Life is Simple in a Fake Democracy
What democracy? Where? The United States?
A democracy is based on the simple principle of majority rule, among other things.
As of the latest Gallup poll on November 22, 2009, less than half of Americans would support a White House decision to increase troops in Afghanistan [1]. This Tuesday, the new U.S. war president Barack Obama will go on the national airwaves to tell his “fellow Americans” why he will be considerably increasing the troop levels in Afghanistan anyway. He will lecture his subjects on why they should get behind his decision.
He won’t mention that he gets far more support for his “Af-Pak” war policies from Republicans than he does from the millions of liberal Democrats who helped elect him.
He won’t say anything about the many tens of thousands of private contractors – mercenaries working for firms like Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater) and DynCorps – he plans to keep deploying at vast taxpayer expense in Afghanistan [2]
Also off the radar screen of the president’s remarks will be the many hundreds of innocent Pakistani civilians killed by his drastically escalated "secret" Predator drone war.
By the New Yorker writer Jane Mayer's account, Obama had embraced and deployed the controversial killer drone program – conducted by the CIA and (guess who?) Xe Services – with remarkable zest. "During his first nine and a half months in office," Mayer notes, "he has authorized as many CIA aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office …So far this year, various estimates suggest, the CIA attacks have killed between three hundred and twenty-six and five hundred and thirty-eight people. Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders."
The first two Predator assaults of the Obama administration occurred on the morning of January 23, 2009 – the future Nobel Peace Prize winner’s third day in office. The second drone-hit ordered by the "peace" president on that day mistakenly targeted the residence of a pro-government tribal leader, killing his entire family, including three children. "In keeping with U.S. policy, there was no official acknowledgement of either strike." Thanks to the program's official concealment, "there is no viable system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war." [3] The CIA drone program is an officially non-existent U.S. secret and honored as such by the Obama administration, as is the non-fact that Israel is a heavily nuclear-armed state [4].
War is Peace, Love is Hate. Ignorance is Strength.
Here is some more interesting, simple, and officially irrelevant opinion data, also from this year:
* 59 percent of Americans support a single-payer government health insurance system (CBS/New York Times poll, January 2009)
* 65 percent of Americans respond affirmatively to the following question: “Would you favor the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan—something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and over get—that would compete with private health insurance plans?” (CBS/New York Times, September 23, 2009).
* Just 7 percent of the American people find health insurance companies to be “generally honest and trustworthy.” The trust rates are even worse for managed care companies/HMOs (5 percent) and not much better (11 percent) for pharmaceutical and drug companies (Harris Poll November 2007)
* 71 percent of Americans feel that we need “fundamental changes” or to have the U.S. health system “completely re-built,” compared to just 24 percent who wish only for “minor changes” (Pew Research Center, 2009).
So what? Despite this clear majority opinion data, the most that a Democratic president (Obama) and a majority Democratic Congress will offer in terms of an alternative to the nation’s disastrous corporate-run health care system is a strictly limited, deeply conservative version of “the public option”— one that would be available only to those without access to private insurance and only in certain states. The fake-progressive Obama has been reported to prefer a “public option” with a “trigger,” meaning a small and weak program for the otherwise uninsured that would only be activated at some time in the future, if it was determined that the private insurers had failed to meet certain benchmarks.
There is nothing in the corporatist health “reform” legislation that Obama is hoping to sign to lead us to question the wisdom of Business Week’s candid judgment more than a month prior to the speech: “The Health Insurers Have Already Won.” “The industry,” Business Week writers Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein matter-of-factly concluded in the first week of August 2009, “has already accomplished its goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business.” [5]
And “dominate policy,” in cold defiance of public opinion, Terhune and Epstein might have added – a curious reflection on life in the “world’s greatest democracy.”
The Obama-Pelosi Democrats’ overly complex and corporate-captive “health reform” efforts are a great gift to their “frenemies” atop the big insurance and drug corporations and those firms’ Wall Street investors. Those companies and investors gave a record-setting amount of campaign cash to the president and fellow Democrats during the 2008 election cycle. The political money was invested with the explicit purpose of undermining any chances for significant progressive health reform in 2009 and 2010.
