Black Agenda Report
Barack Obama: The Empire's New Clothes
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Wednesday, 12 November 2008
by Paul Street*
Barack Obama and his followers continue to revise the history of his
ascendance, pretending his campaign was rooted among the "outsiders."
The public line is a fiction, as even the most rudimentary research
reveals. In fact, Obama's own words document his intense courtship of
the rich and powerful. Unfortunately, "few if any of" Obama's
staunchest supporters "have bothered to read a single solitary word of
Obama's blatantly imperial, nationalist, and militarist foreign policy
speeches and writings," says the author. "And my sense is they never will."
Barack Obama: The Empire's New Clothes
*by Paul Street*
/"Obama is an act of system-legitimizing brilliance."/
"This is bigger than life itself. When I was coming up, I always
thought they put in who they wanted to put in. I didn't think my vote
mattered. But I don't think that anymore."
The speaker of these words is Deddrick Battle, a black janitor who grew
up in St. Louis's notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing projects during the
1950s and 1960s.
Battle was speaking about the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. He
was quoted on the front page of last Sunday's /New York Times/ in a
story about the pride many African Americans are naturally feeling in
Obama's candidacy. The story contained numerous examples of American
blacks who have been encouraged by the Obama phenomenon to think for the
first time that "politics is for them, too" [1].
But, as The New York Times' editors certainly know, "they" still "put in
who they want to put in" to no small extent. The predominantly white
U.S. business and political establishment still makes sure that nobody
who questions dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines
can make a serious ("viable") run for higher office - the presidency,
above all. It does this by denying adequate campaign funding (absolutely
essential to success in an age of super-expensive, media-driven
campaigns) and favorable media treatment (without which a successful
campaign is unimaginable at the current stage of corporate media
consolidation and power) to candidates who step beyond the narrow
boundaries of elite opinion. Thanks to these critical electoral filters
and to the legally mandated U.S. winner-take-all "two party" system [2],
a candidate who even remotely questions corporate and imperial power is
not permitted to make a strong bid for the presidency.
Barack Obama is no exception to the rule. Anyone who thinks he could
have risen to power without prior and ongoing ruling class approval is
living in a dream world.
*An Early and 'Quieter Audition' with the 'Moneyed Establishment.'*
Conventional wisdom holds that Obama entered national politics with his
instantly famous keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National
Convention. But, as Ken Silverstein noted in /Harper's/ in the fall of
2006, "If the speech was his debut to the wider American public, he had
already undergone an equally successful but much quieter audition with
Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without whose support he
would surely never have been chosen for such a prominent role at the
convention."
The favorable elite assessment of Obama began in October of 2003. That's
when "Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate
board-member who chaired Bill Clinton's presidential transition team
after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends
and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home. That event," Silverstein
noted, "marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual-the
gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which
potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists."
Drawing on his undoubted charm, wit, intelligence, and Harvard
credentials, Obama passed this trial with shining colors. At a series of
social meetings with assorted big "players" from the financial, legal
and lobbyist sectors, Obama impressed key establishment figures like
Gregory Craig (a longtime leading attorney and former special counsel to
the White House), Mike Williams (the legislative director of the Bond
Market Association), Tom Quinn (a partner at the top corporate law firm
Venable and a leading Democratic Party "power broker"), and Robert
Harmala, another Venable partner and "a big player in Democratic circles."
Craig liked the fact that Obama was not a racial "polarizer" on the
model of past African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Williams was soothed by Obama's reassurances that he was not
"anti-business" and became "convinced...that the two could work together."
"There's a reasonableness about him," Harmala told Silverstein. "I
don't see him as being on the liberal fringe."
/"Elite financial, legal, and lobbyists contributions came into Obama's
coffers at a rapid and accelerating pace."/
By Silverstein's account, the good "word about Obama spread through
Washington's blue-chip law firms, lobby shops, and political offices,
and this accelerated after his win in the March [2004] Democratic
primary." Elite financial, legal, and lobbyists contributions came into
Obama's coffers at a rapid and accelerating pace [3].
