David Michael Green | December 12 2010
Wow! What got into Barack Obama?!?!
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his week we saw two behaviors out of him that have been completely absent for his entire presidency. Two attitudinal displays that many of us have been longing to witness for a couple of years now. First, he’s showing some real passion, campaigning hard for a big item on his policy agenda. And, second, he’s using some tough talk against the people who are in his way.
It’s great to see. And many of us have long wondered why he never did this before, back when his health care bill was getting savaged, or when we needed someone pounding the bully pulpit to stand up for working people or the unemployed.
Yeah, it’s great to see.
Except for one small caveat.
The passion he’s finally showing is for a horrific piece of legislation, and the people he’s dumping on are his own base.
How great is that, eh? The right can do anything they want to this president, say anything about him they want, personally or politically, and he can’t be bothered to hold them remotely accountable for their monstrous excesses. But if the people who actually made him president get angry at being crapped on by their own guy for the umpteenth time, if they finally stand-up and just say no to another sell-out, if they shake their heads in wonder at the dude who once talked about “the fierce urgency of now”, well then, by gosh, that right there unleashes his unbridled rage and contempt.
Truth be told, I think his mocking anger – on full display at his press conference this week – is driven by shame. Pardon the armchair psychology, but I think he’s hiding from his own embarrassment. I think he knows that his mother would not approve of the sell-out he has become. I think he knows that the Barack Obama of just two years ago would not himself approve of the loser occupying his body today. I think he has to transmogrify his shame into rage, and then direct it at those who point out his failings in order to live with his sorry self.
I think, in short, that Obama knows that he is an astonishingly complete coward, a wimp of epic proportions. I think he knows that the product of his cowardice is the wreckage of millions of lives and his own presidency. And I think that is finally just too much to bear, so he has attacked those who, after two years of remarkable forbearance, have finally had enough out of him, and have finally said so.
Obama’s actually worse than a coward. Most cowards can at least identify their tormentors. Not President Bendback Overa. How many times will Republicans unanimously oppose his legislation before he figures out that they’re not his friends? How many times do they need to literally say out loud that they’re committed to his political destruction before he believes that they’re committed to his political destruction? How many times does he need to get his butt kicked by them before he stops further empowering these thugs?
And how many times does he need to completely fold and yield to their agenda before he realizes that he’s a loser and a joke?
Can you imagine what the last two years have been like within the top echelons of the Republican Party? At first, they must have thought they were toast. They must have figured that they were fighting against the very extinction of the party. They must have known that Bush and Cheney and Rove had driven them to the edge of a cliff. And now here was this new guy, with a new politics, and a hungry and mobilized public rallying behind him. They must have known that if he wanted to, he could give them the final and fatal push over the edge. And he could do so just by telling a few basic truths, so long absent from American politics.
Then, imagine their shock and their stunned glee as they came to realize over time that what they had on their hands was just the opposite of everything they had feared. That Obama was an even weaker pansy than Carter or Clinton or Kerry or Reid. That he was even wimpier than that still, that he was hopelessly predisposed to bargaining with his enemies just for the sake of giving his legislation some sort of jive kumbaya, bipartisan, transcendent, hopey-changey bullshit patina. That you could string the guy along forever. That you could get anything out of him. That you could say anything about him. That he ultimately stood for nothing. That he liked you better than the legions of liberal dupes whom he had fooled into making him president, and for whom he had only sneering, supercilious contempt. Imagine Republican surprise and joy when the guy who looked potentially like the slayer to their former giant turned out instead to be their savior, the naval-gazing punk who snatched resuscitation and historic victory from the jaws of crushing defeat and near annihilation. Imagine their shock and awe when it turned out that the greatest gift the Republican Party ever got was a Democratic president, and not even because of some White House intern sex scandal.
This tax deal that Oweenie just agreed to is an abomination, and it never needed to happen. If you have any doubt about how bad it is, consider solely the fact that the Republicans are in favor of it. Look at Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and the rest of them. These are not your grandfather’s Republicans. These are predatory thugs. They have come to Washington to serve the interests of their oligarchic puppet-masters, and nowadays they are capable of taking any action, telling any lie, and savaging any opponent to fulfill that singular agenda. If these folks are for it – and especially if it involves taxes – you can safely bet any several of your bodily appendages that the legislation in question is purely evil. Don’t worry, you’ll emerge fully intact.
If GOP support is not a sufficient barometer of the true nature of this sick dog of a deal, consider that it was bad enough even to wake the somnolent Democrats in Congress out of their slumberous thirty year coma, causing them to rise up and flip a fat bird in the direction of their own Dear Leader. No doubt this new-found independence has something to do with the fact that he just led them over a cliff in last month’s election debacle, his ‘leadership’ bequeathing them a gift-wrapped defeat of proportions unseen for nearly a century. But I think there’s more than that. Indicators suggest that Democratic members of Congress are actually genuinely furious with the president for the piece of crap he delivered to them, both because if its content and because of the arrogance with which he took them for granted, negotiating with the Yanomami cannibal warriors of the GOP instead, and assuming that members of his own party would have no choice but to go along for the ride. When one member of Congress was defending the president in a speech to his fellow Democrats this week, out of nowhere another actually blurted out, “Fuck the president”. I don’t think they’re just posturing this time.
Nor should they be. This deal is sickening in every respect. And I’m sickened, too, when I hear nice, buttoned-down, safe little liberal sanitary napkin defenders of Obummer defend him by saying, “What did you want him to do? He didn’t have the votes.” Arrrrggggghhhhh!!!! As if the only two choices a president has are to take a lousy deal or take no deal. As if the president doesn’t have the world’s biggest bully pulpit with which to sway public sentiment and votes in Congress. As if the public didn’t already overwhelmingly support ending tax cuts for the wealthy. As if Obama doesn’t have, and hasn’t had for two years, giant majorities in both houses of Congress. As if the visage of Republicans kicking the unemployed to the street in order to cater to billionaires couldn’t be portrayed as exactly the plutocratic heartless greed that it actually is, if only the president were willing to say so, rather than legitimating these thieves instead through negotiations. As if caving into “hostage-takers” (Neville Quisling Obama’s own term) doesn’t just encourage them to come back for more. As if, worst case scenario, it isn’t better lose on principle sometimes than it is to win in shame. As if thinking you’re winning when you’re actually badly losing isn’t the worst case scenario of all. As if Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush would have just neatly folded their hands together, pursed their lips, noted their regret, and explained that, golly gosh, they just couldn’t get what they wanted because the darned votes weren’t there.
Barack Obama is an utter failure as a president. In part, that is because his policies are almost entirely as regressive as any and all of George W. Bush’s, and regressive policies have been ruining America for thirty years now. Now that the right has brought a once great country to its knees, more of the same is the absolute last thing we need, but that message somehow hasn’t gotten to this supposedly Democratic president, who won election precisely on that principle.
But Obama is also a failure because he is a total coward. He fights for nothing. His view of the presidency as some sort of passive, dormant institution that does what it’s told to by Congress and otherwise lays low, buffeted this way and that by the winds of circumstance, would have been an excellent fit for any of the benevolent, politically quiet, decades of the nineteenth century. It’s a disaster for our time, however, when so much more is expected of presidents, and when the country is now faced with multiple crises.
His cowardice will almost assuredly make him a one-term president. That breaks my heart, I assure you. What’s really disastrous, however, is what having such a punk at the helm of the country in this historical moment means for the 98 percent of us who aren’t rich and connected. If the election of last month didn’t make the point emphatically enough, far worse times are likely ahead of us in the coming years, and my guess is that there’ll then be even worse times after that.
The extent of President Milquetoast’s capitulations are now becoming the stuff of legend. In the last week alone, he gave us a remarkable record of multiple and thorough assume-the-position-full-on-presidential-reamings, one directly following the next, as his adversaries passed around his rag doll self between them. No wonder regressive New York Times columnist David Brooks declared it had been a good week for Obama.
He stood on the sidelines silently watching as the repeal of the noxious Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy went down to destruction. Previously claiming that he opposed the policy and that it would be ended on his watch (despite his administration having gone to court in support of both DADT and the Defense of Marriage Act), it seemingly never occurred to him to get out and fight for its repeal. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that that’s what you’re supposed to do with the presidency.