When Obama gives a big speech claiming to be the first president to have passed real health reform in the U.S., we can be sure, he won’t say anything about the following comments he made as a state senator in the early summer of 2003 to the Illinois AFL-CIO:
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.” [6]
This remarkable statement was made just prior Obama’s realization that he had a serious shot at national office – a realization that sharpened his willingness to subordinate himself to what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money.” That behind-the-scenes tyranny “vets the nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties, reducing the options available to U.S. citizens to two candidates, neither of whom can change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime.” [7].
Speaking of imperial priorities, Obama’s record-setting “defense” (empire) budget and related colonial war expansion in South Asia has rewarded the giant military industrial complex, including leading political investors and Obama supporters like General Dynamics and Boeing. . Unlike the Administration’s “health reform,” Washington’s war spending is unburdened with the requirement that it (as Obama promised in his health care speech to a joint session of Congress in September) “not add a dime to the federal deficit.”
This is despite the immaterial, extraneous and academic fact that a large majority of Americans has long favored significantly reducing “defense” (empire) spending and significantly increasing spending on meeting health care and other human and social needs. The people’s longstanding support for a peace divided continues to be largely irrelevant – a great testament to the spirit of popular governance in the homeland and headquarters of global freedom.
Maybe “life” is simple in the United States’ “dollar democracy.” Ever watch “P”BS’ nightly “News Hour?” The spectrum of acceptable debate permitted on the shows “in-depth” coverage and “expert” commentary is about 99.6 percent within the narrow parameters of the bipartisan corporate-neoliberal and military consensus. Corporate funding is part of the reason. Each “News Hour” episode begins with a few minutes of propagandistic advertising by the high-tech corporate, military, and petro-chemical likes of Chevron (“Human Energy: Finding Newer, Cleaner Ways to Power the World”), Boeing (“Our Story is Evolving”), Intel, Monsanto (“We Help Farmers Around the World Produce more While Conserving More,” BNSF (“The Cleaner Road Ahead”), Toyota (“We See Beyond Cars”), and Wells Fargo Investments (“Working to Strengthen Our Communities”), along with short ads from such well-heeled, corporate-underwritten “non-profits” as the Bill and Melinda Gates and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundations. Private is public. Love is hate...
It’s like the old working-class adage goes: “money talks, bullshit walks.” There’s nothing complex about it. Guess it’s not “a democracy.”
Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).
NOTES
1. Gallup, November 25, 2009 at http://www.gallup.com/poll/124490/In-U.S.-More-Support-Increasing-Troops-Afghanistan.aspx
2. “As of 30 June,” 2009, The Guardian (UK) reported last September, “there were nearly 74,000 military contractors – including 5,165 armed private security guards – in Afghanistan, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 US troops in the country.” See Eric Stoner, “Guards Gone Wild,” The Guardian, September 4, 2009 (read at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/04/afghanistan-embassy-guards-abuse), detailing massive “out-of-control” behavior on part of the private contractors.
3. Jane Mayer, "The Predator War," The New Yorker (October 26, 2009), pp. 36-38.
4. Eli Lake, “Obama Agree to Keep Israel’s Nukes Secret,” Washington Times, October 2, 2009, read at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/02/president-obama-has-reaffirmed-a-4-decade-old-secr/
5. Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein, “The Health Insurers Have Already Won,” Business Week (August 6, 2009), read at http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/09_33/b4143034820260.htm
6. “Obama on Single Payer Health Insurance,” June 30, 2003, YouTube video clip at http://www.1payer.net/All-Videos/obama-on-single-payer.html. See also YouTube link at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE
7. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Riding the ‘Green Wave’ at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond,” Electric Politics, July 22, 2009.
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Reflections Sparked by Chris Green
By Street, Paul at Dec 01, 2009 09:38 AM
Chris..it's madness, yes. You are brilliantly describing "junk politcs" (Benjamin DeMott ), referenced in a remarkably good essay last May by Chris Hedges: "Buying Brand Obama."
Sometimes in my car at night I hear a right-wing talk radio guy named Mark Levine (spelling may be off here), For this guy, it's not enough to call the corporate-miltiarist Obama (who will lecture the nation on the need to escalate imperial war tonight from freaking West Point!) a "socialist." No, for Levine (sp.), Obama needs to be understood as a "Marxist-Lenninist." That's completely insane, of course. This is dark comedy --- a natural outcome of proto-totalitarian junk politics.
The elite so-called "left liberals" have no legitimate excuse anymore, certainly not after tonight's nauseating West Point drama and not after the imminent Copenhagen climate fiasco and the systematic destruction of genuinely progressive health care reform and...fill in the blank. None. Some of them are helping grease the skids for a right comeback with their refusal to articulate reasonable and legitimate populist/radical-democratic outrage, contributing to a vacuum that the "talk radio mob" (Chomsky's term) is more than pleased to exploit.
Sometimes it seems like there's something psychologically perverse, like some form of Stockholm Syndrome, about some "left liberals" continuing attachment to Barack Hoover Obama. But frankly, with many of them its about money and access (real and perceived) and even about employment fears. I know - I've been there (in Daley's Chicago for five years). They know the real story, some of them, but it doesn't pay - doesn't serve their coordinator class interests one bit ---- to tell the truth. Limousine "leftism" can be very cynical and calculating.
Whatever the causes, the so-called radical left is way too polite, proper, and power-worshipful. I coined a catchy and funny, tongue-in-cheek phrase last year: "His Holiness the Dalai Obama." (I'm sure other folks have come to the phrase on their own, but if anyone deserves a patent on it, I do) People on the left are often frightened to use it. Not the right. I got interviewed by some right wing local FOX News talk guy last year and he said "I hope you don't mind but I'm going to steal that and run with it." I hear it used on the right, but not on the left - not very much (Cindy Sheehan uses it alot on FB). The right is flat nuts but at least when you listen to them the're not afraid to jerk the president''s chain (on yes absurd and indeed frightening premises) and I've never met or seen anyone who deserves to have his chain jerked more than Barack Obama - an elitist pain in the ass if ever I've met one. Dr. King hoped that America would one day graduate to the point where we could judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. Well, let's do that on Obama like we did it on Clarence Thomas and Condy Rice and to some extent on the also loathesome Colin Powell. Let's graduate to the point where we can call a corporate-imperalist jackal a corporate-imperialist jackal even if he is the first black president and, for what its worth --- which isn't much --- a Democrat. . Progressives would do well to sound just a bit more like Sean Hannity...no not in terms of ideology but yes in terms of disdain for the Bush-rebranded White House.
Can't wait for the West Point oration tonight. It ought to exceptional.
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Re: Reflections Sparked by Chris Green
By Green, Chris at Dec 02, 2009 19:40 PM
Yea, "junk politics" and "brand Obama" are good descriptions. Because support for Obama is seemingly to a large extent not based on any rational analysis of his ideas. It's all about "liking" Obama or rather Obama's tv image. Lamentably this seems to have been the case with Ani DiFranco. She based her enthusiasm for Obama on shaking hands with him and how he seemed to her, based on her meeting with him, just to really care about maing progressive changes and empowering poor people and blah blah blah. The interviewer said to her "Well you know Noam Chomsky has said that Obama is just a typical business as usual politician" and she said something like "Oooh, ooh, Chomsky yea, I don't want to hear things like that right now......I met Obama and he's a great guy and he gives me hope and I'm convinced he really wants to change things",etc. In other words it was Obama's personal magnetism (i.e. his brand", his image marketing to the public) that convinced Ms DiFranco that he is genuine and not any serious analysis of Obama's record as a state senator and US senator of the sort that you put in your book. You would that with the kind of education Miss DiFranco has that she would have the ability to look beyond the BS charm, the "brand", of politicians like Obama.
You're right, some or many activists on the liberal-left may view it as strengthening to their careers if they avoid attacking Obama too extensively. It is alot easier to spend one's time attacking lunatic right wingers. Doug Henwood made the observation some time ago that a good portion of shows like Keith Olberman are devoted to covering the latest crazy things that Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck has said. Since the American right wing is now so close to fascism it is alot easier to focus on them than to discuss the right wing policies of Obama. Of course when you do attack Obama from the left, some people can only interpret it as a right wing attack. The "junk politics" mentality is so pervasive that rational, serious analysis of Obama's policy just can't register with such people. This morning I saw a response that said "Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck will love you for this" to some criticisms of Obama's Afghan surge that David Sirota made on his facebook page. This meathead apparently can't comprehend that Sirota was making criticisms the Afghan surge in a completely opposite direction from any criticisms about the surge that might come from Limbaugh, et. al. In a recent comment to an article on the Black Agenda Report site, somebody wrote, "I can't help but think that all these criticisms of Obama that black people are making on BAR are encouraging to right wing people who want to assasinate Obama." It didn't occur to this ignorant person that right wing people are completely unsympathetic to the substance of left wing arguments against Obama.
You are right some people may view it as an aid to their careers if they water down their criticism of Obama. Of course, it's impossible to know what really is going on in the minds of people. Conformity may have something to do with it. Holding forth on the fascism and lunacy of the American right wing is certainly a big industry on the liberal-left and it certainly gains one a much more friendly audience that if one attacks Obama from a substantively left perspective. Of course right wingers are very dangerous and all that but Obama is not much better. I think about a guy like Tim Wise. He seems to be appearing on CNN as a pundit all the time Wise has made plenty of substantive criticism regarding Obama's race neutral politics in his last two books. He makes excellent criticisms of the lunatic right wing attacks on Obama. But he has also become very close to liberal activist cicles in recent years. He seems to be constantly appearing on CNN as a pundit. He has thousands of facebook friends and from the comments on his page, it seems that 95 percent of them are un-critical partisans of Obama. I'm guessing that Wise kind of has to kind of walk a fine line; he has to avoid criticisizing Obama too extensively so he dosen't unduly piss off his admirers and liberal friends in the orbit of The Nation, Michael Eric Dyson, etc. It would be nice if he would come forth with some articles about how Obama's policies affect black people, or at least mention in passing how those policies affect black people, for example Arne Duncan's education policies.
Of course, Obama's appeal to the childish emotions may explain the actions of people like Ehrenreich and Wise and so on. Lots of people were probably and are probably still deluded that Obama was at the head of a great progressive grassroots movement. I remember those dreadful essays Wise wrote after Obama's election where he whimpered about Obama's left wing critics something along the lines of "please stop spoiling the fun of Obama's election for me, I just want to feel for a moment that there is hope for the future world that my two young daughters are going to be living in." I mean, I admire Wise in many ways, he's a superb analyst of racial issues. I remember how in the early years of the Znet forums, back in the days when he hosted his own forum, how he never failed to thoroughly and patiently answer my questions.
Some people apparently still can't completely disabuse themselves of the notion that there is something progressive about Obama. Rahul Mahajan seemed to vaguely accept the "Progressives for Obama" argument that the Obama movement was progressive, though not as clearly as the "Progressives for Obama" did. He has been critical of Obama in many ways, especially on foreign policy. But in a Novemeber 23rd post on his "Empire Notes" blog I find the following statement: "you can already see Obama losing popularity, even though most of what he has done is at least partly in the interest of the lower and middle classes." I guess it depends on how you define the word "partly" but I don't think Obama has done anything of substance for the lower and middle classes except on a few minor things.
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Image is everything, substance is nothing.
By Green, Chris at Dec 01, 2009 04:48 AM
The work of Obama (and the Republicans) is facilitated by the fact that political life in this country is mostly about sound-bites and slogans rather than substantive understanding. I remember watching Keith Olbermann sometime ago and he said something like "'these people in congress who oppose Obama's health reform have received lots of campaign money from the insurance industry; Obama and some liberal Democrats also receive lots of campaign money from the insurance industry but they are so principled that they don't let those donations affect them and they are fighting strongly to increase access to health care for ordinary Americans." Where does Olbermann get the evidence that Obama is struggling to increase access to health care for ordinary Americans and that he's not influenced by insurance industry campaign contributions? The only evidence I can see to support such claims would be the mere rhetoric, the mere vague platitudes of Obama and his congressional supporters to the effect that they are in favor of helping poor Americans and fighting the abuses of insurance companies and so on.