The "good news" for Washington and Wall Street insiders was that Obama's
"star quality" would not be directed against the elite segments of the
business class. The interesting black legislator from the South Side of
Chicago was "someone the rich and powerful could work with." According
to Obama biographer and /Chicago Tribune/ reporter David Mendell, in
late 2003 and early 2004:
"Word of Obama's rising star was now spreading beyond Illinois,
especially through influential Washington political circles like blue
chip law firms, party insiders, lobbying houses. They were all hearing
about this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African American
who unbelievably could win votes across color lines.....[his handlers
and] influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers all vigorously
worked their D.C. contacts to help Obama make the rounds with the
Democrats' set of power brokers. ...Obama...spent a couple of days and
nights shaking hands making small talk and delivering speeches to
liberal groups, national union leaders, lobbyists, fund-raisers and
well-heeled money donors. In setting after setting, Obama's Harvard Law
resume and his reasonable tone impressed the elite crowd."
According to Mendell, Obama now cultivated the support of the privileged
few by "advocate[ing] fiscal restraint" and "calling for pay-as-you-go
government" and "extol[ing] the merits of free trade and charter
schools." He "moved beyond being an obscure good-government reformer to
being a candidate more than palatable to the moneyed and political
establishment." [4].
"Reasonable tone" was code language with a useful translation for
Obama's new business-class backers: "friendly to capitalism and its
opulent masters."
"On condition of anonymity," Silverstesin reported two years ago, "one
Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious:
that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as
a 'player.' The lobbyist added: 'What's the dollar value of a
starry-eyed idealist?'"
*Obama's 'Dollar Value'*
Since his election to the U.S. Senate and through the presidential
campaign, the "deeply conservative" (according to /New Yorker/ writer
Larissa MacFarquhar) Obama has done nothing to undermine his
"palatability" to concentrated economic and political power. He has made
his safety to the power elite evident on matters both domestic and
global, from his support for bailing out parasitic Wall Street financial
firms with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars (while claiming to
be "a free market guy" and proclaiming "love" for "capitalism") to his
refusal to question the morality of U.S. colonial wars and his strident
support for maintaining a globally unmatched "defense" (empire) budget
that accounts for nearly half the world's military spending. As Edward
S. Herman and David Peterson note in an important recent article, "in
2007-08, Obama has placated establishment circles on virtually every
front imaginable, the candidate of 'change we can believe in' has
visited interest group after interest group to promise them that they
needn't fear any change in the way they're familiar with doing business"
[5].
It's all very consistent with Obama's history stretching back to his
days as the Republican-pleasing editor of the Harvard Law Review and his
climb up the corporate-friendly politics of Chicago. As Ryan Lizza
noted in /The New Yorker/ last July, "Perhaps the greatest misconception
about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment
revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been
marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions
rather than tear them down or replace them" [6].
/"Obama enjoyed a remarkable windfall of favorable corporate media
coverage."/
Obama's business-friendly centrism helped him garner an astonishing,
record-setting stash of corporate cash. He received more than $33
million from "FIRE," the finance-real-estate and insurance sector. His
winnings include $824,202 from the leading global investment firm
Goldman Sachs [7]. He has been consistently backed by the biggest and
most powerful Wall Street firms.
At the same time and by more than mere coincidence, Obama enjoyed a
remarkable windfall of favorable corporate media coverage. That media
treatment was the key to Obama's success in winning support and
donations from the middle-class and from non-affluent people like
Deddrick Battle.
This does not mean that the Obama phenomenon has raised no concerns
among the rich and powerful. As Herman and Peterson note, "Obama's race,
his background, his enthusiastic, and less predictable constituency, and
the occasional slivers of populism that creep into his campaign, make
the establishment nervous, whereas Hillary Clinton and John McCain
clearly posed no such threat."