Of course, the worst of it was the deal on taxes, which is so wrong in so many ways it defies words. But I’ll try anyhow.
It is wrong, to start with, because this is no tax cut at all. None of them have been, since Reagan started doing this in the 1980s. In fact, if you borrow money in order to fund a tax ‘cut’ – and what the Republicans got from the president will require massive borrowing to finance it – what you’re really doing is a tax increase. You’re still going to have to pay every penny back in taxes, but now you’re also going to have to pay back a lot more pennies – compounding annually – as well, in the form of interest on those loans. Add it up and it’s easy to see that net taxes go way up, not down. So why do the oligarchs want this so badly? Because what it really is is a tax transfer, from them to the rest of us, because it comes back at lower percentage rates for elites then it went out at in the form of tax-avoidance loans. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the president to be concerned about what this means for those of us who are not economic elites. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him to be concerned about what this means for our mountain of national debt that is approaching dangerous levels now. It doesn’t even seem to have occurred to him to have publically offered the Republicans his acceptance of their beloved tax ‘cuts’, contingent on them merely showing what expenditures from the federal budget they would cut to pay for them. Not only would this expose the GOP thugs as either deficit frauds or entitlement destroyers, but it would have had the huge political advantage of driving a wedge between the tea party and establishment camps within the GOP. But that would mean that the president might have actually won the battle, so we can’t have that now, can we? And, of course, we didn’t.
His stupid deal was wrong, secondly, because he held nearly all the cards. He had control of both houses of Congress. He had public opinion solidly behind ending tax rip-offs for millionaires and billionaires. He had the powerful deficit argument against these cuts, and the inability of his opponents to argue against it. He had solid public support for extending unemployment benefits, both on moral grounds and because of their excellent stimulative effect. And he had the default position in his favor. That is, if nothing happened, if they couldn’t agree to a deal, if he refused to give in, Republicans lose, when the tax rates expire at the end of this year. With his veto pen, he could prevent them from getting the single thing they most crave in the entire universe for the next two years. He had everything, and all he had to do was show some spine. Oops – I forgot. It’s Barack Obama we’re talking about here.
This thing was also wrong because the politics favored the president, and still he folded. On taxes, the only difference between his position and theirs was over tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. On unemployment, they are on record as saying that these meager payments to people suffering badly under George Bush’s Great Recession just encourage laziness among recipients. He could have easily prevailed on these fights had he shown the courage to turn them into public relations battles. He could have done long-term damage to the GOP by showing them to be exactly what they are – a destructive disease willing to do anything to the rest of us in order to better the already rich. Republicans have won politically over and over again by telling enormous lies, simply because nobody stands up to them and speaks the truth. Some political situations are more conducive to that than others (because, my god, they’re such good liars), but few as much as this one. Allowing the GOP to paint itself as being precisely as heartless, greedy, deceitful and hypocritical as it actually is would have been a public relations bonanza far exceeding the one Newt Gingrich put on in his display of petulance that undid the party in the 1990s, if only Oworthless would have merely called their bluff. You know you’re a sorry thing indeed when the likes of Bill Clinton makes you look weak and regressive by comparison.
Finally, this whole thing is tragically wrong because it is yet another major swing of the wrecking ball in the multi-decade effort to destroy the American welfare state. The fabulously wealthy just absolutely can’t stand it that the rest of us should have some moderately decent quality of life instead of all that money getting crammed into their already overstuffed pockets. That’s why these sociopaths have been trying for thirty years to unravel the New Deal and more. That means breaking unions, that means trade deals shipping decent jobs overseas, that means changing the tax structure in their favor, that means deregulation, and that means privatization. And what it also means is killing popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare the only way that seems possible: by creating a debt crisis that would give politicians plausible political cover for slashing these otherwise untouchable third-rail (you touch it, you die) benefits. It’s bad enough to have Republicans work so hard toward that end. Now, in the age of Clinton and Obama, Democrats are every bit as culpable.
