Barack Obama

[randolph]

A Silly Question: "Is Barack Obama a Progressive?"*

August 29, 2009 By Paul Street
Paul Street's ZSpace Page


Is Barack Obama a progressive? John Wilson says "yes," I say "no." But how much does the question really matter at the end of the day? Obama wasn't selected to head the United Way or the White Sox. He's chief executive of the American Empire. He is a politician above all - one who was selected to sit atop and, I think, to re-brand what the left-liberal political scientist Sheldon Wolin rightly calls "Democracy, Incorporated."



Every four years millions of American voters are induced to put their political hats on, to hope a bit, and then to go back to sleep. To hope that a savior or at least a more effective manager can be installed in the White House to raise wages, roll back war and militarism, provide universal and adequate health care, rebuild infrastructure, fix the environmental crisis, reduce inequality, and generally make life more livable.


The Obama presidency so far is a chilling object lesson in the reach, power, and bipartisan nature of that "unelected dictatorship." Obama is following what David Rothkopf, a former Clinton official, calls "the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right." In other words, you gain and hold the presidency with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but you govern, you make policy, in service to existing dominant institutions.



So, you lecture Wall Street on the immorality of their bonuses. You visit Elkhart , Indiana to show solidarity with downtrodden working people. And then you give yet more of the public treasury and commons away to the Privileged Few, justifying the handouts as a noble expression of your "sensible," "realistic," and "pragmatic" commitment to rising above ideological divisions to "get things done" for the American people.



Funny how our "pragmatist"-in chief keep getting things done for the rich and powerful. The mind and soul go numb as yet one more populist-, progressive-, and peaceful- sounding campaign promise gets drowned in the icy waters of corporate and military rule. Its been a strange time for many of Obama's progressive fans, what with their "peace" president's blatant escalation of civilian-slaughtering war in South Asia, his indefinite continuation of the Iraq occupation, his increase of the Pentagon budget, his advance dismissal of a peace dividend, his advance approval for an Israel attack on Iran, his refusal to move in any serious way against Israel's occupation of Palestine, his apparent commitment to building a provocative missile shield in Eastern Europe, his embrace of NATO expansion, his ambivalent and tepid response to the right-wing coup in Honduras, his embrace of the War on Drugs in Columbia and Mexico and his continuation of numerous key aspects of George W. Bush's counter-terrorism program. "Obama," Jeremy Scahill notes, "is a brilliant supporter of empire who has figured out a way to trick people into believing they're supporting radical change." The president is "an Orwellian character" who "make[s] people think that war is peace."




"Obama," Noam Chomsky notes, "made sure to staff his economic team with advisors from [the financial] sector." This helps explain both Obama's willingness to expand the Bush policy of transferring trillions to financial parasites and Obama's unwillingness to displease the financial sector lobby with clearly indicated progressive measures like seriously restricting executive compensation, re-instituting the Glass Steagal Acts's separation of commercial and investment banking, closing regulatory exemptions on customized derivatives, banning the notorious credit default swap, and breaking up the "too-big- [and too-powerful]- to fail" banking firms.



As bailouts for oligarchs combined with growing destitution amongst the populace last March, William Greider noted that "People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power... They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it." But nothing or very little for the lower and working class majority, even with Democrats in power.

And then of course there's Obama's struggle to advance corporate healthcare reform for and by the nation's leading insurance and drug companies - an unpopular private-public mish-mash that is all too consistent with the hundreds of millions of dollars that Obama and other leading blue Cross Blue Shield Democrats like Max Baucus have received from the health sector and the finance and insurance industries in the last few years.



It's not for nothing that Obama's presidential campaign garnered a record-setting $39 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate industries (10 million better than McCain), $44 million from the legal and lobbyist sector (33 million better than McCain), $25 million from the communications and electronics industries (20 million better than McCain), and more than $19 million from the health sector (12 million better than McCain).



You don't need to be a Marxist to be concerned about Obama's service to economic royalty. Two Sundays ago, the liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich, something of an Obama fan last year, wrote an editorial noting the absurdity of Republican claims that Obama is a socialist and worrying that "Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be for the common guy."







The left-liberal senior black Congressman and single-payer advocate John Conyers recently described Obama's health care plan as "crap," adding that "nobody is more disappointed in Barack Obama than I am."



It's all very consistent with the campaign warnings of a liberal named John Edwards, who said it was a "complete fantasy" to think that meaningful progressive reform could be achieved by sitting down at a big negotiating table with big corporations and Republicans. Only an "epic fight" with corporate power could achieve such reform, Edwards said.