Still, the moneyed elite's most reactionary wing used its formidable
media and propaganda system to keep the Obama "movement" safely within
conservative boundaries. It employed a series of neo-McCarthyite
anti-radical and related racial scare tactics including the Jeremiah
Wright Affair and subsequent public relations campaigns surrounding
alleged Obama links to "terrorist" charter-school advocate William Ayers
and "radical professor" Rashid Khalidi. It has sought to link the
openly capitalist Obama to the "anti-American" threat of "socialism,"
alleging that that the harbors a nefarious desire to "redistribute" wealth.
*'Holding Domestic Constituencies in Check'*
At the same time, many in the establishment sensed (accurately) that
Obama is particularly well-suited to the goal of wrapping corporate
politics and the related American Empire Project in insurgent garb.
Their profit- and empire-based system and "leadership" has been behaving
so badly that a major image makeover is required to keep the rabble (the
citizenry) in line. Once he was properly "vetted" and found to be
"reasonable" - to be someone who would not fundamentally question
dominant power structures and doctrines - Obama's multicultural
background, race, youth, charisma, and even his early opposition to the
Iraq War became useful to corporate and imperial elites. His outwardly
progressive "change" persona is perfectly calibrated to divert, capture,
control, and contain coming popular rebellions. He is uniquely qualified
to simultaneously surf, de-fang, and "manage" the U.S. and world
citizenry's hopes for radical and democratic transformation in the wake
of the Bush-Cheney nightmare. As John Pilger warned last May:
"What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as
Robert Kennedy's [in 1968]. By offering a 'new,' young and apparently
progressive face of Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member
of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was
Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will
bring intense pressure on the US antiwar and social justice movements to
accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens,
domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent" [8].
/"His outwardly progressive 'change' persona is perfectly calibrated to
divert, capture, control, and contain coming popular rebellions."/
Obama's race is no small part of what makes him "uniquely qualified" to
perform the key tasks of mass pacification for which he has been hired.
As Aurora Levins Morales noted in a Z Magazine essay written for left
progressives last April:
"We're far more potent as organizers and catalysts than as voters. Our
ability to create a world we can thrive on does not depend on who wins
this election, it depends on our ability to dismantle profit-based
societies in which greed trumps ethics. This election is about finding a
CEO capable of holding domestic constituencies in check as they are
further disenfranchised and... [about] mak[ing] them feel that they have
a stake in the military aggressiveness that the ruling class believes is
necessary. Having a black man and a white woman run helps to obscure
the fact that ...decline of empire is driving the political elite to the
right. Both [Obama and Hillary Clinton] represent very reactionary
politics...Part of the cleverness of having such candidates is the fact
that they will be attacked in ways that make oppressed people feel
compelled to protect them" [9].
*Imperial 'Re-branding'*
The logic works at the global as well as the domestic level. A
considerable segment of the U.S. foreign policy establishment thinks
that Obama's race, name (technically Islamic), experience living (Muslim
Indonesia, as a child) in and visiting (chiefly his father's homeland
Kenya) poor nations and his nominally anti-Iraq War history will help
them repackage the U.S. imperial project (replete with more than 730
military bases located in nearly every nation on Earth) in softer and
more politically correct cover [10]. John Kerry, who ran for the
presidency four years earlier largely on the claim that he would be a
more effective manager of empire (and the Iraq War) than George W. Bush
[11], was certainly thinking of these critical imperial "soft power"
assets when he praised Obama as someone who could "reinvent America's
image abroad" [11A]. So was Obama himself when he said the following to
reporters aboard his campaign plane in the fall of 2007:
"If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power, as long
as we are making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergencies,
crises, and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober
way....I think that if you can tell people, 'We have a president in the
White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of
Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a
Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better
sense of what's going on in our lives and country. And they'd be right"
[12].
What Obama didn't tell reporters was that his idea of "prudent" and
"intelligent" foreign policy is strongly committed to U.S. global
hyper-militarism and world supremacy, including unilateral action
whenever "we" deem it necessary to "protect the American people and
their vital interests" [13].
