About this title: Obama enabled maximally prominent Neo-Cons to represent and govern the USA. When I asked Silicon Valley cognoscenti what it meant for a supposedly “democratic” presidency to nominate maximally prominent neofascists, I was told: “They represent the HIDDEN government of the USA.”
For years it was incorrect to point out that emperor Obama had no clothes, that all he had was playing with his brown skin. That observation was called racist. Yet, it has been made recently, loud and clear, by leftists of renown: president Obama has been incompetent, and a sell-out. As Thomas Frank puts it in Salon:
“Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy is failure.
Yes, we know, the crazy House. But we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action.”
Within days of Obama’s accession to power, banks were given public money without any counterparts. This was an outrageous theft of public money. I advocated it was “Time for RICO“. I may as well have told the mafia to summon the police.
Just as Reagan-Bush 25 years ago, and Sweden later, after 2007, the UK and Germany nationalized giant banks such as Northern Rock, RBS, Hypo Real Estate, when they had to give them hundreds of billions to save them. Instead in the USA, the banks were given trillions, without so much as a change of management; the fact the banks were given money was hidden by the simple device of TARP, then giving plenty more to banks through Quantitative Easing, to reimburse TARP.
To the great applause of conscientious, politically correct “liberals”, such as drummer boy Krugman.
This has world consequences: it made American financiers rule the world, more than ever; GE, saved by Obama’s $60 billion, just bought a French giant competitor, Alsthom. This is the Faustian deal of the USA: its plutocrats may rule the USA, but they also rule the world, and that increasing empire profits average Americans.
The dying Roman Republic went through a similar Faustian bargain with its increasing militarization: the resulting empire profited the Populus Romanus, while killing the Republic. The most insidious corruption corrupts the souls.
[Profitable presidency: Obama spent at least 400 day raising billions from the richest plutocrats.]
Then, unbelievably, Obama kept on saying he could not do a thing without Republican’s approval (never mind that he had 60% of the votes in the Senate, and a strong majority in Congress). It was, Obama explained disingenuously, a new way of doing politics by consensus. The savages opposing him rejected it, Obama’s fanatics informed us, thus making him a failure.
In truth, Obama had such strong control of all the government and the legislative, he could easily have imposed “Medicare For All“.
I have said all of this in the past, but, from another pen, my point of view comes out stronger. Thomas Frank again:
“America should have changed but didn’t. [how] to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over-when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers. for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in-and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.”
As early as 2009, it dawned on me that Obama was neither incompetent nor a sellout. I said so on some leftist sites, and was promptly thrown out, as a “troll” and a “Neo-Con”. Obama was a Neo-Conservative from the start and was chosen for that, by the higher-ups of the “democratic” party: they gave him a keynote speech, and their top master operative.
Obama practiced Dick Morris and Bill Clinton’s theory of triangulation basically the democrats do the republicans’ work for them: democrats deregulated, balanced the budget, and unleashed the financial markets of the USA, while allowing huge corporations to pay no taxes. Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over.” Big banks, small government.
All of this covered by noises to the contrary while the notorious weasel, Dick Morris, chuckled. Weasels are somewhat below apes in the evolution of evolution. Not to worry, French judges never heard of Dick Morris, and he is white, in any case.
Nearly all American leftists, including myself, did not see early enough that Obama was a Neo-Con with Martin Luther King’s mien. We got manipulated by his speeches and rhetoric. His King-style voice rhythms sucked all back to the nostalgia of the progressive 1960s.
We were blinded by political correctness. I recovered quickly, in the first few weeks of Obama’s administration: it was clear Obama was all in rhetoric, and no action.
Obama claimed he could not do a thing, because the “Republicans” blocked him. In truth, fifth generation plutocrats such as Max Baucus, a major democratic senator, were the excuse Obama evoked, in democratic circles, to say he could not a thing. (That Max Baucus lather authored “Obamacare”, is pretty telling.)
I wrote, on this site, about the commonality between Obama’s behavior and that of the “boys” who used to serve white masters in Kenya. Some in my family wrote to me I had trampled on their hearts, and had no common decency. I replied my decency was uncommon. (No doubt it made their stays at Camp David less comfy, so they have hated me ever since.)
Obama is a far more competent Neo-Con than Bush Jr., or even Reagan, ever were. Those had opponents. Obama got collaborators, all over. No banana peel shaking for him. No need for French judges.
The two Bushes generated a backlash and really could only rule in secret, or though devious means. Obama instead pushed the agenda of Wall Street Banks, USA corporations, and the CIA/NSA much further than Bush ever dreamed of, by going public about it while carefully misrepresenting the truth.
For example, Obama officially clashed with Netanyahu. However, below that surface of enmity, extensive cooperation developed, say on anti-missile systems (the fact I like those systems is irrelevant). Such systems were crucial to allow Israel to not negotiate with the Palestinians.
Clinton was the best president the republicans ever had. Under him Franklin D. Roosevelt’s revolutionary reforms of finance and banks were completely undone; Rubin, that is Goldman Sachs and their followers were solidly in command. Clinton, while officially at war with Newt Gingrich, was actually doing the work the Republicans could never have done, had Bush Senior still been president.
As the Republicans got all they wanted, the debate switched further to the right. When the democrats acquired control of Congress in 2006, they went right. Pelosi and company accepted to give all the money banks and shadow banks wanted in 2008. Without any counterparts. Obama became the best president the Neo-Cons could dream of.
Obama once convoked all the top bankers to the White House. He announced, triumphal, that the Obama team was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks”. He delivered. Thanks to political correctness, nobody important dared say that the emperor had no clothes. That, would, indeed, have deemed to be racist. Still is. But not for long.
The picture that will stick with Obama is the one I observed six years ago: a black boy, serving the white masters. and not for brains: under Obama, the share of scientific publications by the USA has collapsed. Why? Under Obama, plutocratization has jumped (as I said, because of the treatment of finance). So it has in academia. But money has deleterious effects on research (if nothing else, it creates the wrong mood and obsession).
Obama ran his first campaign as “change you can believe in”. Yes, none at all. Obama, at best consolidated Bush’s Neo-Con rule. At worst he is still the engulfing lie that appearance is all what reality is about.
Patrice Ayme