Barack Obama is the biggest political wimp to walk the global stage since Neville Chamberlain donned lederhosen and hoisted a beer with the Führer in Munich. Even Chamberlain had an excuse, though. Had the Nazis devoted their full attention to gobbling up Britain, it seemed reasonable at the time to imagine that they could well have succeeded. After all, France would later fall in a mere seven weeks. And, indeed, Chamberlain was canonized at the time for saving his country by means of what looked then like a politically adroit, if highly cynical, deal with the devil.
Obama has no such excuse. He’s just a freaking coward, and his cowardice is killing this country. It must be stopped.
If we progressives have learned anything these last two dismal years, it is that an over-reliance on electoral solutions to our problems is a failed strategy, especially when you live in a country with a one-party two-party system. Now, more than ever, we must think of solutions outside the realm of conventional practice.
That said, there’s no reason to ignore electoral politics at the same time we are acting elsewhere. The actions – and, especially, the non-actions – of this president have made a primary challenger to him coming from the left more than merely something to be contemplated in the face of incontrovertible evidence of his worthless nature.
It is now an absolute necessity.
Russ Feingold, are you listening? Your country is calling.
____________________________________
BY GLENN GREENWALD
Even when sincere, liberals miss the mark by a wide margin. Most liberals are not serious students of politics or history, nor do they understand how the two chief opposing classes—capitalist and working people—interact. By his pretentious and painfully egotistical actions Jon Stewart illustrates the limitations of centrism, and why centrism, so easily derailed into irrelevancies, can never cure a serious crisis.
BY GLENN GREENWALD | SUNDAY, SEP 19, 2010
(updated below)New York Times,Thursday:
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McClatchy, June 18, 2008:
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Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg Trials, Closing Statement:
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The central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars. The chief reason for international cognizance of these crimes lies in this fact.
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What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda?
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By Patrice Greanville with Jason Miller
Note: This is a repost. This essay was written by TGP’s editor in chief in 2008, years before the founding of The Greanville Post.
Obama at the Democratic National Convention, 2004. The corporate media and fellow politicos simply consecrated him, overnight, as the new “tribune of the people.” His nomination was more like a coronation.
Originally published on March 20, 2008 and in simulpost on Dandelion Salad
Bstcyrano.org/ Thomas Paine’s Corner
3/19/08
“Of Obama, Democrats, and the Power Elite”
Barack Obama is the living embodiment of his vague, ethereal, and tantalizing messages of “hope” and “change.” To the millions upon millions of US Americans desperate to purge the naked imperialism and blatant criminality of the Bush administration from the White House, Obama IS hope and change. Yet like many establishment liberals before him, Obama is no cure for the malignant creep toward fascism plaguing our nation. If elected, at best he will merely serve to postpone the inevitable a bit.
To understand why Obama and the ilk he took with him to DC would be little or no better than the human excrement currently occupying the tangible, visible positions of power in the US, let’s examine various facets of Obama(1) and of our rotten-to-the-core sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems.
Issue one is that Obama or no Obama, we are still stuck with a bourgeois democracy. Which means that despite all the rhetoric and mythologies about equality, freedom, meritocracy, opportunity, and a host of other lies that placate the masses and maintain the social order, the United States is a nation of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.
Even if we suspend our critique of Obama for a moment and pretend he is a man of saintly virtue, trusting an Obama or a JFK or whomever to do the right thing by the nation, the environment, the people, etc. rests on the assumption that the American president is indeed an all-powerful figure capable of enacting or precipitating policies of tremendous consequence for the country. This illusion holds when the person in the executive office is moving within the traditional confines, values and methods of the capitalist system, which even such a “radical” as FDR observed. It would not hold for long, or at all, should the miracle happen and a true radical was actually elected.
In the case of a within-the-system-boundaries reformer of FDR’s magnitude, the media would not align and uniformly attack him and there would not be a capital strike (as savage capitalism has waged against true left reformers like Allende); we’d just see a sectoral division within the ruling class, and factions would develop—but the policy dialogue would remain within the historically acceptable parameters of capitalists elites. This is in fact what happened during the FDR years. Their principal interest would be to maintain and preserve as many of their privileges and as much of their way of life as possible. That was fine for FDR’s time.
However, let’s look at the larger picture we traverse today.