Obama's distinctive biography is one of his great attractions to the
mostly white U.S. foreign policy elite in a majority non-white world
that has been deeply provoked and disgusted by U.S. behavior in the
post-9/11 era (and truthfully before). He is a perfect symbol of
deceptive imperial "re-branding." According to the power-worshipping and
unconsciously imperialist /New York Times/ columnist Nicholas Kristof
three weeks ago, the election of a black president "could change global
perceptions of the United States, redefining the American 'brand' to be
less about Guantanamo and more about equality" [14]. Never mind that
the U.S. remains the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy country in the
industrialized world by far, strongly dedicated to maintaining steep
socioeconomic and disparity within and between nations and scarred by a
domestic racial wealth gap of seven black cents on the white dollar.
Call it "the identity politics of foreign policy." The Empire wants new
clothes and Obama is just the man to wear them.
*"If there's anyone out there who still questions the power of our
democracy..."*
The first public words out of Obama's mouth on the evening of his
election were richly consistent with his assignment of restoring
legitimacy to the American System. "If there is anyone out there who
still doubts that America is a place where all things are
possible.....who still questions the power of our democracy," Obama
intoned, "tonight is your answer" [15].
Our supposed "left" President-Elect's first statement was NOT a call for
peace, justice, and equality. It wasn't a call for America to confront
the inseparably linked problems (what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called
the "triple evils that are interrelated") of economic exploitation,
racism (deeply understood), and militarism-imperialism.
No, it was a Reagan-like declaration bolstering the American
plutocracy's ridiculous claim that the U.S. - the industrialized world's
most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society by far - is home to a great
democracy and limitless opportunity for all.
And what's with the word "still" (used twice) in Obama's assertion? It's
not exactly like the case for the U.S. being a great popular democracy
has been made with special, self-evident strength in recent times! The
last three-and-a-half decades have brought the deepening top-down
infliction of a sharply regressive corporate-neoliberal policies that
are widely (but irrelevantly) repudiated by the majority of U.S.
citizens [16].
In this century we've witnessed the execution of a monumentally criminal
petro-imperialist Iraq Invasion sold to the U.S. populace by a
spectacular state-media propaganda campaign (including preposterous
claims of noble democratic intent Obama has embraced) that mocked and
subverted the nation's democratic ideals. Dominant U.S. media's role in
the invasion of Iraq marks perhaps the all-time low point of the "free
press" in the U.S. [17]. The "democracy disconnect" - the gap (chasm
really) between majority public opinion (which supports things like
national universal health care, significant reductions in military
expenditure and imperial commitment, massive public works, reduced
corporate power, etc.) and "public" policy - is a widely acknowledged
problem in American political life [18]. The specter of homeland
totalitarianism - please see Sheldon Wolin's recent book/Democracy
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism/ (Princeton, NJ, 2008) - has never loomed larger than in
the opening decade of the 21st century.
"If there is anyone out there who still questions the power of our
democracy"? Hello? How about: "Is there anybody who seriously thinks we
really have a functioning democracy in the U.S.?"
*Elections as Change*
"In all of the post-election noise," a student recently wrote me, "I
think one thing Obama said in his acceptance speech was completely right
on: the election itself is not the 'change' but simply the chance to
make the changes we have to make. I know, I know, Obama was the ruling
class candidate, but you have to admit that this represents at least
symbolically a very good (first) step."
In the fifth paragraph of his acceptance oration, however, the
President-Elect said that "because of what we did on this day, in this
election, at this defining moment, change has come to America." That
line (anyway) makes the election itself change.
Later in the speech Obama said that his election "proved that...a
government of the people, by the people and for the people has not
perished from this Earth" [19].
That was very premature. Whether or not that judgment proves accurate
remains to be seen and the answer is up to citizens, not politicians.
I'm no where near ready to put Wolin's book in the basement because of
the neoliberal "conciliator" [20] Barack Obama's election.
I've never said Obama was THE ruling class candidate, just A ruling
class candidate. And for what it's worth, I agree with Herman and
Peterson that the Obama phenomenon (not so much Obama but the
expectations surrounding him) causes some anxiety in establishment
circles [21] - as well it should.
*'Carefully Crafting the Obama Brand'*
"Our campaign," Obama announced last Tuesday night, "was not hatched in
the halls of Washington" [22].
Yes it was. "One evening in February 2005, in a four-hour meeting stoked
by pepperoni pizza and great ambition," the /Chicago Tribune/ reported
last year, "Senator Barack Obama and his senior advisors crafted a
strategy to fit the Obama 'brand.'" The meeting took place just weeks
after Obama had been sworn into the upper representative chamber of the
United States government. According to the/Tribune's/ Washington Bureau
reporters Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, in an article titled
"Carefully Crafting the Obama Brand":
"The charismatic celebrity-politician had rocketed from the Illinois
state legislature to the U.S. Senate, stirring national interest. The
challenge was to maintain altitude despite the limited tools available
to a freshman senator whose party was in a minority."
"Yet even in those early days, Obama and his advisors were thinking
ahead. Some called it the '2010-2012-2016' plan: a potential bid for
governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, followed by a bid for the
White House as soon as 2012, not 2016. The way to get there, they
decided, was by carefully building a record that matched the brand
identity: Obama as a unifier and consensus builder, and almost
postpolitical leader."
"The staffers in that after-hours session, convened by Obama's Senate
staff and including Chicago political advisor David Axlerod, planned a
low-profile strategy that would emphasize workhorse results over
headlines. Obama would invest in the long-term profile by not seeming
too eager for the bright lights" [23].
This /Tribune/ story suggests a degree of cynicism, manipulation, and
ambition that does not fit very well with the progressive and hopeful
likeness that the Obama campaign projected. The politician being sold
would make sure to seem non-ambitious and humble. But, by Dorning and
Parsons' account, Obama and his team were actually and quite eagerly all
about "the bright lights" and "the headlines" in a "long-term" sense.
They were already scheming for the presidency less than a month into his
Senate seat.
/"For Obama and his team the Senate was largely a marketing platform for
the Next Big Thing."/
The image of Obama as a humble and hardworking rookie who got along with
his colleagues across partisan lines was part of their marketing
strategy on the path to higher - the highest - office. Obama may have
just become only the third black to sit in the U.S. Senate since
Reconstruction, but for Obama and his team the Senate was largely a
marketing platform for the Next Big Thing - a place to build his image
as a "unifier" and "consensus builder." The term "Obama brand" suggested
the commodified nature of a political culture that tends to reduce
elections to corporate-"crafted" marketing contests revolving around
candidate images packaged and sold by corporate consultants and public
relations experts.
The fact that presidential opportunity knocked four years before 2012
does not alter the basic point.
Other "halls" of wealth and power also "hatched" Obama: LaSalle Street
(Chicago's financial district), Wall Street (Goldman Sachs alone gave
Obama nearly $900,000 for the 2007-08 campaign), and the monopoly media
[24].
*Power Elite Cabinet Appointments*
Those remaining bizarre individuals on the lunatic fringe who "still
question the power of our democracy" are going to be entertained and/or
nauseated by "Obama Inc.'s" cabinet appointments. As the balmy populist
warmth of Election Day (75 degrees and blue skies as I knocked doors in
rural Iowa) gives way to the big chill (it was freezing in Iowa City by
Friday) of corporate-imperial governance, Obama has already named the
brass-knuckled power-elite enforcer Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff.
This is a slap in the face to leftish progressives who think the next
president is one of them.
Emmanuel is a former leading member of the corporate-neoliberal
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Formed by business-oriented elites
to increase the Democratic Party's distance from labor,
environmentalism, blacks, and Civil Rights, the DLC's mission was to
steer the party closer to the corporate, imperial, southern, suburban,
and racially accomodationist center. It's goal was to advance
post-partisan convergence between Democratic and Republican agendas and
to impose economically and racially regressive polices underneath the
cloak of "progressive" strategy and "pragmatic" "realism."
Emmanuel was a leading Clinton administration agent of the
corporate-globalizationist investors-rights bill called the "North
American Free Trade Agreement." He is a leading liaison between
corporate funding sources and the Democratic Party.
The son a wealthy Israeli doctor, he is a fierce defender of Israel's
apartheid regime and its illegal occupation of Palestine.
He played a critical role in favoring conservative and pro-war Democrats
over progressive antiwar Democrats during the 2006 congressional primaries.
The rest of Obama's cabinet appointments should follow in much the same
vein. Expect Republican imperialist Robert Gates (who advocated the
straight-up U.S. bombing of Nicaragua in the name of the Monroe Doctrine
during the early 1980s) to stay on as "Defense" Secretary for at least a
year. In the campaign home stretch, Obama bought into the noxious notion
that the Bush-Patraeus-Gates "Surge" is "working" ("beyond our wildest
dreams" he told FOX News thug Bill O'Reilly) in Iraq
We will certainly get somebody from the neoliberal Wall-Street-Goldman
Sachs-Harvard-University of Chicago-Hamilton Group crowd in Treasury - a
seasoned state-capitalist apparatchik who understands the need to bail
out the wealthy Few, not ordinary homeowners and workers. Top Obama
economic adviser Lawrence Summers could well be brought in, despite (a)
his scandalous claim that females are genetically unfit for science; (b)
his claim (as World Bank economist) that Africa was under-polluted since
people don't live very long there anyway; and (c) his critical role
(along with Robert Rubin, another possibility at Treasury) in advancing
the financial deregulation that helped create the recent meltdown of
U.S. and global financial markets.
Look for a foreign policy post of some sort to go to Richard Holbrooke,
a major Iraq War Hawk, largely indistinguishable from Paul Wolfowitz on
Iraq and the broader Middle East. Holbrooke's resume includes
authorizing (during his time as a State Department functionary in the
Carter administration) the continued sale of arms to Indonesia while its
military conducted a genocidal invasion of East Timor during the middle
and late 1970s.
I could go on.
*'I Can't Read That'*
Are progressive people I used to like and take seriously really going to
let themselves be turned into hopeless reactionaries and/or fools by the
Obama phenomenon?
The progressive filmmaker Michael Moore says this on his Web site:
"Never before in our history has an avowed anti-war candidate been
elected president during a time of war" [25]. Obama is an "anti-war
candidate?" Yes, and Love is Hate. I tried to write Moore to suggest
that he read my book's fourth chapter (titled "How 'Antiwar'? Obama,
Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire"), but his mailbox was full.
A left labor historian I've worked with has admonished me for
criticizing Obama, who (the historian hopes) will bring the Employee
Free Choice Act (re-legalizing and expanding unions). Well, the EFCA is
in Obama's policy book and I'm going to work for it but mark my words:
it'll have to be fought for tooth-and-nail against the likes of Emanuel,
Summers, and Obama's own "deeply conservative" [26] instincts. (This
morning on ABC, the neoconservative commentator and Obama fan George
Will said that president Obama might well be pleased to see the EFCA
fail since it could end up being for the new administration what "gays
in the military" was for Bill Clinton).
An old friend used to be a very smart Marxist and was an early member of
SDS - a real New Leftist. She refused to be given - yes, refused to be
given - a copy of my very careful and respectful book on the Obama
phenomenon. "I can't read that," she said. Some of the names on the
back of the book (Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky, and John Pilger) are
former icons of hers (she introduced me to the writings of Adolph Reed,
Jr in the mid-1990s.) but now she's in love with Obama. "It's the best
thing that could happen," she says about his election. She's
repudiated her radical past and agrees with centrist American Enterprise
Institute (AEI) "scholar" Norman Ornstein's recent ravings on how "the
left" must not press Obama for very much right now (Ornstein's
AEI-funded admonitions have recently been broadcast again and again
across America's wonderful "public" broadcasting stations ("N'PR and
"P"BS) because of, you know, "the economy" and all.
Paul Krugman in the /New York Times/ (a left-liberal Obama critic during
the primary campaign) says there's "something wrong with you" if you
weren't "teary-eyed" about Obama's election [27]. Yes, numerous other
radicals and I need to be put under psychiatric care because we didn't
cry over the militantly bourgeois and openly imperialist Obama's
presidential selection.
We have the increasingly unglued white anti-racist Tim Wise screaming
"Screw You" to Obama's harshest radical critics [28] - this after
recklessly charging racism against working-class whites [29] Wise 2008b)
and Hillary Clinton supporters [30] who had any issues with (the
racially conciliatory) Obama.
Half-progressive liberals I know in Iowa City (white-academic-Obamaist
ground zero) ask my opinion of the election. I express the slightest
hint of substantive, evidence-based left critique/concern and they turn
away.
The local bookstore, run by progressives (left-liberal Edwards
supporters during the Iowa Caucus), is wiling to sell my book but "too
scared" to have an author event.
Few if any of these people have bothered to read a single solitary word
of Obama's blatantly imperial, nationalist, and militarist foreign
policy speeches and writings. And my sense is they never will. They do
not care about such primary sources in the ongoing history of the Obama
phenomenon.
For the last two years talking to many liberals and avowed
"progressives" I know about Obama - who I picked to be the next
president in the fall of 2006 (I thought he was too simultaneously
irresistible to both the power elite and the liberal base not to
prevail) - has been like talking to Republicans about George W. Bush and
the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 2004: no room for messy and
inconvenient facts.
I am hearing people of color identify with the occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq in ways that would be unimaginable without Obama.
This may be the worst thing of all.
Obama is an act of system-legitimizing brilliance - a tour de force for
the ruling class.
He has been chosen to wear the Empire's new clothes. He is the "managed
democracy's" fake-progressive public relations makeover at home and abroad.
Meanwhile the real heartland white fascists - the ones Wise doesn't make
up - are buying up assault weapons at a record pace.
Such is the dark authoritarian reality of U.S. political culture lurking
behind the pride and excitement felt by Deddrick Battle and many other
poor and black voters who have been inspired by the Obama phenomenon to
think that "politics is for them too." President Obama can be counted on
to use their new faith in reactionary and imperial ways reflecting
hidden allegiance to the timeworn elite principle that really big
matters of politics and policy are for the rich and powerful - not
ordinary citizens. At the end of the day Obama's job is to keep the
restless poor, working class, and global Many safely pacified while
serving the needs of the wealthy and imperial Few. It's a deadly
juggling act that could have terrible consequences. How long he can
maintain the illusion of serving the interests of the people and the
elite at one and the same time is an open question.
The sooner seriously left agitators and activists can expose the
corporate-imperial truth behind the progressive Obama fa?ade to
disenfranchised people at home and abroad, the quicker we can get to
real social and democratic change beyond the ruling class's latest
quadrennial candidate-centered electoral extravaganza.
/Paul Street's books include Empire and Inequality: America and the
World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Racial Oppression in the
Global Metropolis (New York, 2007), and most recently Barack Obama and
the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, September 2008).
Paul can be reached
[email protected]
<mailto:
[email protected]
.>/
NOTES
1. Susan Saulny, "Obama-Inspired Black Voters Find Politics is For Them
Too," New York Times, November 2, 2008, sec.1, p. 1.
2. In deciding against "fusion" electoral options (which would allow a
voter to select Obama [or McCain] in the name of the Green Party or any
other non-mainstream party), the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the
nation has an interest in restricting the number of viable political
parties to just two.
3. Ken Silverstein, "Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington
Machine," Harper's (November 2006).
4. David Mendell, Obama: From Promise to Power (New York: HarperCollins,
2007), pp. 248-49.
