The “shutdown issue,” presently mired in the political-ideological battle between the Far Right and the Less-Far Right (House Republicans and Administration Democrats), has little to do with the social welfare of the American people, and instead reveals discernible differences only on the degrees of sophistication informing the programs of each in their determined assistance to corporate capitalism. Republicans in this tableau (a staged presentation going back decades in the roles assumed by each side) are the visceral fascists, striking out at government without realizing how much it helps, assists, and protects business and banking, while Democrats actively, yet with becoming liberal rhetoric to hide from themselves their delusions and treachery, take help, assistance, and protection to a higher level of systemic interpenetration between business and government by means of a regulatory framework written by the affected interests.

Let’s put the situation in historical perspective. FDR announced when coming into office that America was a nation one-third ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-fed; today one might say, one-fourth, possibly one-fifth, in a vastly larger population, so that, at minimum, sixty million Americans, in what is reputed to be the richest country in the world, are living, or should I say, existing, at or below the poverty line, and at least a third more barely breaking the surface. When, here, I explicitly call for the government shutdown, it is not to bring on more suffering to the already afflicted, which would follow from a subsequent default, but to clear the air, blow off the fog of false consciousness, and force the issue, especially percolating from below, as to why the distortion of social priorities (x billions to dictators, past, present, future, around the world; y billions to US megabanks and AIG; and z for an all-devouring military machine eating up the nation’s resources which might—dare we speak democratically?—otherwise create a vital social safety net) has been allowed and in various guises pursued for more than half a century.

Shutdown, ideally, equals wake-up, an exposure of widespread impoverishment on one hand, widespread waste, corruption of democratic institutions, and military aggression pure-and-simple on the other. If nothing more, scaring the folks at Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs until the legislative conflict is papered over, is worth the candle, considering that nothing will be done for the poor in any case.

Sequestration will ensure the lifeblood of the current American polity and economy, militarism attached to the continuing program of global hegemony, so that neither Republicans nor Democrats find urgency in resolving the present stalemate—and in fact, holding the bottom one-fourth of the people hostage to the utter good will of the political system and the consolidated wealth standing behind it, as the source for a solution, is a good lesson in proper obedience, deportment, citizenship. Dangle just enough social- welfare anticipated goodies before the people to ensure quiescence while simultaneously magnifying ideological differences that hardly exist, and one has the perfect formula keeping the masses distracted from the main show—not shutdowns or debt ceilings, but a foreign policy of global capitalist expansion geared to US-defined financial, monetary, and trade advantages, coupled with necessary regime change for their realization, all wrapped in a framework of massive surveillance at home and the quickening paces for demanding patriotism and conformity.

[pullquote]Face-saving measures from either side may avoid a shutdown. So what? Either way, the governing classes are against the people.[/pullquote]

This is not Tea Party fare (and the Republicans as the Partiers’ enablers and breeding ground)—akin to geostrategic dumbness abroad, hoped-for Red Scare forays at home, but rather the self-styled liberals and progressives in their ongoing financialization and militarization of the American economy, monopoly capitalism with a smiley face, comfortably lodged in Democratic ranks. Here government shutdown is welcome, because by giving the political-ideological spectrum a still further Rightward push (Republican intransigence as pretext and excuse for Obama’s failed presidency, except to those privileged by it), the Democrats somehow appear Left-leaning or centrist. Nonsense. Obama has demonstrated on every count subservience not merely to Wealth, but to its most atavistic form: from policies which sanction a rawness of capital accumulation via deregulation, regressive principles of taxation, and subsidies to such favored industries as defense and nuclear power, to social policies which keep working people in a state of suspended animation, their collective bargaining rights weakened, and through lack of job creation, a reservoir of hard-core unemployment resulting in deteriorating standards of living.

On the civil-liberties front, an equal rawness, actuated by the abuses of a saturated counterterrorism atmosphere in which NSA surveillance is a unifying thread for the nuts-and-bolts of a National Security State, from the lack of transparency in government and an over-classification of its documents to the abridgement of freedom of the press in exposing illegal activity and punishment of whistleblowers in Espionage Act prosecutions to the same end. But it is the rawness of military growth and activity under his watch which takes the cake. I have in mind particularly Obama’s pivot to the Pacific, and the encirclement of China, and more immediate, the obvious attention to the Middle East, as part of carving out a future still wider sphere of influence in the region.

Is this off-topic? No, precisely because the threat of a shutdown, whether or not it actually materializes, is like a laser beam into Leviathan’s brain and/or stomach, revealing contents which normal operations of government successfully cover up. Military, yes; public welfare, no. Yet I hope it comes about, in the hope that it energizes the community of the poor to in fact become so, a community discovering itself, now, as the fulfillment of Dr. King’s long-delayed fulfillment of the Poor People’s Campaign, to DEMAND an end to militarism, inequality, inadequate educational opportunities, poor housing—after so many years, a turn-around from FDR’s description of American poverty, and yes, his defiant call to throw the money-changers out of the temple, so ordinarily people can live lives of social decency. The shutdown per se of course would hurt an already hurt to all-intents-and-purposes underclass, but if a permanent change is ever to be effected, a class awakening is of absolute importance.

In that regard, Obama and the Democrats, with their liberalization of corporate class-rule, and what I’ve termed several times the gradual slide into full-scale fascism (surveillance is already a good start, with or without the domestic force-feeding of monopolism and, abroad, aggressive CIA-JSOC paramilitary operations, drone warfare, and main forces still in place, along with the elaborate network of military bases), are a greater obstacle to such class awakening than the heavy-handed, Neanderthalish Republicans who are so easy to spot.

Face-saving measures from either side may avoid a shutdown. So what? Either way, the governing classes are against the people.

My Comment on NYT editorial, “Dawn of a New Era in Health Care,” Sept. 29, relevant here because Republicans have made Obama’s health care plan the issue/pretext for the Shutdown, a plan deeply flawed as herein noted:

The final words of the editorial undercut its overall tone and content: “…that has long been universal in other advanced countries.” NYT praises what deserves opprobrium: private insurers riding the government gravy train, rather than the single payer system which ensures a wider safety net and doesn’t shove money–our money as taxpayers–into the maw of the gorging Private System. Indeed,those final words are incorrect in one important respect: “other advanced nations.” For the US plan places America in the political-structural context of being a DECLINING not an advanced nation. We have sacrificed the people’s health on the altar of ideology: market fundamentalism, the natural-rights status of private property, profit before moral decency. Obama = the liberalization of a militarized capitalism, rhetoric glossing over reality.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch in the fall of 2013.

Half a year into Obama’s second term, it has become clear what has been done under his watch. He brought to the world massive banking fraud, drone attacks, indefinite detention, assassination of US citizens and an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The rhetoric of hope and change has finally and undeniably revealed its true colors. Prominent dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky remarked how Obama’s assault on civil liberties has progressed beyond anything he could have imagined. All of these telltale signs mark the slippery slide toward totalitarianism that seems to now be escalating.

Edward Snowden’s NSA files unveiled to the world mass global surveillance and that the USA has become the United Stasi of America. The decay of democracy in the United States is now undeniable, as all branches of the federal government have begun to betray the very ideals this country was founded on. The exposed NSA stories have had serious global impact, challenging the credibility of the US on all levels. Under a relentless secrecy regime, the criminalization of journalism and any true dissent has become the new norm. In recent months, a pattern of attacks on journalism has unfolded. Examples include the APA scandal of the Department of Justice’s seizure of telephone records, the tapping of Fox News reporter James Rosen’s private emails and the British government’s detention of David Miranda, partner of the Glen Greenwald, who was the primary journalist breaking the NSA story. On top of these recent developments, a media shield law has moved forward in Washington. The Senate Judiciary Committeepassed the bill that narrowly defines what a journalist can be, thus removing the First Amendment protection from new forms of media. This all points not only to deep threats to press freedom, but to a general trend toward excessive state control through centralizing power.

The American corporate media takes all this in stride with a business as usual attitude that carries the meme of “Keep Calm and Carry On”. After the NSA revelations, author Ted Rall posed the question, “Why are Americans so passive”? Obama’s blatant violations of the Fourth Amendment have reached far beyond Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in 1974 that led him to resign under threat of impeachment. In the midst of Obama’s aggressive persecution of those who shine light on government crimes, where are all the courageous Americans? How have the people allowed such egregious acts by the government against the Constitution? As scandals of the NSA continue to shed light on a further subversion of basic privacy within the internet, the drumbeat of war seems to be no coincidence as Obama prepared for an attack on Syria. Although Snowden’s revelations began to stir up debate and efforts for reform across the country, compared with mass protests breaking out in countries like Turkey and Brazil, the scale of the response has been relatively small and hasn’t reached the full swing needed for meaningful change. One can ask -do Americans even care or are they so defeated and disempowered by a corporatized war machine they feel there is nothing they can do?

[pullquote]  Chris Hedges in “Death of the Liberal Class” called the election of Obama as “triumph of illusion over substance”, namely “a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite” [/pullquote]

The Slowly Boiling Frog and the ‘Good American’

One of the reasons for public passivity is the normalization overtime of radical politics. The metaphor of the slowly boiling frog comes to mind. A frog would not jump out of a hot pot if the temperature is slowly being altered over time. The frog’s instinctual reaction to boiling water can be compared to an innate sense within us that detects dangerous, radical or controlling agendas and blatant unconstitutional and illegal actions of governments or corporations. Our sense to feel the changes of temperature in the habitat of this supposed democratic society has been made dull and eventually incapacitated by subversion and perception management.

This control of perception is seen most blatantly in US politics with the manufactured pendulum between a faux right and left. For instance, the handling of the issue of raising the federal debt ceiling in 2011 illustrates this machination of perception control. Michael Hudson, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends spoke of how the rhetoric of crisis is used to rush through otherwise impossible, unpopular agendas:

“Just like after 9/11, the Pentagon pulled out a plan for Iraq’s oil fields, Wall Street has a plan to really clean up now, to really put the class war back in business … They’re pushing for a crisis to let Mr. Obama rush through the Republican plan. Now, in order for him to do it, the Republicans have to play good cop, bad cop. They have to have the Tea Party move so far to the right, take a so crazy a position, that Mr. Obama seems reasonable by comparison. And, of course, he is not reasonable. He’s a Wall Street Democrat, which we used to call Republicans”.

The definition of liberal can move as opponents shift views. There is a false partisanship that slowly makes the public feel comfortable with what are quite radical and inhumane ideas and actions. This subversive form of perception management appears to have reached its height with the current presidency. This administration, with its crafted image of the ‘progressive Obama’ has successfully co-opted the left and marched them into supporting neoconservative policies that they once claimed to reject. Greenwalddescribed Obama as much more effective in institutionalizing abusive and exploitative policies than any Republican president ever could. He pointed out for instance how “Mitt Romney never would have been able to cut Social Security or target Medicare, because there would have been an enormous eruption of anger and intense, sustained opposition by Democrats and progressives accusing him of all sorts of things”. On the contrary, he continued, Obama would “bring Democrats and progressives along with him and to lead them to support and get on board with things that they have sworn they would never, ever be able to support.”

Chris Hedges in “Death of the Liberal Class” called the election of Obama as “triumph of illusion over substance”, namely “a skillful manipulation and betrayal of public by a corporate power elite”. He pointed out how Obama was chosen as Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008 and that “the goal of a branded Obama, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake brand for an experience”.

This subversive form of control seems to have evolved beyond political tactics of the past. During the Bush era, manipulation was more blunt. Naomi Klein, author of “
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” outlined the state’s use of public disorientation after massive shocks for manipulation. Calling this “the shock doctrine”, Klein argued how from natural disasters to terrorists attacks, the state exploits crises through taking advantage of public’s psychologically vulnerable state to push through their agendas. A prime example was the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. After the 911 implosions of the Twin Towers, a climate of fear was manufactured with the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, accompanied by the repeated images of those Towers collapsing. This was followed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s shameful performance of lying at the U.N. Security Council about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Before the public recovered from the horrendous tragedy, the nation was railroaded into an illegal war.

