the current financial collapse provides an incontestable demonstration that it has failed even on its own terms. Spending trillions of dollars in an effort to restore this system to its previous condition is a reckless waste of time and resources."

The failure of the credit system is only one manifestation of a failed economy that is wildly out of balance with, and devastating to, both humans and the natural environment, says Korten. "Consumer debt and housing foreclosures are setting historic records. The growing worldwide gap between rich and poor, with its related alienation, is eroding the social fabric to the point of fueling terrorism, genocide, and other violent criminal activity. At the same time, excessive consumption is pushing Earth’s ecosystems into collapse."

The unprecedented global economic meltdown has put to rest the myths that our economic institutions are sound and that markets work best when deregulated. The ‘Growth Illusion’ is dead too, and we need to face the reality that there are environmental limits to growth. The more intelligent course, in Korten’s view, is to set about redesigning our economic system from the bottom up to align with the realities and opportunities of the twenty-first century.

The Parable of the Shopping Mall is Alexander Cockburn’s way of conveying the decay and imminent death of the once-flourishing retail trade. Writing in The Nation, Cockburn says the shopping mall changed the American landscape within the course of a generation. "Malls, whether in strip or covered form, symbolized the conversion of people from citizens to consumers, the death of Main Street, architecture reduced to utter banality."

Across the past forty years some 200 cities built pedestrian malls, notes Cockburn. "Today, only thirty remain. Drive around any town and you can see strip malls in similar decline, their parking lots nearly empty, boarded-up stores in the retail frontage like a mouth losing its teeth, as the lights of Circuit City go out and Linens ’n Things, Zales, Ann Taylor and Sharper Image retrench or collapse."

As for Obama echoing the determination of Wall Street bankers and the likes of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers – that the architecture of ‘free enterprise’ capitalism must somehow be preserved – Cockburn recalls what Thurman Arnold captured so wittily in his 1937 book, The Folklore of Capitalism. Arnold had described with vivid humour the tenacity with which supporters of untrammeled ‘private enterprise’ held to beliefs whose operating principles had engendered the Great Depression, and had likened it to the University of Paris insisting in the seventeenth century that bleeding was still the cure for malaria, even though quinine, promoted by the Jesuits in Peru, seemed to offer a more effective remedy. ["The remedy for fever," Arnold wrote, "was the art of bleeding to rid the body of those noxious vapors and humors in the blood which were the root of the illness. Of course, patients sickened and died in the process, but they were dying for a medical principle."]

Asks Cockburn, "Is there a better description for the Republicans opposing the stimulus plan on principle or Geithner stoutly proclaiming his zeal to preserve the banking system as presently constituted?"

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and a leading crusader for the refashioning of the American urban landscape, writing in AlterNet was of the view that a lot of reasonable people had begun to ask whether President Obama was a stooge of whatever remained of Wall Street, "with Citigroup and Goldman Sachs’s puppeteer, Robert Rubin, pulling strings behind an arras in the Oval Office."

"Personally, I doubt it," he wrote, "but it is still a little hard to understand what the President is up to. For one thing, the stimulus package, so-called, looks more and more like national sub-prime mortgage itself, a bad bargain made under less-than-realistic terms, with future obligations fobbed onto whoever inhabits this corner of the world for the next seven hundred years - and all to pay for a bunch of granite counter-tops and flat-screen TVs."

No good would come, in Kunstler’s view, of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which was exactly what the Obama program was starting to look like. "In the folder marked ‘unsustainable’ you can file most of the artifacts, usufructs, habits, and expectations of recent American life: suburban living, credit-card spending, Happy Motoring, vacations in Las Vegas, college education for the masses, and cheap food. All these things are over. The public may suspect as much, but they can’t admit it to themselves, and political leadership has so far declined to speak the truth about it for them." The truth was essential to forming a useful consensus that would allow them to move forward effectively.

"One of the sad paradoxes of politics is that democracies do not seem very good at disciplining their citizens’ behaviour. The wish to please voters and the influence of campaign money overwhelm even leaders with mature instincts. In America’s case, this could lead to what I like to call corn-pone Nazism a few years down the road. Someone will design snazzy uniforms and get us all marching around to ‘God Bless America’. At the point of a gun."

Kunstler believes it’s not too late for Obama to start uttering these truths to avoid a turn to fascism and get on with America’s next phase of history - living locally, working hard at things that matter, and preserving civilized culture. "What a lot of us can see now staring out of the abyss is a new dark age."

Perhaps someone he trusts – Michelle, maybe? – could, for a start, whisper softly in Obama’s ample ear: