Obama's win will usher in a brave new world

• If the Senator wins on Tuesday, the world will never be the same

THIS WEEK, NOT ONLY WILL the world as we know it change forever, it will turn upside down.

If all goes well (and there is no Kenya-style rigging in the elections), America will have voted in Barack Obama, the only hope the US and the world has for creating a more just and compassionate social order.

A seismic paradigm shift will occur. Greed will no longer be considered a legitimate and desirable aspiration, as it currently is in the US and elsewhere.

Equity and social justice will be hallmarks of civilised societies, not wealth concentration and individualism.

America and the world will finally move towards creating more humane societies where the rich do not hog all the resources and opportunities at the expense of the not-so-rich.

Western nations, reeling from the excesses of capitalism, will rethink their anti-protectionism and anti-nationalisation strategies — a move that would have been considered unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

What is more, countries that pushed privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation down the throats of poor countries will have to eat their words.

Unfettered capitalism and unregulated free markets will be a thing of the past, thanks to lessons learnt from collapsing institutions on Wall Street. (Already, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has admitted that he made a big mistake in thinking that free markets would regulate themselves.)

In other words, the United States will begin to wean itself away from the “dictatorship of money”.

This trend will herald the birth of a brave new world, where governments around the world will strive to level the playing field for all income groups so that wealth and opportunities are accessible to all.

Obama has promised to “spread the wealth around” in the US by using taxpayers’ money towards programmes that assist low-income groups and the middle classes. John McCain and his Republican lieutenants call this socialism.

Obama has been labelled a Marxist who wants to “take from the rich to give to the poor” (as if this is a sin!).

These are the same people who claim to be devout Christians, forgetting that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is to show kindness towards the less fortunate.

The idea that the rich should subsidise the poor is so abhorrent to the Republicans that they have convinced a large section of American society to believe that Obama is trying to introduce Cuban-style communism into America.

They fail to understand that what Obama wants for his country is neither charity nor communism. All he wants is to create a more just society where people who are too weak, too poor, too marginalised or too disempowered to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps have a chance at making it in life.

HE WANTS TO FUNDAMENTALLY transform the narrow-mindedness of the American psyche, which has been brainwashed into believing that making loads of money is the only worthwhile goal in life (and all Arabs are terrorists).

Obama has rightly pointed out that the United States stands alone in the Western world as a country that does not provide subsidies in basic services, such as healthcare. His own mother died prematurely partly because her insurance company refused to cover her medical costs.

One of the great ironies of the United States, one of the richest countries on earth, is that people who cannot afford healthcare have no choice but to forego treatment and die.

Those who are too poor to afford higher education must resign themselves to menial jobs because universities are too expensive.

Obama believes that lack of opportunity is to blame for the asymmetrical growth experienced in the US, where the rich get richer (and get more tax breaks) and the poor sink into a never-ending cycle of debt and impoverishment.

He also wants the US to take on the role of pacifist, rather than aggressor, in conflicts that it cannot afford and which have made the world a much more dangerous place.

Obama’s ideas aren’t exactly revolutionary. Many European countries, such as Sweden and France, are already implementing them.

But the fact that he has the audacity to introduce these ideas in a country that is deeply individualistic, which believes that poverty is a result of laziness, not the result of unjust social and economic systems, is revolutionary.

If Obama wins tomorrow, he will put the world on a path that it desperately needs to be on. Countries that have blindly adopted the crudest forms of man-eat-man capitalism, such as Kenya, will have to rethink their policies and see the wisdom of introducing a more humane type of capitalism and a more just social order.

Protectionism and subsidies will no longer be shunned, but will be seen as prudent and practical economic strategies to combat the excesses of liberalisation, globalisation and free markets.

If this is socialism, then yes, the world is on its way to becoming socialist.

Ms Warah is an editor with the UN. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations.