Obama Speaks: "Oh Great White Masters, You Just Haven’t Been Asked to Help America"

-  Barack Obama, speaking to the masters of “American” finance capitalism at the headquarters of NASDAQ, Wall Street, New York City, September 17, 2007

For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently.  I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., May 1967

Obama is deeply conservative.

- Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator,” The New Yorker. May 2007. 

“STANDING UP” AND KNEELING DOWN

Maybe it’s because Barack Obama and his handlers are sensitive to the need to reassure ruling forces that the “first black United States president” will not challenge existing hierarchies. Maybe it’s because he’s bought and paid for by big money (1).  Or maybe it’s because he believes in his “deeply conservative” (2) heart that good Americans show deep respect for their socioeconomic masters.  Whatever the explanation, I’ve never seen an avowedly “progressive” political candidate more eager than Obama to display his deep willingness to obsequiously kiss the ring of dominant political and economic authority. For someone who is marching across Iowa and New Hampshire calling working- and middle-class American to “get fired up” and “stand up” for democracy (and for him), Obama sure likes to spend a lot of time groveling  before supposed white and upper-class superiors.

BLACK EXPERIENCE “NOT FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT”

We know that the technically black Obama has political reasons to avoid threatening the white electoral majority. Still it is too much for him to absurdly claim, in his power-adoring 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (3), that “what ails working- and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts”(Obama 2006, p. 245).   Also rather audacious is Obama’s praise of the U.S. for historically possessing “an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all comers regardless of status, title or rank”(Obama 2006, pp. 231-232)  – including apparently the many millions of black chattel “comers” who came in chains, carrying literally subhuman “status.”  Just to make sure that no Caucasians fear he’s about reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Obama calms white anxieties further by claiming that black Americans (who suffer from a median household wealth gap of seven cents on the white dollar in the 21st century United States) have been “pulled into the economic mainstream” (Obama, 2006, pp. 248-49). 

He also apologizes for whites’ indifference to the persistence of profound racial inequality and discrimination in the U.S (see Street.2007c and Brown 2003) by explaining that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites…tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country” (Obama 2006, p. 247). This statement of understanding toleration for white racism-denial deftly consigns racial oppression to the supposedly finished past, cleverly deleting its continuing and deeply cumulative (Brown 2003) relevance in the living historical present (4).  

“THE VOICE OF THE COUNCIL OF FOREIGN RELATIONS”

The self-described “American exceptionalist” Obama has obvious political reasons to try to bring to his campaign as much of the imperial U.S. foreign policy establishment as he can. Still, it is a bit much to hear him “ponder” with a sense of awe “the work” of imperial U.S. Cold War architects George Kennan and George Marshall (Obama 2006, p. 36).  Is it really essential for him to applaud the wonderful (he thinks) “post-[World] War [Two] leadership of president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan” for “craft[ing]... a...new...order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around the world” (Obama 2006, p. 284)? This is a remarkably deferential and whitewashed commentary on such memorable moments in American “humility” as the arch-criminal atom-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki  (mass-murderous shots across the bow of the emerging Cold War), the mass-murderous U.S. assaults on Korea and Indochina (3 million “enemy” dead), the U.S. restoration of fascist power in “liberated” Italy, the U.S. intervention against popular social revolution in Greece (smeared as a Soviet export by U.S. policymakers in order to “Scare the Hell out of the American people” to garner support for massive new imperial “defense” expenditures)  and the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet: Iran (1953), Dominican Republic (1965), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1970-1973), Indonesia (1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a list that goes on and on.

John Pilger put the imperial foreign policy essence of the Obama phenomenon in useful context indeed during a speech in Chicago last June (Pilger 2007):

“As for the Democrats, look at how Barack Obama has become the voice of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal Washington establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops home, ‘We must not rule out military force against long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria.’ Listen to this from the liberal Obama: ‘At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.’ That is the nub of the propaganda, the brainwashing if you like, that seeps into the lives of every American, and many of us who are not Americans. From right to left, secular to God-fearing, what so few people know is that in the last half century, United States administrations have overthrown 50 governments—many of them democracies. In the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the loss of countless lives.”