In the current circumstances we face we see a rapidly degenerating empire, in which the logical evisceration of FORMAL aspects of democracy proceeds accordingly. The prospect is for endless wars, more super-exploitation of the planet, and so on. If any “remedial” policies are implemented against judicial abuse, planetary death, or human/non-human animal exploitation in various contexts, these cannot take hold and neutralize the overarching slide toward worse because “toward worse” is embedded in the dynamics of the system—and how could it be otherwise in a socioeconomic structure premised on greed and selfishness? There are systemic contradictions at play that almost force the hand of capitalists to do what they do–for example they are now trying to roll back the social democratic gains of the European working class during the postwar period. Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi, and Sarkozy are no accidents. They represent the concerted effort of the European bourgeoisie, egged on by the American elites(2), to push back on the working class and take it all back under the pretext of “remaining competitive” and a plethora of other fraudulent reasons.
In the current circumstances we face we see a rapidly degenerating empire, in which the logical evisceration of formal aspects of democracy proceeds accordingly. The prospect is for endless wars, more super-exploitation of the planet, ore immiseration, and so on.
Capitalism faces insoluble issues. As the world’s population continues to grow, it cannot hope to cure unemployment—ever– because the dynamic of modern capitalist industry is toward ever larger portions of machine labor replacing human labor. Neither science nor technology can be stopped. And advancing technology naturally makes work production routines continuously more efficient, thereby reducing the need for human workers. This phenomenon can be seen nearly everywhere now (it was always there lurking right under the surface, but remained hidden from most via cultivated ignorance, lies, and the complicity of the media) including in “cheap labor” zones such as India and China, which at last count had more than 150 million unemployed. In many places in Europe one paycheck has to be spread among 2 or even 3 “employed” workers. That means that 2 jobs have vanished and the fiction of smaller unemployment is kept alive by musical chairs, a trick which is becoming increasingly transparent to many.
The American people, in keeping with their reputation as the most misinformed people on the planet, have been the slowest to recognize that as citizens of a clearly fibrillating bourgeois democracy they are perpetually teetering on the brink of fascism. Meanwhile, while the world edges ever closer to the edge, the media–including those revered phonies on the PBS Lehrer Newshour—rarely talk about these things and the politicians even less (both out of sheer ignorance and a sense that such topics are taboo), which enables the cancer to grow unchecked. What we do receive are fictions like those of Robert Reich and his ilk, who go about preaching the pseudocure of “better education” and job retraining for technological unemployment. Reich–a terrifically intelligent fellow—may really believe his own message, but either way, it doesn’t matter because the solution is no solution. This is not to say that under any and all circumstances it’s not better to be educated. However the structural aspects of a capitalist economy at this point make that posture moot: all the titles in the world will not get you a job when the economy says it needs only 5 PhDs and 10 skilled technicians while there are 25,000 PhDs and 15 million technicians clamoring for jobs. (Check out Jeremy Rifkin’s THE END OF WORK, to get a taste of what this is all about).
Those who bank on stopping the slide to fascism through a liberal president are deluding themselves, because the American president is powerful ONLY when he’s playing with the consent of most of the ruling class and the institutions it controls. Such personal power deflates rapidly when playing against the values and consensus of the US power elite, at which point a “rogue president” would likely suffer a wave of opposition that would literally bring them down–via impeachment or through a coup orchestrated during a state of tumult created by capital strikes, agents provocateurs, and the media. Not to mention even a military takeover.
Further, we must recall that the slide to fascism is both a witting and unwitting choice by the bourgeoisie in power. The very essence of capitalism is anarchy: anarchy in production, anarchy in distribution and so on. Military precision may rule the day within each business entity, but from the larger societal perspective there is little coordination, and much waste of resources and human power, inherent in the selfish dynamic of the companies in play. Hence the horrific duplication and waste we see. For example, in the health care sector up to 1/3 of costs are squandered on paper-shuffling and marketing alone. None of this is likely to change until one deals with the fatal flaws of capitalism, which an Obama is about as likely to do as a lion is to go vegetarian.