Obama’s manufactured brand has till now been quite effective in hiding his real intentions and those of the corporate overlords to effectively crush any meaningful opposition. The late comedian George Carlin pointed to the emergence of creeping total government control, saying “When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with Jack-boots. It will be with Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Under this guise of a Democrat president, a Nobel peace prizewinner and constitutional scholar, Obama seems able to get away with policies unheard of since the last attempt at a large totalitarian state. The pretense of liberal normalizes the most radical policies with glib rhetoric of national security and it neutralizes any oppositional force. In responding to recent NSA leaks, Obama justified it as a vital part of the government counter-terrorism efforts and remarked that privacy is a necessary sacrifice for assuring security.

So many people have been fooled by fake campaign promises and friendly smiley faces and have become oblivious to what is really going on. Most destructive systems and murderous deeds are normalized and enacted in our name without the true consent of the governed.

What has unfolded in the US political and social landscape is a kind of numbing of the senses. The machinations of public relations, tawdry distractions and manufactured desires create an artificial social fabric. It is as if a layer of skin has been added around the body that prevents us from having direct contact with the real water or fabric of our immediate environment. Entertainment and corporate ads desensitize us. These create a lukewarm feel-good political bath replacing real human experience with pseudo-reality. This artificially installed skin intermediates our experience of actual events. It misinforms those inside the boiling pan, and prevents them from coming to know the world out of direct experience.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of good people”. History has shown how many people remain silent while witnessing the most egregious crimes against humanity. During the rise of Hitler in Germany, it was the ‘Good German’ that became bystanders, supporting by default the horrendous acts of one man and allowing him to dictate life and death within an entire nation.

At the ceremony of the prestigious German whistleblower prize in Germany, the acceptance speech from Edward Snowden was read by security researcher and activist Jacob Appelbaum. Appelbaum spoke to the audience of how he now lives in Berlin because in his home country of the United States, true journalism has become a dangerous trade. He conveyed the importance of not forgetting history and asked all Germans to share with Americans about their history and experience with totalitarianism.

Numbed people of nations in the grip of fear easily lose connection with reality. Once we are divorced from our own senses, we come to rely on these signals from outside and regard them as our own. This creates a blind obedience to perceived outside authority and in face of abuses and injustice it is all too easy to become passive and silent. No one person or nation is immune from this and Americans are not an exception. As Snowden said, we now live in a global turnkey tyranny. The key to overt fascism has not yet been turned, but smiley faces are everywhere. In the slowly boiling water of the United States of Amnesia, it may be that many are now becoming the ‘Good Americans’ who won’t speak up before it is too late.

The Empty Self and Representation As a New Authority

How have the American people lost touch with reality? What made them so vulnerable to manipulation and political and media misinformation? No doubt the corporate media played a large role in the controlling of perception, yet there is something deeper at work.

The root causes of passivity and apathy of the populace can be better understood by looking into a particular configuration of self that has emerged in Western history.

Psychoanalyst Phillip Cushman in “Constructing the Self, Constructing America” analyzed how in post-World War II United States, modern industrialization broke down the traditional social bonds and restructured the reality of community and that out of this, a specific configuration of self emerged. He called it “the empty self”, “the bounded, masterful self” and described how it “has specific psychological boundaries, a sense of personal agency that is located within, and a wish to manipulate the external world for its own personal ends”. He characterized this empty self as one that “experiences a significant absence of community, tradition and shared meaning — a self that experiences these social absences and their consequences ‘interiority’ as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger”.

Cushman argued how this new configuration of self and its emotional hunger was indispensable to the development of US consumer culture. Stuart Ewen, in his classic, “Captains of Consciousness” explored how modern advertising was used as a direct response to the needs of industrial capitalism through its functioning as an instrument for the “the creation of desires and habits”. “The vision of freedom which was being offered to Americans was one which continually relegated people to consumption, passivity and spectatorship”, Ewen saw this in the shift of economy from production to consumption and of personal identity from citizens to consumers.

It did not take long for this covert manipulation of desires to be widely used for advancing certain economic or political agendas. Through unpacking his uncle Freud’s study of the unconscious, the father of modern corporate advertising, Edward Bernays gained insight into the power of subterranean desires as a tool for manipulation. Bernays in “Propaganda” put forth the idea that “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country”. This deliberate work of controlling perception came to be understood as propaganda, and has been identified as “the executive arm of the invisible government”.

How does the invisible force of this governance work? How is such effective manipulation of desires on such a mass scale accomplished? It has to do with a mechanism of the unconscious; desires and drives that most people don’t even know exist. Psychologist Carl G Jung took Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and examined the phenomena he identified as projection. Jung described how one meets one’s repressed materials in the form of projections outside and that this projecting is carried out unconsciously (as cited in Storr, 1983). In “Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology”, Marie-Louise von Franz, analyst who worked closely with Jung explained the concept how Jung likened it to a ‘hook’ upon which one hangs an object in a similar way one hangs a coat on a coat hook.

The Ad and PR industry channels our desires, then convert them into the desires for certain products or political candidates. This manipulation of desires relies on the ability to craft effective images of products that would induce the involuntary process of projection from the individuals. Whether it is images of elected officials or celebrities, the latest laundry soap or high def TV, images outside present themselves as something that speaks to internal desires. They quickly appear before us as desirable objects and the representation of unconscious desires. Representation becomes simply an externalization of those unconscious and internal desires and emotions that are mostly unknown to us. Manipulation of desires in a form of representation squashes our capacity to create images and instead images are imposed upon us from outside. We lose connection with our own desires and not knowing the real roots of our emotions and drives, we are cheated in the act of determining our own actions. Activity of imagining is interrupted and shortcut to a finished product as multiple ways of manifesting our desires is narrowed down to simple act of consuming. We become passive and end up carrying out the will of others.

Representation places the source of legitimacy outside of oneself. Whether it is a corporate brand name, political party, an ideology or slogans, one looks for objects of representation through which something inside can be projected out to the world. A good example is seen in the US political system, in the so-called representative form of government. This is the idea of electing officials into whom power is delegated to enact changes on behalf of the people. Another is found in the operation of corporations, where individuals, through purchasing company’s stock become shareholders and supposedly indirectly influence the direction of the corporation; the theory is that the corporation as an entity could represent their economic interests. Many began to regard these outer forms as possessing intrinsic authority, giving them power to govern and influence their own lives, when in reality what underlies them in both cases are simply something that represent what lives in us unconsciously and it is all about our interaction with them. The mechanism of representation harvests a mindset that makes people believe real solutions to problems can only come from somewhere outside, often from the people who are divorced and not affected by those problems.

With the advent of consumer culture and apparatus of image manufacturing that further reinforced the condition of empty self, the notion of representation has come to form a new authority. Unlike the traditional authority of churches and the nuclear family, in representation, an authority is internalized and its force of control becomes more unrecognizable to those under its governance. “The only way corporate capitalism and the state could influence and control the population was by making their control invisible;” Cushman noted “that is, by making it appear as through various feelings and opinions originate solely from within the individual”. This is seen most clearly in the electoral politics, where candidates are pre-approved and outcomes are manipulated, yet we are made to think we are making independent and individual decisions about who best represents our common interest when in reality there is no real choice and we often end up voting against our own self-interests.

Freed from the previously identified external authority, now there appeared to be a potential for the individual freedom in a way never before possible. Yet, beneath the promoted idea of freedom was a false freedom of an illusion of choice. We no longer connect with the source of our desires, not intermediated and manipulated by corporate interests and what is engineered in the guise of individualism is conformity. When the force of control became invisible through merging with oneself, it became much more difficult for us to challenge its legitimacy, or even to recognize its governing force.

Crisis of Representation and Autonomy of Self

State-corporation centralized control and its power of coercion lies in the ability to sustain the image of representation through careful manipulation and for it to create a strong emotional bond with that image within individuals. This gives those in power access to unconscious desires and tends to create an irresistible force. Those who control representation can then generate motives and impulses and govern the will of a mass of people. Media has been playing a crucial role in control and distortion of images of representation, hiding the real actions of those who claim to represent us. TV commercials allure us with images of perfect products and suitable political candidates; it sells products as a solution to everyday problems.

Yet now, some signs of deep change are arising. Images of representation are no longer so easily held. Many who use social media and information sharing are challenging the monopolized image and single message echo chamber of consolidated media. When one is surrounded by multiplicity of images that are not produced or mediated from outside, projection that have mesmerized can no longer exercise such great power.

After the Iraq war was sold to the ‘Good American’, a series of wars in the Middle East have marched over the lives of millions. Next is Syria. The Obama administration is engaged in full PR battle, selling a new war with the image of humanitarian intervention in a similar way as with Libya. Firedoglake reported how Obama, in trying to win support for military strikes on Syria has launched a information operation, a kind of psychological operation to sway approval of Congress. They showed members visceral images of victims suffering from some chemical attacks in classified briefings. Former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich called it; “War marketing in the YouTube era” through releasing horrifying graphic videos of people suffering and dying to move American people. Despite Obama’s seemingly desperate attempts, the public is no longer so easily swayed by hypocritical rhetoric of humanitarianism. A recent poll shows that most Americans strongly oppose a US attack against Syria. Along with Congress, the UK, the key ally is not supporting the US this time.

The legitimacy of this authority is now being challenged. Waves of whistle-blowing that have emerged in recent years, from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden, combined with the power of social media and courageous journalism like WikiLeaks are counteracting the propaganda.

Trends of protests and movements around the world have been challenging the perception of authority of the nation-state and its governance models. The year 2011 marked the beginning of global wide uprisings. Like The Arab Spring and Spanish protest, movements abroad found resonance in North America. Inspired by people’s struggles overseas, the disfranchised American rose up, taking to the streets at the centers of wealth and corruption. Occupy Wall Street that began in the fall of 2011 captured the imagination of the public across political lines. Though this one of the largest mass movements in US history wound down after police and the Federal and local government coordinated efforts to shut it down, from Brazil to Turkey, Egypt to Bosnia and Bulgaria, new insurgents are still rolling in, challenging the legitimacy of corrupt governments worldwide. What these movements from below reveal is how in virtually every corner of the globe, democracy as we have known it is in crisis.

Jerome Roos, PhD researcher at the European University Institute synthesized the waves of revolutions since the Arab revolutions of 2011 and saw them as a symptom of “the global legitimation crisis of representative institutions”. Pointing out one of characteristics commonly shared in those seemingly isolated events as disengagement from the existing power structures and the end of political parties, he suggested “only radical autonomy from the state can take the revolution forward”.

People are moving more and more outside of the electoral politics. A call is arising for a new type of governance, for a real democracy where each person participates directly and manifests their own voice. This is a political act, but it is also much more. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of representation. Images that perpetuate illusions about ourselves can no longer sustain our humanity. From Mubarak to Morsi, from Bush to Obama, the false images and masks of leadership are beginning to fall away as people begin to disengage with charlatan faces of recycled puppet leaders. The mirror that has for too long reflected back false promises is now being shattered. What happens when people’s faith in institutions crumble? We are seeing chaos and destruction as never before. August 14 marked the bloodiest day in Egypt’s recent history when clashes between Egyptian security forces and supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi unleashed mass violence.

In the crisis of representation, for the first time we are left with themselves, empty and hollow, yet truly with ourselves. In this nakedness, therein lies the possibility for a true freedom. Only when our emptiness is fully confronted and accepted can we find our true autonomy. With emotions and desires that are truly our own can we guide the world into a future that springs from the depth of our imagination.

Who am I? Who are we? What do we want? The rejection of false representation is a rejection of artificially imposed identity. Around the world, the message is loud and clear. People are saying we are no longer to be mere consumers, passively accepting the commercialized visions of a future handed down to us, with corporate values and political candidates sold to us like many brands of toothpaste. This is a voice resonating in all these movements around the world and calling for deep systemic change.

The thirst for real democracy is a thirst to be free. It is the spirit that drives us to find our true aspirations within. Our self is empty. When society loses its grip and leaders become devoid of morals and compassion for humanity, we need to declare autonomy from all those outside that try to allure us and promise to fulfill our dreams. Through connecting with our own desires and passions we can fulfill the void of the empty self and transform empty slogans into real action. Only then will it be possible for us to become the authors of our own lives, transform history and take charge of our common destiny.

Nozomi Hayase is a contributing writer to Culture Unplugged. She brings out deeper dimensions of socio-cultural events at the intersection between politics and psychology to share insight on future social evolution. Her Twitter is @nozomimagine.

Systemic criticism of Obama—in fact, all criticism, political, economic, ideological, environmental, etc.—is, on the part of liberals (running true to form) and so-called progressives (a bitter disappointment), like water running off a duck’s back.

Clinging to illusions, evidence at every turn to the contrary, that he is a fighter for social democracy, champion of the working people, force for international peace (again, etc.), or even, more modestly, holding the line against an intransigent Congressional Right, standing up to the banks, proposing and enforcing regulations of the business system, ensuring that all Americans have jobs and decent health care and that polluters are driven (like FDR’s money-changers) from the temple, liberals and progressives are willfully blind, labor under the ideological narcotic of false consciousness, and, like it or not, are the Swiss Guard of the Vested Interests, working hand-in-glove, by their silence or acquiescence, with those who advocate for unrestrained, amoral, and yes, imperialist, capitalism. It appears that nothing short of the administration’s indulging in a nuclear spat will pull the wool from their eyes, and perhaps not even then.

Below a small gallery of celebrity Obamabots—

MSNBC’s sometime academic and full-time diva Melissa Harris-Perry. As pretty as she is politically dumb, and mendacious, too.

Van Jones: Ambition that conquers self-respect.

Al Sharpton: Peerless self-promoter and demagog. Has found a rich lode shilling for Obama.

Bill Maher: A confusing mess of progressive and reactionary, alarmingly ill-informed, intellectually lazy commentary made worse by stubborn defense of Obama.

When I say the “Left,” I mean, of course, its inauthentic realization, which includes upwards of 95% of the Democratic party (I hope the remaining 5% will soon leave on principle), but also the large numbers of Americans who, by rights, from historical experience and their own social struggles, should know better, having traditionally borne the brunt of racial oppression, antiunion legislation and strikebreaking, McCarthyism and other forms of red-baiting designed to penalize and purge dissent, and yet practically grovel at Obama’s feet, offering the lame excuse, when not positively praising him, that he represents the lesser of two evils.

Blacks succumbed right away on the grounds both of racial solidarity and mistaken faith (I am especially chagrined at John Lewis and his likening Obama to Dr. King, insulting to the latter in every respect, but also most members of the Black Caucus, who have supported Obama on economic policies and military interventions alike), remaining wholly oblivious to Obama’s strengthening of class-differentials, particularly hurtful to blacks, in which a practically infinitesimal proportion of the population enjoys an ever-increasing share of income, wealth, and power directly through his policies and appointments. With the old Robert Rubin crowd of deregulators, Geithner and Summers, installed on Day One, some of us knew at once the jig was up. Is it unfair to single out blacks? I think, no—there were too many sacrifices in the civil rights movement (Lewis, greatly to his credit, among them) to allow such fraudulence to go unanswered.

What we need is a color-blind political epistemology, in which it is recognized that upwardly mobile blacks are no different than upwardly mobile whites, both showing a proneness to reactionary ideas and policies in order to ingratiate themselves to the (mostly white) power structure. Obama is as far removed from Paul Robeson or Thurgood Marshall on every indicator of moral decency (the gold standard of which might be Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign) as am I from Albert Einstein or any other human being of exceptional intelligence.

But why single out any group, when his support takes in much of the FDR-New Deal coalition and its modern counterparts? I am not advocating for a revolutionary Left, at least not in public (and not in earshot of the NSA, FBI, and CIA, whereby mass surveillance in the name of counterterrorism will be increasingly turned in the direction of antiradicalism at home, as foreign policy itself increasingly takes on China, Russia, and heretofore Third World countries rapidly industrializing), but I do think rejection of Obama must be the minimum litmus test of the genuine progressive, whom—without quibbling over definitions (an age-old malady of the sectarian Left)—one can comfortably term sufficiently critical of capitalism, hegemonic plans and aspirations, military preparations and the interventions to which they lead, indifference to job creation, mortgage foreclosures, and entrenched poverty, and not least, the expansion of Executive Power and a POTUS intimately involved in targeted assassination, as to qualify. In a better day or thoroughly-achieved political democracy, Obama’s record would be seen as repugnant to humankind.

