Could you ask for a more perfect bookend to Obama’s blood-soaked neocon abortion of a presidency than his receiving $400,000 to give a speech at a health care conference organized by a Wall Street firm?
Original dateline: 05/02/17 11:22am | Cover image above: If you’re an actual, real progressive Obama is not your man.
My God I hate every single thing about every single part of this. Let me type that out again in segments, so we can all really feel into it:
Four hundred thousand dollars. For a former President of the United States. To give a speech. At a healthcare conference. Organized by a Wall Street firm.
Why are Wall Street firms organizing motherfucking healthcare conferences, one might understandably ask? And why are they hiring the man who just completed an eight-year war on progressive healthcare policy and a torrid love affair with Wall Street criminals? These are extremely reasonable questions that might be asked by anyone who is intelligent and emotionally masochistic enough to look straight at this thing, and the answer, of course, is America. That’s what America is now. The man who continued and expanded all of Bush’s most evil policies, created a failed state in Libya, exponentially expanded the civilian-slaughtering US drone program which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times” to unprecedented levels, facilitated the Orwellian expansion of the US surveillance state while prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, and used charm and public sympathy to evade the drastic environmental policy changes we’ll need to avert climate disaster and lull the progressive movement into a dead sleep for eight years now gets paid nearly half a million dollars an hour to continue bolstering the exploitative corporatist nightmare he’s dedicated his life to. American University has compiled data indicating that the already extremely wealthy Obama family may end up being worth as much as $242 million in their post-White House years, and if Barry keeps whoring himself out like this, he might exceed even that.
Are most of the people we kill with armed drones innocent? This former U.S. Air Force tech says yes. pic.twitter.com/Dpov14CmhR
— AJ+ (@ajplus) April 26, 2017
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nyone who’s familiar with my work knows that I harbor markedly less affection for Hillary Clinton than I do for malaria-infected mosquitoes, but I still find it annoying how clued-in people on the anti-establishment left are to how horrible she is while still maintaining a degree of sympathy for Obama. There’s a general awareness that Obama was far from perfect and did immoral things, but you rarely see the same vitriol and disdain for him as you do for Clinton on the left, which is absurd because they are the same monster. This needs to change before there can be any forward movement on the progressive front. Unless we get crystal clear that these Democratic neocons are unacceptable, they’re going to keep finding political influence among our ranks.
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I began this essay by saying that Obama’s $400,000 oligarchic shill job was a bookend. I did that because, in what was easily the single most important and egregious WikiLeaks email of 2016, we learned that Wall Street was calling the shots in the Obama administration before the Obama administration even existed. Before he was even elected, an executive from Citigroup (the corporate owner of Citibank) gave Obama a list of acceptable choices for who may serve on his cabinet. The list ended up matching Obama’s actual cabinet picks once elected almost to a ‘t’.
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I can understand why pro-establishment liberals are defending this man; he stands for everything they stand for. If all you stand for is vapid tribalism and vanity politics and you are willing to sacrifice integrity along with economic and social justice and the lives of other people’s kids in corporatist wars overseas in order to feel like you’re on the right team, Obama is your man. But if you’re an actual, real progressive and not just a latte-sipping NPR listener with a sense of self-righteousness and a pro-choice bumper sticker, you’ve got no business regarding Obama with anything but disgust.
I think the answer to the authors question, why do “progressives” still support Obama, is in her definition of “progressive” ..First of all, what is a “progressive” ? In the way the author seems to define it, I can only take it to mean, liberals of a more “left” flavor. In fact the term “progressive” was adopted by democrats and liberals because they didn’t want to identify as “democrats” and “liberals”, because those terms had become toxic. The reason they support Obama ,even now, is because they agree with his policies, and even those who find them mostly repugnant have… Read more »
“So by attacking these moronic right-wing narratives, we often wound up tacitly taking his side, which fostered sympathy.” THAT is so accurate. The fostering sympathy part – so human a tendency, especially for those who hunger for truth and justice. But it sure can trip us up in many situations. Thanks for your clear-eyed and reference-filled info here.
A bunch of SJW’s attacked Trump for the Saudi arms deal on Reddit. I made them aware that it was Obama who approved the entire deal. Got downvoted tremendously. Basically, never fk with people’s world-view, no matter how distorted it is.