Remember that FDR’s reforms (FDR representing the classic example of the “savior” liberal president), radical as they seem now (and denounced at the time by many fellow capitalists as sheer communism and rank “class betrayal”) were never such; they were simply realistic measures to save the store that remained at all times totally respectful of the rights of private big business property. Thus FDR never really went deep into the question of workplace democracy, production choices, income distribution, or many other issues that would have meant a true clash of class interests. And WWII of course obscured all that. Sure, FDR entered the war against the Axis, and MOMENTARILY a segment of official propaganda shifted to demonize the Germans and Japanese insteads of the “Reds”, but those were not so much antifascist/anti-imperialist sentiments as nationalist power calculations.
The above means that if the ruling cliques deem it necessary to take the “nice mask” of democracy off (a big gamble since they may never restore the “legitimacy” they retain through this ruse), it will happen, no matter who’s nominally in charge at the White House. In the case of the Bush/Cheney duo, they were born to stage the perfect friendly fascist coup and have almost pulled it off in slow motion over the last eight years. But if confronted with a less cooperative president, the power elite would find a way to neutralize him. We’re dealing with a huge cast of actors here, many with colossal stakes, and who have enormous resources at their disposal to create all sorts of mischief, which they have done at taxpayer expense all over the world for years. These criminals will not give up their accustomed ways without a fight. In fact, they will do as Bush/Cheney have done and go on the offensive in a nearly transparent way.
What the world needs—desperately (and we are using this word sans hyperbole here) are dramatic changes in policies and top personnel and new models of advanced democratic enfranchisement. That means real democratic restructuring, proportional representation, certifiable elections, workplace democracy, a disenfranchisement of the power and income rights of the reigning plutocracy, and an effective global program of ecological respect and sanity. Do you see that being initiated under ANY establishment politico, including “Mr. Change” himself? Do you see any of these radical (yet utterly necessary) changes being implemented without a HUGE fight from capital and its affiliated elites around the globe?
Even if, and that is a big if, Obama wanted to institute beneficent change, he would be facing impossible odds. Need proof? Consider one of the ugliest and most absurd contradictions of American capitalism. Despite frontpage acknowledgment by the crypto-fascist WSJ in 1973 that 68% of US Americans supported a universal, single-payer healthcare system, the fact that even fellow capitalist nations have such a system, and the reality that our existing health care system is ruining many capitalists in the US (especially those in the small and middle sectors but even making corporate giants like GM uncompetitive), the health of the masses remains tertiary to the profits of health-care industry giants and to the availability of the gold standard in health care to a relative few. Think Obama and his family don’t have the best medical care known to man?
The American people must de-link themselves from our farcical presidential election circus, turn their eyes to a different kind of electoral politics, leave electoral politics entirely, or develop and field new forms of oppositional struggle. This may and will probably entail the formation of mass mobilization instruments such as a real popular party. In all these tasks, the Democrats like Obama just stand in the way, beguiling the people with illusions and sucking up precious oxygen. That long journey has to be made, and the sooner the better. Trying to avoid the arrival of fascism by appealing to the “good cop” of the bourgeoisie is an illusion; fascism can only be stopped when the masses are organized—and fully aware.
Some think we gain time for such organization under the Democrats. Problem is, the Democrats and their half measures that appear to thwart the capitalist juggernaut are what keeps the masses enthralled with the system and in effect dissuade them from joining the struggle against it. The public will not do what needs to be done until professional and charismatic charlatans like Obama are revealed for what they are. Band-aid solutions by the Democrats will not stop the slide toward the disaster and chaos guaranteed by the dynamics of the system.
Simply look at what has happened with the subprime crisis, an abortion that wriggled and writhed its way directly from the foul womb of a freewheeling, mature, ultra-cynical crony capitalism. It was a deep-rooted phenomenon that happened as inevitably as the transformation of undifferentiated cells into cancers. Politicians could not see it or stop it because that’s not their job under the traditional task distribution of the system.
Obama or anyone else in the establishment can’t cure the myriad ills of capitalism. These ills can never be cured from within or through playing by the accepted rules of the world’s plutocracy. That’s why all American politicians are into tinkering and superficialities. Their programs and “solutions” to the most glaring and obvious aspects of a severely broken system are complex, almost ludicrous Rube Goldberg contraptions (the health system comes to mind yet again). Obama and his fellow liberals are incredible illusionists: they give the people the distinct impression they are acting to cure the very disease that provides the life-blood to the opulent class whose interests they strive so hard to preserve. This would be obvious to most US Americans and the WaPo, the WSJ, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, the NY Times and even the CIA headquarters would have been stoned and razed to the ground already if so many of us were not braindead and kept in that vegetative state by the corporate media, an entity that more aware Latin Americans justly call, the “falsimedia.”