5. Edward S Herman and David Peterson, "Jeremiah Wright in the
Propaganda System," Monthly Review, September 2008, pp. 3-4; Paul
Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm, 2008). For Obama as "deeply conservative," see Larissa
MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" The
New Yorker (May 7, 2007). According to MacFarquhar, "In his view of
history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world
can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative."
6. Ryan Lizza, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama," The New Yorker,
(July 21, 2008).
7. Center for Responsive Politics, "Open Secrets," Barack Obama's
Campaign Finance Profile, read at www.opensecetrs.org
<http://www.opensecetrs.org/> (accessed on November 2, 2008).
8. John Pilger, "After Bobby Kennedy There Was Barack Obama," Common
Dreams, May 31, 2008, read
atwww.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/31/9327/
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/31/9327/>.
9. Aurora Levins Morales, "Thinking Outside the Ballot Box," Z Magazine
(April 2008).
10. James Traub, "Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?" New York Times
Magazine (November 4, 2007). See also Liza Mundy, "A Series of
Fortunate Events: Barack Obama Needed More Than Talent and Ambition to
Rocket From Obscure State Senator to Presidential Contender in Three
Years," Washington Post Magazine (August 12, 2007).
11. See Paul Street, "Bush, Kerry, and 'Body Language' v. 'Message':
Notes on Race, Gender, Empire and Mass Infantilization," ZNet Magazine
(October 12, 2004).
11A. John F. Kerry, "Truly Transformative," Newsweek (April 28, 2008): 34.
12. Quoted in Traub, "Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?"
13. For truly ugly details, please see the fourth chapter - titled "How
'Antiwar?' Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire" - in my book Barack
Obama and the Future of American Politics.
14. Nicholas Kristof, "Rebranding the U.S. With Obama," The New York
Times, October 23, 2008, p. A27.
15. Barack Obama, "Remarks on Election Night," Chicago, IL (November 4,
2008), read
athttp://www.barackobama.com/2008/11/04/remarks_of_presidentelect_bara.php
16. For one among many sources, see see Jeff Faux, /The Global Class
War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will
Take to Win it Back/(New York: Wiley, 2006).
17. For some important recent reflections, see John Bellamy Foster,
Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, "The Military/Industrial/Media
Triangle," Monthly Review (October 2008), pp. 15-16.
18. For sources and details, see Paul Street, "Americans' Progressive
Opinions vs. 'The Shadow Cast on Society by Big Business,'" ZNet
Sustainer Commentary (May 15, 2008), read
at http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3491.
19. Obama, "Remarks on Election Night."
20. MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator."
21. Herman and Peterson, "Jeremiah Wright."
22. Obama, "Remarks."
23. Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, "Carefully Crafting the Obama
Brand,"/Chicago Tribune/, 12 June, 2007, sec.1. p.1.
24. Ken Silverstein, "Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,"
Harper's (November 2006); Center for Responsive Politics 2008, Mendell,
Obama: From Promise to Power; Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future
of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, September 2008), pp. xvii-72.
25. Michael Moore, "Pinch Me," ZNet (November 5, 2008), read
athttp://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19359. And what's with
this "time of war" crap? Is Moore dodging IEDs and mortar shells on his
way to and from his filming locations or home? Are they imposing
nighttime blackouts and rationing scarce war materials in Moore's
hometown of Flint or anywhere else in the U.S.?
The American Empire has undertaken two vicious and one-sided
petro-colonial occupations in oil- and gas-rich Southwest Asia. It is
not imposing anything like wartime rigors on the imperial homeland.
26. MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator."
27. Paul Krugman, "The Obama Agenda," New York Times, November 7, 2008.
28. Tim Wise, "Good and Now Back to Work," ZNet (November 6, 2008), read
at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19398
29. Tim Wise "This is How Fascism Comes," Red Room (October 11, 2008),
read at
http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-how-fascism-comes-reflections-cost-silence.
30. Tim Wise, "Your Whiteness is Showing," LIP Magazine (June 5, 2008),
read at http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/WhitenessShowing.html
<http://www.lipmagazine.org/%7Etimwise/WhitenessShowing.html>