“DANGER IN THE IDEA OF EQUALITY”

Then there are Obama’s disturbing statements of fawning respect for the predominantly white capitalist economic elite – the top 1 percent that owns more than a third of U.S. wealth and a probably higher percentage of its politicians, policymakers, and opinion-makers.  Given his dependence on super-rich “election investors” to run a viable presidential campaign under the plutocratic rules of the United States’ self-negating “market democracy” (Herman 2007), it’s not surprising that he would wish to avoid offending the nation’s leading corporate power-brokers. But Obama goes beyond the call of class-deferential duty when he praises the arch-plutocratic Ronald Reagan for embodying “American’s longing for order” (Obama 2006, p. 31) and when he pens the following nauseating paean to aristocratic rule in The Audacity of Hope:   “The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order…how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?” (Obama 2006, pp. 86-87).  How’s that for commitment to the democratic and egalitarian ideals to which the United States so often lays special claim?

“OUR [GREAT] FREE MARKET SYSTEM”

Equally sickening is Obama’s eagerness to praise the glories of the capitalist system that produces grotesque fortunes at the top of America’s “inherited social order” while tens of millions of Americans go without adequate food, clothing, shelter, and health insurance.  One key question addressed in The Audacity of Hope comes straight out of the neoconservative world view Obama was so good at accommodating at Harvard Law: what makes the United States so “exceptionally” wonderful?  Obama finds part of the answer to this nationally narcissistic query in the wise and benevolent leadership of the nation’s great white Founders and subsequent supposedly sensible leaders like Harry “Hiroshima” Truman and JFK.  But Obama roots the excellence and eminence of America in something deeper than the magnificence of its political elite.  He also grounds the United States’ supposed distinctive impressiveness in its “free market” capitalist system and “business culture.”

The United States overclass should be gratified by Obama’s paean to the United States’ “free-market” system of (in reality state- and corporate-) capitalism (Obama 2006, pp. 149-150):

“Calvin Coolidge once said that ‘the chief business of the American people is business,’ and indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that’s been more consistently hospitable to the logic of the marketplace.  Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty.  Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material rewards.  Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models…As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.”

“The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.  It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world.  America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success.  Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources…our free market system.”

The Audacity of Hope leaves it to hopelessly alienated and insufficiently realistic carpers, “cranks” and “gadflies” (Obama’s insulting description of the late progressive  U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone [Sirota 2006]) and other dangerous “zealots” of the “morally absolutist” and insufficiently “pragmatic” Left (Obama's insulting description) to observe the terrible outcomes of America’s distinctively anti-social and incidentally heavily state-protected “free market system” and “business culture.”  Those unfortunate results include the marvelously “efficient,” climate-warming contributions of a business-dominated nation that constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population but contributes more than a quarter of the planet’s carbon emissions.  Other notable effects include the innovative generation of poverty and deep poverty for millions of U.S. children while executives atop “defense” firms like Boeing and Raytheon rake in billions of taxpayer dollars for helping Uncle Sam kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. 

It is left to the radical lunatic fringe to note the American System’s “efficient” allocation of a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth and power to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of the common good to private profit.  “Unreasonable” Marxists, left-anarchists and “conspiracy theorists” are left to observe that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal “individual initiative” from millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of imbecilic and soul-crushing operations conducted for such increasingly unbearable stretches of time – at stagnating levels of  material reward and security – that working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great “democracy” Obama trumpets as the Founders’ great legacy (Obama 2006, pp. 87-88).

A Revealing/Revolting Comparison

It is perversely symptomatic of Obama’s passionate desire to sweet-talk the United States ruling class that he compares “our poor’s” “good” situation to that of its more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America. Obama deletes considerably less favorable (at least from a “progressive” standpoint) American System contrasts with Western Europe and Japan, the most relevant comparisons, where dominant norms and  social policies create significantly lower levels of poverty and inequality than what is found in the militantly hierarchical U.S.

“It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good” even “our poor” live? It depends on where the “overseas” trip goes.  If it takes the traveler to much of the rest of the industrialized world, where state (so-called “free market”) capitalism’s inherent tendencies towards wealth inequality and corporate rule are considerably more tempered by social-democratic programs and popular movements, the comparison  is generally less than flattering to the United States, reminding the minimally attentive societal observer that the United States’ “unmatched prosperity” is doled out in harshly regressive ways that create relatively high percentages and numbers of poor and uninsured households, drastically long working hours, rampant economic insecurity and generally inadequate and under-funded public services alongside spectacular opulence for the privileged few (see Mishel, Bernstein and Boushey 2003, chapter 7: “International Comparisons,” pp.395-432  in a volume dedicated to Obama’s “gadfly” Paul Wellstone, described by the authors as “a tireless fighter for economic justice”). 

Of course, one does not have to cross seas to appreciate the distinctions. A trip across the Rio Grande to the proximate “Third World” nation Mexico will yield many examples consistent with Obama’s praise of U.S. “prosperity.”  But a trip to Canada challenges Obama’s narrative, revealing considerably lower poverty rates and broader economic security. The favorable Canadians comparisons partly reflects the fact that Canada possesses a popular and social-democratic single-payer health insurance system - something the "progressive" Obama sees as a dysfunctional and un-American system of coercive government mandates (Sirota 2006).[5] 

But given Obama’s desire to raise money and win approval from the masters of America’s openly plutocratic dollar democracy, it makes sense that he prefers to compare the U.S. poor with the desperately impoverished masses of Nairobi, Jakarta and Bogota than with the relatively well-off lower classes of Oslo, Paris and Toronto

“NO ONE HAS ASKED YOU TO BUILD A MORE JUST AMERICA”

My favorite obsequiously capitalist-praising Obama comment came on September 17th, 2007.  That’s when the “progressive” senator made a revealing statement at the Wall Street headquarters of NASDAQ.  At the end of a speech that purported to lecture Wall Street’s great leaders on their “Common Stake in America’s Prosperity," Obama  scaled the heights of Orwellian absurdity to tell the lords of investment capital that “I believe all of you are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America. I believe you care about this country and the future we are leaving to the next generation. I believe your work to be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America. I think the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal.”

These were strange beliefs to (claim to) hold in light of the pattern of elite U.S. business behavior that naturally results from purpose and structure of the deeply authoritarian system of private profit.  An army of nonprofit charities and social service-providers, citizens, environmental and community activists, trade union negotiators, and policymakers have spent decade after decade asking and (often enough) begging the “American” corporate and financial capitalist over-class to contribute to the domestic social good.  The positive results have been marginal and fleeting at best as the “business community” works with structurally super-empowered effectiveness to distribute wealth and power ever more upward over and above any considerations of social and environmental health at home or abroad. With no special loyalty to the American people in an age of negative (corporate) globalization, corporate “America” is more than willing to forsake the imperial homeland – the domestic U.S. society and its workers and communities – to serve the only true and ultimate business end: investors’ bottom line.

As the founder of the Economic Policy Institute Jeff Faux notes in his instructive 2006 book The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will Take to Win it Back,  America’s largely business-based and bipartisan “governing class” holds no particular attachment to the people, communities, health, or even competitiveness of the United States per se. “As early as the 1950s,” Faux notes, “A Ford Motor executive corrected a U.S. senator who referred to the company as ‘an American firm. We’re an American company when we are in America,’ he said, ‘and a British company when we are in Britain, and a Brazilian company when we are in Brazil.”

Forty years later, Ford Motor Company chief Alex Trotman told Robert Reich that “Ford isn’t even an American company, strictly speaking.  We’re global.  We’re investing all over the world.  Forty percent of our employees already live and work outside the United States, and that’s rising.  Our managers are multinational.  We teach them to think and act globally” (Faux 2006, pp 87, 168).

Prior to the 1970s, Faux observes, the “American” business community invested in foreign countries primarily to produce for their markets.  Afterward, however, global competition and technological changes sparked “the restless American corporate class to see the potential of outsourcing production to places where labor costs were cheaper and weak governments could be bribed to keep them cheap.  The ability to produce elsewhere and still sell in America would allow them to abandon the irksome twentieth century American social contract.  Just to threaten to move would give more bargaining power over workers and government” (Faux 2006, 87-88).  

The results have included an ongoing epidemic of “outsourcing,” job loss, union-busting, and capital flight – an “abandonment of America” that has led both to dramatically increased inequality and to the waning competitiveness of the U.S. economy as a whole. As Faux observes, the ever more globalized “American” business class makes no serious effort to reverse the nation’s declining performance and investment in the critical areas of education, research, infrastructure, health, and energy efficiency. “Today,” Faux writes, “business elites that cared about America’s future would be demanding new government investments” in quality education and national research and development and the like.  “Instead, they send their lobbyists to demand more tax cuts, now.”

At the root of this terrible reality is the simple and obvious fact that “American” capital no longer holds any special allegiance to, or interest in a specifically American community or economy (Faux 2006, pp. 187-190). Writing about why “American” corporate CEO’s seem hopelessly disinterested in the United States’ ongoing domestic decline, even the rabid U.S. corporate-globalization enthusiast Thomas Friedman admits that “in today’s flatter [more tightly interconnected] world, many key U.S. companies now make most of their profits abroad and can increasingly recruit the best talent in the world without ever hiring another American” (Friedman 2005). 

In his book The Transnational Capitalist Class, Leslie Sklair distinguished between three sorts of economies with which corporations interact.  The first is a “national economy” wherein production and distribution occur within national boundaries.  The second is an “international economy” in which goods and services are traded across national lines.  The third is a “global economy” where investment, production, and sales are conducted freely and regularly across permeable borders.  In the first two, corporations can make some credible claim to representing the “national interest” of their home countries.  In the third, however, national interest fades to insignificance in relation to the corporations’ underlying profit considerations (Sklair 2000).

Thanks in no small part to the corporate-globalizationist thrust of U.S. foreign and trade policy, the commanding heights of corporate “America” are now strongly rooted in the third sort of economy.  Until the last quarter of the last century, the American corporate elite’s pursuit of profit was at least partly consistent with the mission of “building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America.” But the leading segments of the business-based U.S. ruling class have long since disposed of that "project." Their disinterest in America is seen in their borderless neoliberal business practices and policy agenda. It also demonstrated by their willingness to tolerate and even in some cases encourage hair-brained right-wing campaigns to ban stem-cell research, purvey creationism in the public schools, privatize Social Security, generally attack public education and the like.

This great abandonment makes Obama look ridiculous and/or cynical when he purports to think that what is required for domestic societal revitalization is for the U.S. citizenry to supposedly belatedly “ask” its capitalist ruling class to sign up with the allegedly shared “project of American renewal.” Disregarding harsh historical and structural reality, Obama’s “you just haven’t been asked” line to big investment capital is worse then naïve. Given his role – well understood inside the Beltway’s corporate-political cash nexus but not (of course) among the general populace (systematically targeted with an impressive propaganda campaign seeking to portray him as a people’s progressive) – as a serious corporate-imperial “player”(Silverstein 2006),  it is most likely a cynical effort to curry business favor by absurdly turning the tables of blame for American crises (rampant poverty, joblessness, inequality, overwork, inadequate education and health care, environmental pollution, and so on ) back on the American people and away from those with most power to shape U.S. policy and conditions: the privileged business-based governing class.  There’s no other credible explanation for Obama’s claiming to absurdly believe that ordinary Americans and their purported (Democratic) representatives should go cup in hand to the great white lords of global investment capital to childishly say: “we believe in your essential goodness and commitment to a just and decent society. It’s our fault that you have been so nasty, pushing for huge tax cuts you don’t need and cutting our wages and eliminating our pensions and pushing up our prices and exporting our jobs, and so on. You aren’t really the mean and selfish Scrooge before he was visited by the Christmas ghosts. No, you really want to be the nice and caring Scrooge after the ghosts came. You aren’t really the vicious workhouse masters and street bandits who exploited Oliver Twist; you actually want to be more like the nice Mr. Brownlow, whose benevolent sense of noblesse oblige led him to help the abandoned young street urchin.  We the American working class majority just needed to ask you, our benevolent transnational masters to invest in us, disregarding your world-capitalist profit calculations. And we just need to be more like Oliver, saying ‘please sir(s), more sir(s), if you don’t mind.’ Who knew?  Our bad.”

Whatever the precise calculations (or lack thereof) behind his idiotic NASDAQ comment, Obama’s  profession of faith in the notion that capitalism’s steep and inherent structural disparities can be meaningfully addressed at the bourgeois-sentimentalist level of Charles Dickens (Orwell 1939) is terribly insulting (6). 

Capitalism v. Justice and Democracy

One doesn’t have to be a Marxist or left-anarchist to be revolted by such class-accommodationist silliness. As the vaguely populist liberal Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards sees it, “the choice we must make is as important as it is clear. It is a choice between corporate power and the power of democracy” (Edwards 2007).  While Obama blames ordinary working people and their purported Democratic Party representatives for not mimicking young Oliver Twist by courteously requesting that America’s economic elite act more responsibly, Edwards insists that “big” democratic and progressive change will not be attained by “negotiating” with the privileged few and their gigantic corporations. Such change cannot be meaningfully achieved, Edwards has argued again and again in the summer and fall of 2007, by exchanging “corporate Democrats” for “corporate Republicans.” It will only come, Edwards says, by “relentlessly fighting and beating” the corporations, who have “rigged the game” of U.S. politics and policy across partisan lines (Edwards 2007). 

Edwards is likely mistaken if he thinks meaningful progress on the path to social justice will occur without a fundamental and radical challenge to the system of private profit (7). Economic globalization enthusiasts repeat a false Cold War conflation by claiming that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. As the liberal economist Lester Thurow noted years ago in his New York Times bestseller The Future of Capitalism (New York, 1996), "democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, 'one man [sic] one vote,' while the other believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. 'Survival of the fittest' and inequalities in purchasing power are what capitalist efficiency is all about. Individual profit comes first and firms become efficient to be rich. To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not."

In a similar vein, Chicago Tribune economics correspondent R.C. Longworth, (also no radical), once noted that the "struggle of democracy and capitalism" is "at the heart" of current "debate over the global economy. In theory," Longworth claims, "they are meant to go together, indeed to be inseparable. But democracy's priorities are equality before the law, the right of each citizen to govern the decisions that govern his or her life, the creation of a civilization based on fairness and equity. Capitalism's priorities are inequality of return, profit for the suppliers of capital, efficiency of production and distribution, the bottom line” (Street 2000).

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was on to something when he repeatedly told civil rights staffers to “turn off the tape recorder” while he expounded on the necessity of “democratic socialism” and explained that “capitalism” could not “meet the needs of poor people” (Garrow 1986, pp. 591-592).

Still, it is almost refreshing to hear Edwards speak some honest measure of populist truth about the need to battle amoral, profit-mad corporations rather than following Obama's counsel by moronically getting on our knees to beg them to advance something that holds no bottom line interest for them: “American renewal.”

FOR THE “RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY ITSELF”

Reading Obama’s NASDAQ oration for a second time the other day, I was struck by the contrast between Obama’s eager willingness to accommodate and embrace dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and Martin Luther King’s more critical and radical approach to race, class and global disparity. By 1966 and 1967, King was openly and repeatedly criticizing what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated:” racism, economic exploitation/poverty (class inequality) and militarism/imperialism.  “The evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together,” King said, “and you really can’t get rid of one of them without getting rid of the others.”  Consistent with what we know to have been his deep and early rejection of Obama’s supposedly “efficient” American capitalist system, the democratic socialist King aid that only “the radical reconstruction of society itself” and “a radical redistribution of economic and political power” could “save us from social catastrophe.” Consistent with the teachings of Marx (of whom King was something of a youthful admirer) and contrary to sentimental bourgeois moralists like Dickens, King argued that "the roots of [economic injustice] are in the [capitalist] system rather in men or faulty operations" (8).

“For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there,” King told David Halberstam in May of 1967.  “Now I feel quite differently.  I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society,” including even the nationalization of some major industries (Garrow 1986, p. 562).  In King’s view the simultaneous existence of mass poverty at home and U.S. imperial violence abroad attested to the fact that “a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them.”  King told Americans not to beg their business rulers to behave more responsibly but rather to “question the whole society [emphasis added],” seeing “that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.  They are the triple evils that are interrelated”

As King explained in his haunting posthumous essay “A Testament of Hope:” “The black revolution...is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.  It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

"If we are going to achieve equality," King told a young Civil Rights worker (Charles Fager) in a Selma, Alabama jail in the winter of 1965, "the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism’” (Garrow 1986, p. 382). 

Obama writes about how fortunate poor residents of the United States are compared to wretched “Third World” masses. In the summer of 1966, by contrast, King was most struck by the greater poverty that existed in the U.S compared to other First World states. “Maybe something is wrong with our economic system,” King told an interviewer, observing that (in Garrow’s words) “in democratic socialist societies such as Sweden there was no poverty, no unemployment and no slums” (Garrow 1986, p. 568).

There’s something more than a small empirical contrast between the international poverty comparison made by King the one made by Obama forty years later.  The dissimilarity reflects one aspect of the difference between a radical progressive who valued truth and justice over personal advancement (King) and a corporate-imperial faux progressive (Obama) who distorts truth and justice to achieve the power he simultaneously worships and craves. 

Veteran Left historian Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a writer, speaker and activist based in Iowa City, IA and Chicago, IL.  He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007);and  Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005).

NOTES

1. A judgment for which I have marshaled considerable evidence:  see Paul Street, “The Obama Disease: Business Rule, ‘Common Ground,’ and Paying/Playing the Fool,” ZNet (December 4, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14432 and also “Sitting Out The Obama Dance in Iowa City,” ZNet Magazine (April 28, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12687. For earlier accounts, see Sirota 2006 and Silverstein 2006, both cited in the “Sources” section below.