"Every stage of his political career," the liberal journalist Ryan Lizza noted about Obama last year, "has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions." And in a carefully researched New Yorker portrait of Obama based on extensive interviews in May of 2007, Larissa MacFarquhar found that Obama was about as far from being a radical reformer as one could imagine. "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," MacFarquhar wrote, "is deeply conservative....It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example," MacFarquhar noted, quoting Obama on how the United States ' for-profit health insurance companies were too deeply entrenched for us to evict them from their Mafia-like control of our health-care future.



MacFarquhar's portrait was consistent with how the left black political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly after the future president won his first election to the Illinois legislature. Obama struck Reed as "a smooth Harvard lawyer with ...vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics" including a "fundamentally bootstrap line" that was "softened by...talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program - the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substance."






I am aware of the standard liberal defense that Obama is doing all he can for progressive values under the existing system of business and imperial power. Corporate Washington, the argument goes, leaves little room for progressive maneuver, Yes, that's true, but leaving aside the fact that the "deeply conservative" Obama often goes farther than required to appease corporate and military masters, there's an obvious response to this defense: "Hey, maybe it isn't about running for president." Maybe it isn't about climbing to the top of this authoritarian system and helping that system re-brand and re-legitimize itself as a "democracy" where "anything is possible." Maybe it's about re-building and expanding social movements and creating a more responsive political culture beneath and beyond these big, business-coordinated corporate-crafted mass-marketed narrow-spectrum and candidate-centered candidate-obsessed electoral extravaganzas the power elite and its dominant media stage for us every four years.



Adolph Reed got it right at the beginning. And as the brilliant black left Obama critic Glen Ford recently put it in regard to Obama's predictable conservative trajectory as president, "what begins badly usually ends badly."



With all due respect for John Conyers, we might also heed the words of the Tarnac Nine, who wrote the following in their 2007 pamphlet The Coming Insurrection: "To be disappointed one must have hoped for something. And we have never hoped for anything from business: we see it for what it is and what it has always been, a fool's game of varying degrees of comfort."



That's how I've felt about the false-pragmatist business liberal Barack Obama since he first leaped on to the national stage in the summer of 2004 and it's no small part of why I picked him as the next president in the fall of 2006.

[tslust]

(Just a joke.)

Originally Posted by randolph

A Silly Question: “Is Barack Obama a Progressive?”

No, he hasn't progressed verry far.

Sorry, I couldn't pass that up.

[TracyCoxx]

Isn't this interesting...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/bo...onfiction.html

Three conservative books in the top 10, and no liberal political books on the list.

And this from the Gallup poll

Originally Posted by Gallup

Bottom Line

Despite the Democratic Party's political strength -- seen in its majority representation in Congress and in state houses across the country -- more Americans consider themselves conservative than liberal. While Gallup polling has found this to be true at the national level over many years, and spanning recent Republican as well as Democratic presidential administrations, the present analysis confirms that the pattern also largely holds at the state level. Conservatives outnumber liberals by statistically significant margins in 47 of the 50 states, with the two groups statistically tied in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

BO is going to find the 2nd half of his term very difficult

[randolph]

Originally Posted by TracyCoxx

Isn't this interesting...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/bo...onfiction.html

Three conservative books in the top 10, and no liberal political books on the list.

And this from the Gallup poll


BO is going to find the 2nd half of his term very difficult

It appears Obama is actually a conservative. Tracy you should be pleased.

[The Conquistador]

Originally Posted by randolph

It appears Obama is actually a Marxist. Tracy you should be buying more 7.62x54R.

Fixed it for you.

[randolph]

Originally Posted by TheAngryPostman

Fixed it for you.

First of all it is a serious felony, at this site, to alter someone else's post.
Besides, look at what he is doing;
Selling out to the drug companies.
Selling out health care.
Expanding war in Afghanistan.
Playing footsie with the bankers.
He is looking more like a fucking conservative every day.

[The Conquistador]

Originally Posted by randolph

First of all it is a serious felony, at this site, to alter someone else's post.
Besides, look at what he is doing;
Selling out to the drug companies.
Selling out health care.
Expanding war in Afghanistan.
Playing footsie with the bankers.
He is looking more like a fucking conservative every day.

You obviously do not know what conservatism is.

[TracyCoxx]

Originally Posted by TheAngryPostman

Fixed it for you.

Thanks Postman, I was getting really confused about what Randolph wrote. Must have been a mistake... or he was joking.

[TracyCoxx]

Originally Posted by Fox News

Obama Aide Van Jones Resigns as Environmental Adviser Amid Controversy Over Past Statements

Awesome! One commie down... many more to go.