The recent shooting-down of the Summers appointment as Fed chair may signal Obama’s reversal of fortunes, that coupled with his foreign-policy unilateralism (which even in the US is starting to meet resistance), so that, finally, the American public will begin to realize they have a Judas Iscariot at the top, who has betrayed not merely his campaign promises, but his pledge of faith to the Constitution down the line, from civil liberties to making war, and in ever-widening circles, the poor, the national estate (as FDR would phrase it), and democracy itself. Just today (September 18) we see in the New York Times the confusions surrounding Obamacare, an excellent article by Sharyl Gay Stolberg, whose title says it all, “Ex-Officials Are Reaping Profit After Assisting on Health Law,” in which his team constructs a law favorable to the Health Industry and then, through the revolving door, proceeds to join the interests to be regulated, and an editorial, “The Money Behind the Shutdown Crisis,” which implicitly takes Obama’s program at (liberal) face-value, chastising the Far Right for attacking it, using the threat of a government shut-down as pretext for eliminating it.

The Far Right has myopia, in failing to see the whole thrust of Obama’s militarization and financialization of capitalism; nothing coming from his hand should be objectionable to them, or rather, given their own Neanderthalish character, nothing, that would be objectionable to sophisticated corporate capitalism.

Whether or not corporate capitalism breaks from its shock troops because of their dysfunctional positions more suitable to a less advanced or mature stage of capitalism, only time will tell—but plebeian fascism and corporatism, whatever their nuances and differences, smell just as bad. And Obama is the traffic cop du jour presently assisting both, one, with targeted assassination and rah-rah militarism, the other, with slick policies of trade, taxation, subsidies, free-market economics, and the ever-mammoth military budget. A three-legged stool—he, protofascists, mega business and banking leaders, all committed to punching holes in the social safety net and preserving the hierarchical nature of the social order.

My NYT Comment (Sept. 18) on the editorial:

The situation is difficult to grasp, as though signifying an alarming rightward shift of the political-ideological spectrum in America, in which the Obama White House, Center-Right in my estimation, has somehow been relegated to the Far Left by forces, e.g., the groups mentioned in the editorial, truly on the cusp of fascism. The three most insightful words in the editorial, “feed on chaos,” reveal the danger they hold: internal terrorists, who can do more damage to society, viz. the breakdown of government, than those we normally designate by that term. What is so odd about our times is that Obamacare itself is well to the Right of world developments in health care. And coming on the heels of the editorial, we see the article on the revolving-door precisely of those who worked to shape it now becoming “strategic advisers” to the mega health insurers who will most profit from it.

Health care, to me, represents the moral bankruptcy of Obama and his administration. Instead of fighting for a single-payer system, which, if the effort failed, still would have opened the way for the public option, Obama declared both off limits, leaving the American people with a cash cow for the Health Industry. Like his authorization of targeted assassination, in the realm of a national system of health insurance, he has assassinated the public he was pledged to serve. We need a new cabinet position: Department of the Revolving Door.

My NYT Comment (same date) on the Stolberg article:

The chickens come home to roost. Of course, the revolving door; of course, policy advisers leaping to the other side. Obamacare was a fraud from Day One, when the White House Health Care Summit was turned over to the very groups it allegedly was designed to regulate. Even the word “regulation” is totally out of place in an administration pledged, among its insiders, but not the public, to deregulation of all things–whether banking, climate change, gun control, or, as here, the health care industry. At that Summit, groups favoring the single-payer system (and even the public option) were excluded or, as in the case of Physicians for Social Responsibility, picketing outside, were allowed two entrants–on condition they remain silent.

Obama has flim-flammed the nation, as on so much else, and yet, because forces to his Right view him as Far Left, we have in America such a complete distortion of the meaning of democracy that anything Center-Right (for there is little around further Left) is seen as communistic. And the Far Right has become the new Center. The “strategic advisers” simply bided their time, first, proving to the Health Industry that they had engineered a law favorable to them, and then, cashing in through inner-expertise and what used to be called (and should again) influence-peddling. A sorry state all-around.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, Eichmann on the Potomac, will be published by CounterPunch in the fall of 2013.