Such sound-bites and slogans are the pre-dominant norm in political discourse and they encourage people not to try to understand the intricacies of policies but to become uncritical partisans of politicians. There is this video circulating online, probably produced by talk radio liberals or by some liberal web site, where a guy is in Columbus Ohio at this Sarah Palin book signing and he asks the Palin supporters at the scene about Palin's policies. None of the Palin fans interviewed at this Borders store, seemingly ordinary working class Americans, seemed to have any idea of what Palin's policies actually were. They could only say that they liked her personally or rather the TV image of her.. They couldn't describe her policies on health care or foreign policy. The closest coherent statements that the interviewer got was one guy saying that he supports Palin because the United States has become so weak and is no longer the mighty nation in the world and and one lady saying that she supports Palin because she wants to "cut spending." . Another guy told the interviewer that Obama laid out his Marxist-Leninist vision for the US in the two books he wrote before he became president. I'm sure alot of liberals have been snickering over this video as it portrays ordinary Palin fans as ignorant, repeating slogans they hear on talk radio and so on. But if Obama was at that bookstore signing books and ordinary Obama enthusiasts attending that event were interviewed do you think they would give answers that would demonstrate a significantly greater level of information than the Palin supporters? For example would they be able to give you an accurate description of the mechanisms that are in the Obama health care bill? They might be able to say the words "public option" but would they actually be able to tell you what the "public option" really is? I doubt it. I remember in your book on Obama you mentioned how you encoutered a couple of college girls going to an Obama rally and they couldn't give you an answer as to why they supported him beyond something like "He's cute" or "he's so eloquent and a good speaker." That's probably the type of answer you could expect if it were Obama fans instead of Palin fans at the Borders in Columbus.
Meanwhile many people on the left keep pretending that there is something progressive at stake in the Obama health care fight. I remember Dean Baker's silly article about a month ago where he was overcome with excitement about the fact that the Democrats had agreed to include a provision with the title of "public option" in the House health care bill. He went on and on about how the inclusion of the public option, after the Democrats had previously suggested they might drop it, was the result of pressure exerted by a heroic mass citizens movement. He claimed, against all evidence to the contrary, that the public option in the House bill would be "robust." Baker is a fine economist and I enjoyed reading his book on the economic crises but this particular article seemed to be nothing but vacuous cheer-leading. I think it is fair to say that the so-called mass movement for a public option, while it's heart may be in the right place, is nothing but a demonstration of the co-optation of progressives by the Obama administration. Instead of fighting for single payer, progressives were wasting their energy demanding that something with the words "public option" be included in the health care bill.
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Reflections
By Street, Paul at Nov 30, 2009 22:01 PM
John, I'm not sure what goes in the inner circles of the West Wing's "best and brightest," of course, but maybe they're not as bright as many of their remaining true-believers want to think. The flim-flam Obama man has always been about splitting the difference and trying to be all things to all people who matter, but the absurdity of it all --- and of the corporate-Democratic Party --- is being ever more badly exposed as we roll past 10 % official unemployment, as 1 in 4 U.S children now rely on Food Stamps, as "health reform" becomes a sick corporatist joke, as the government writes yet more open-ended checks for endless colonial war and Empire, and as Goldman Sachs "compensation" shoots back to grotesque pre-recession levels. Good con-men know how long they can sell their game and then move on to another locale once their lies catch up with them. But where is the Bush-rebranded con artist in the W.H. (Barack Obama that is) supposed to run? I don't see how much longer a self-respecting "left-progressive" base can stay on board with The Dalai Obama. The "left" receives one more "Eff You" from the "progressive" president after another...on civil liberties, on labor rights, on climate change, on Wall Street, on political reform, on the "defense" (empire) budget, on health care, on...the list goes on. I have to track these "F-Us" in detail in connection with the writing of my next book.. It's become literally sickening to follow, like walking around in vast tunnels of rotting sewage. Every day its some new revolting episode with Obama-Emmanuel-Pelosi-Reid et al. In the absence of any serious criticism from a relevant left, much of the legitimate popular outrage across the nation is captured by the (truly) insane right, which will, yes, make the dreaded "Stab in the Back" charge (ala Hitler et al.) along with other wild accusations.