2. See Larissa MacFarquhar  2007. By MacFarquhar’s account, Obama “rarely accuses, preferring to talk about problems in the passive voice, as things that are amiss with us rather than as wrongs that have been perpetrated by them...If you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back… 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.”

3. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, NY: Crown, 2006).  For a detailed, extensive, and critical review (shockingly disregarded in mainstream left-liberal commentary), see Paul Street, “Obama’s Audacious Deference to Power,” Black Agenda Report (January 31-February 6, 2007), available online at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=61.

4. For more detailed reflections on the complex racial meaning of the Obama phenomenon, see my essay “Barack Obama’s White Appeal: and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Black Agenda Report (June 20, 2007), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=34

5. The “deeply conservative” Obama has even recently criticized John Edwards’ and Hillary Clinton’s corporate-accommodating non-single-payer proposals for universal health coverage as coercive state mandates.  See Krugman 2007. 

6. Obama has exhibited an astonishing willingness and ability to insult popular intelligence.  See Street 2007d and Street 2007e.

7. For detailed reflections on the contributions and limits of Edwards’ populist approach, see Paul “How Big Change Occurs: ‘Under the Threat of Revolt,” ZNet Sustainer Commentary (October 2, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-10/02street.cfm; Paul Street, “A Very Narrow Spectrum: Even John Edwards is Too Far Left for the U.S. Plutocracy,” ZNet Sustainer Commentary (August 29, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/29street.cfm.

8. For detailed original sources for this and the remaining five paragraphs of this essay, see notes 38 to 51 in Street 2007a.  See also Street 2007b

SOURCES

Michael Brown et al. 2003.  Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California-Berkeley Press, 2003).

John Edwards 2007.  “To Build One America, End the Game,” speech at Hanover, New Hampshire (August 24, 2007), read online at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/the_path_to_one_america.html.

Jeff Faux 2006. 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).

Thomas Friedman 2005.“C.E.O.’s M.I.A,” New York Times, 25 May 2005, p. A25.

David Garrow 1986.  Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1986).

Edward S. Herman 2007. “How Market-Democracy Keeps the Public and ‘Populism’ At Bay,” ZNet Sustainer Commentary, 13 August 2007, available online at  http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-08/13herman.cfm. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.1967. "A Time to Break the Silence," 1967 speech to Riverside Church published in Freedomways, 7 (Spring 1967), reproduced in Martin Luther King Jr.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1991), edited by James N. Washington.

Paul Krugman 2007. "Mandates and Mudslinging,” New York Times, 30 November, 2007.

Larissa MacFarquhar  2007. “The Conciliator:  Where is Barack Obama Coming From?,” The New Yorker(May  7, 2007

Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey 2003. The State of Working America 2002-2003 (Ithaca, NY:  Economic Policy Institute and Cornell University Press, 2003), chapter seven, titled “International Comparisons.”

Barack Obama 2007.  The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, NY: Crown, 2006). 

Barack Obama 2007. “Our Common Stake in America’s Prosperity,” Speech at NASDAQ, New York City (September 17, 2007), read at http://www.barackobama.com/2007/09/17/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_24.php.

George Orwell 1939.  “Charles Dickens” [1939], pp. 413-460 in Orwell, An Age Like This: 1920-1940 [New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1968], edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

John Pilger 2007.  “The Invisible Government,” ZNet (July 20, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=13334

Ken Silverstein 2006. “Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,” Harpers (November 2006)

David Sirota 2006.. “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” The Nation (June 26, 2006)

Leslie Sklair 2000. The Transnational Capitalist Class (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000)

Paul Street 2000. “Capitalism and Democracy ‘Don’t Mix Very Well’: Reflections on Globalization,” Z Magazine (February 2000): 20-24.

Paul Street 2007a “The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Meaning of the Black Revolution,” ZNet Magazine (March 16, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12336

Paul Street 2007b. “‘Until We Get a New Social Order’: Reflections on the Radicalism of Martin Luther King, Jr.” ZNet Magazine (January 16, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11871.

Paul Street 2007c. Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, NY: Rowman-Littlefield, 2007).

Paul Street 2007d. "Obama's Insults," Empire and Inequality Report No. 25, ZNet Magazine (October 3, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13940 .

Paul Street 2007e.  “Barack Obama and the Audacity of Deception,” ZNet (December 7, 2007).