So if Obama–let alone Hillary–won’t and can’t guarantee the defeat of friendly-fascism in America, what’s the point? Sure, Obama very intelligently trades on HOPE. And many people, us included, are always loath to give up on hope. Hope is a powerful drug. Cyrano is in itself a work of HOPE. So this is tricky territory.
But hope must always be tempered with reason, especially in politics and war. And no reasonable human being could conclude that putting Obama at the helm of the USS Titanic will avert disaster for anyone but him and his cronies in the first class berths.
Suddenly Ralph Nader doesn’t sound like such a ridiculous option, unless you’re a plutocrat or a corporado.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Patrice Greanville is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s founder and editor in chief. Jason Miller is CJO’s Associate Editor and Editorial Director of Thomas Paine’s Corner, Cyrano’s largest blog.
Further Reading:
(1) Check out radical historian and activist Paul Street’s thorough deconstruction of Obama at: http://www.bestcyrano.org/p.streetonObama2.2.07.htm
(2) For a penetrating analysis of the power structure of our bourgeois democracy, take a look at this excerpt from C Wright Mills’s “Power Elite:” http://thirdworldtraveler.com/Book_Excerpts/HigherCircles_PE.html
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APPENDIX: On the next page we present a great example of modern, p.r. managed, snake oil. Read and see how convincing this kind of oratory can be in the hands of an expert and gifted demagog.
Barack Obama’s Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
July 27, 2004 at 12:00 AM EST
[Sorry, the video for this story has expired, but you can still read the transcript below. ]
TRANSCRIPT
BARACK OBAMA: On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.
But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place; America which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor he signed up for duty, joined Patton’s army and marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through FHA, and moved west in search of opportunity.
And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream, born of two continents. My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or “blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential. They are both passed away now. Yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.
I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody’s son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — or at least, most of the time.
This year, in this election, we are called to reaffirm our values and commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up, to the legacy of our forbearers, and the promise of future generations. And fellow Americans — Democrats, Republicans, Independents — I say to you tonight: we have more work to do. More to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. More to do for the father I met who was losing his job and choking back tears, wondering how he would pay $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits he counted on. More to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her, who has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn’t have the money to go to college.
Don’t get me wrong. The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don’t want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon. Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. No, people don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.
In this election, we offer that choice. Our party has chosen a man to lead us who embodies the best this country has to offer. That man is John Kerry. John Kerry understands the ideals of community, faith, and sacrifice, because they’ve defined his life. From his heroic service in Vietnam to his years as prosecutor and lieutenant governor, through two decades in the United States Senate, he has devoted himself to this country. Again and again, we’ve seen him make tough choices when easier ones were available. His values and his record affirm what is best in us.
John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded. So instead of offering tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas, he’ll offer them to companies creating jobs here at home. John Kerry believes in an America where all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in Washington have for themselves. John Kerry believes in energy independence, so we aren’t held hostage to the profits of oil companies or the sabotage of foreign oil fields. John Kerry believes in the constitutional freedoms that have made our country the envy of the world, and he will never sacrifice our basic liberties nor use faith as a wedge to divide us. And John Kerry believes that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never be the first option.
A while back, I met a young man named Shamus at the VFW Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid, 6’2” or 6’3”, clear eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he’d joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week. As I listened to him explain why he’d enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us? I thought of more than 900 service men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, who will not be returning to their hometowns. I thought of families I had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one’s full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or with nerves shattered, but who still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists. When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.
Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure. John Kerry believes in America. And he knows it’s not enough for just some of us to prosper. For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.
A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism here — the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!
In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!
Tonight, if you feel the same energy I do, the same urgency I do, the same passion I do, the same hopefulness I do — if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president, and John Edwards will be sworn in as vice president, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come. Thank you and God bless you.
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