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I'm baffled
By Andrews, John at Nov 30, 2009 14:20 PM
Paul, Michael
Perhaps you could throw some light on this for me. Obama sacked his top military man in Afghanistan and appointed Stanley McChrystal who quickly seemed to fall out with Obama and agitated for 60,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. Obama appeared to be considering all options and will finally choose to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Where the hell does the 30,000 figure come from? Surely the only two options were to massively escalate and go along with the military request or to see it as an unwinnable war and cut the losses and get out.
Obama is no fool; he must have a historical awareness. The extra 30,000 troops will take the manning level to about the same level deployed by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It did them no good just as numbers never benefited any invading army in that inhospitable landscape. Afghanistan is a difficult terrain at the best of times but in the middle of winter in the mountains?
What is the political benefit to Obama of half escalating?
The left will despise him even more for not pulling out and the right will despise him even more for not wading in (perhaps this is what they mean by centrist?). When it all goes badly wrong, as it will, McChrystal will use his 'get out of jail card' and cite the half hearted approach by the Commander in Chief as the major reason for failure. The majority of Americans will just be pissed off because all their tax dollars will have been spent on another crazy war. And Obama will end up as an LBJ type one term President.
Why is Obama committing political suicide?
Regards
John Andrews
PS - I've not bothered mentioning the moral issues here as I don't believe that presidents / prime ministers are capable of moral reflection.
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Re: I'm baffled
By McGehee, Michael at Nov 30, 2009 15:58 PM
john,
on the campaign trail he called for the escalation of the afghan war and it was no political liability. thats what he meant when he we "dropped the ball" in afghanistan. he was talking about the need to escalate the war. why he didnt send as much as requested might be a practical decision since the military is stretched and he has no plans to leave iraq either. and he is following the same policies - being belligerent towards iran and venezuela.
his liberal base sees the afghan war as the "just war." even ehren watada said he would go to afghanistan. just not iraq.
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Re: Life is Simple in a Fake Democracy
By Street, Paul at Nov 30, 2009 08:49 AM
Emma Goldman said that "If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal" and the late Marxist historian Alan Dawley once referred (in a book on class conflict in 19th century Lynn, Massachusetts) to the ballot box as "the coffin of class consciousness." I woudn't go with those comments 100 percent but I'd go much and even most of the way with them and its clear that the Empire has demonstration elections in its own homeland as well as in the colonial hinterland (.e.g, the recently concluded/aborted "democratic" voting process in partially occupied Afghanistan).
Citizens were given advance warning of audacious, privilege- and power-friendly deception and policy to come by Obama's interesting election-night speech in Grant Park. The first public words out of president-elect Obama's mouth on the evening of his predictable (and predicted) ascendancy were revealing. "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." ("Obama Victory Speech - Video, Text," Huffington Post (November 4, 2008), read at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/04/obama-victory-speech_n_141194.html). The supposed "progressive" President-Elect's first statement was a declaration bolstering the American plutocracy's ridiculous claim that theU.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. 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.
The real, less than egalitarian nature of the next president's attitude toward his "progressive base " was suggested in the following comment contained in a mass e-mail he sent out to his supporters before speaking to the jubilant masses in Grant Park on November 4, the evening of his election:
"I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first."
"We just made history. "
"And I don't want you to forget how we did it."
"You made history every single day during this campaign -- every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it's time for change."
"I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign."
"We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next." (Barack Obama, "Email Message to His Supporters This Evening" (November 4, 2008), read at http://isaac.blogs.com/isaac_laquedem/2008/11/barack-obamas-e-mail-message-to-his-supporters-this-evening.html)
"I'll be in touch soon about what comes next" - a revealingly top-down sentiment for someone who said repeatedly during the campaign that "change comes from the bottom up." Of course, during the presidential campaign, commonly described in dominant media as a great popular upsurge, Obama's "grassroots army of millions" (The Boston Globe) "took instructions, but contributed essentially nothing to formulating his program" (Noam Chomsky, "Elections 2008 and ‘Obama's Vision,'" Z Magazine [February 2009], read at http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/20424).
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Re:
By McGehee, Michael at Nov 30, 2009 09:23 AM
he sounds a bit like Lenin
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but but but
By McGehee, Michael at Nov 30, 2009 06:22 AM
we vote!
... under similar circumstances to voters in Iran...
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