Awakening From Obama’s Seductive Spell

Barack Obama is no mystery to Paul Street. His new book “documents that Obama has been consistently to the right of center throughout his public career and is doing what he was groomed to do.” The same policies that were deemed so noxious under a white Texan, George W. Bush, “become perversely acceptable for many ‘progressive’ and other citizens when carried out by an eloquent and urban black Democrat from Chicago.”

By Gary Olson

Obama: His main schtick is to exude above-the-fray professorial equanimity. One of the most convincing demagogs in recent times.

The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010, paperback) demolishes any remaining misapprehension that Obama is anything other than a Wall Street/military-friendly, seductive-sounding servant of concentrated wealth and power. I assigned it as a text this term in my course “U.S. Workers in the Global Economy” and for many students it was a game changer.

“Obama refused to utter a word of solidarity with besieged public workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere.”

“It was the combination of a brilliant marketing strategy, beguiling rhetoric, and something approaching a cult of personality that put him over the top in 2008.”

And that dovetails nicely with a quote he recently cited from the late and revered American historian Howard Zinn: “There’s hardly anything more important people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens. It is becoming clearer and clearer to many, after the first year of Obama’s Presidency, that it is going to require independent action from below to achieve real change.”

Gary Olson, Ph.D., is chair of the political science department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Contact: olson@moravian.edu. [5]

[6]

• Democrats Obamarama

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/awakening-obamas-seductive-spell

Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/democrats
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/obamarama
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/empires_new_clothes.jpg
[4] http://www.zcommunications.org/znet
[5] mailto:olson@moravian.edu
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