Needless to say, bourgeois

and reactionary go hand-in-hand

Obama is the 'shining' example of

an African-American, middle-class,

conservative, high-information Democrat

A member of the chattering classes

- privileged and self-important

The Bourgeoisie [Black & White] Back Obama

They're not an official category of voters whose tally is measured in exit polls, like whites or blacks, women or men, old or young. And since they're not an official category, we may never really have the evidence.

But I have a feeling I know which group really handed Hillary Clinton - or maybe they were thinking even more of that other Clinton - her decisive loss to Barack Obama in South Carolina on Saturday night.

Call them "high-information Democrats." So-called middle-class 'progressives', both white and black, who turned out to vote for their new-found heero.

It is important to remember that western democracy is, essentially bourgeois democracy. It is the bourgeoisie who vote in large numbers. "Democracy' is run for the benefit ot the middle classes.

One of the questionable benefits of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s was the emergence of a well-defined black bourgeoisie.

Needless to say, bourgeois and reactionary go hand-in-hand. Obama is the 'shining' example of an African-American, middle-class, conservative, high-information Democrat. A member of the chattering class - privileged and self-important.

These are the people who follow all the ins and outs of the contest. They read The New York Times.

They watch cable television, probably Keith Olbermann first and foremost. They read blogs. They know every twist and turn, every thrust and parry. And yes, they exist even in South Carolina.

As I said, they are not a measured category. But Obama was ahead by eight to 15 percentage points in most public opinion polls up to Friday. He won by more than that, 28 percentage points.

Who accounted for this disparity? We'll need to see raw turnout numbers by region to have a better idea - according to one network exit poll Obama won a majority of college-educated voters, both white and black.

I suspect that it's a plausible conclusion that high-information voters swung in Obama's direction in the contest's closing days and hours.

The Great White Hope

A radical correspondent of mine sent the following message after the inevitable data-mined Obama returns came in from Iowa:

“That’s a shame about Obama. The media-manipulated kids and the misinformed and deluded ‘progressives’ were persuaded by his vague banalities and his corporate-crafted Telescreen imagery.”

Sure, but it’s more complicated. There is a remarkable amount of false progressive consciousness, misinformation, and laziness (failure to do basic homework) about the Obama phenomenon.

Many of his supporters falsely believe that he is some sort of left or populist and antiwar candidate.

Such ignorance is naturally encouraged by the well-funded Obama campaign and is especially widespread among younger voters, who turned out in record numbers for the Iowa caucus.

And some of the college kids in my precinct and town liked Obama pretty much for the same reasons they like a Michael Jordan or a Jamie Fox: because “he’s cool” and it strikes them as vaguely transgressive to like a technically black personality.

Still, a significant amount of support came from people who sense rather well that Obama is a faux-progressive preserver of race and class privilege.

And they love that about him. They’re not deluded at all. He helps them feel good about being white and well-off. His promise of illusory change and pretend transformation is exactly what they are about.

They have big houses, nice careers, and creeping concerns about all the poor black people that are starting to get aggressive again.

He Helps the White Bourgeoisie Feel Good about Itself

Obama is a way for liberal and moderate whites to “pat themselves on the back for not being too prejudiced.”

Obama’s race encouraged a lot of “progressives” not to do their homework on him or on the U.S. political culture he reflects.

Of course, it’s all premised on Obama being a "good [bourgeois and right-acting] black" – one who promises not to actually confront white supremacy in any meaningful way.

Like the white-friendly media mogul and mass Obama marketer and ally Oprah Winfrey, Obama expresses and capitalizes on whites’ partial transcendence of “level-one” state-of-mind racism.

At the same time, he reassures them he will honor their refusal acknowledge and confront the continuing power of deeper, “level two” state-of-being” - societal and institutional – racism in American life.

Barack Obama is a Great White Hope. He is perfectly suited and crafted to wrap establishment corporate politics and the related American Empire Project in rebel’s clothing.

He advances the use of race (albeit in a new and “post-Civil Rights” kind of way) to advance the top-down business-class agenda.

Obama: "The Black Ronald Reagan"

It is discomforting, if not puzzling that Barack Obama, a Democratic Presidential candidate, promising positive blazing changes, has chosen to use Ronald Reagan, a former Republican President as an example; as well as to endorse the Republican party in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board.

After all, Reagan was a controversial figure head, who was notorious for his human rights and environmental record, mismanaging the economy, and having the dubious honour of being the first President who surrounded himself with a bunch of neo-conservative advisers during his administration.

They included Defense Department aide Richard Perle, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.

Upon hearing his comment, John Edwards, another Democratic candidate, was quick to denounce Obama for using Reagan as an example. On Reagan, Edwards said:

This was the man who busted unions, the man who did everything in his power to destroy the organized labor movement, the man who created a tax structure that favored the richest Americans against middle class and working families… was destructive to the environment by removing a lot of the regulation that existed."

Edwards is spot right on all accounts.

On busting unions, just months into being office in 1981, Reagan fired about 12,000 federal air traffic controllers from the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization (PATCO) who, ironically, supported his presidential campaign.

While it was a violation for governmental employees to strike at that time, the result was to ‘break the union and signal to corporations that it is acceptable to be anti-union.’

The former President’s track record in the management of the American economy has often been labelled as ‘Reaganomics’, which, according to Robert Pollin, Professor of Economic and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, benefited the rich and not the poor.

In the article, ‘Reaganomics Revisited, Beyond the Glow of Nostalgia’ published on Counterpunch, he cited the increase of individual poverty rate from 11.9 per cent under Carter to 14.1 per cent under Reagan as an indicator. He also cited the fall of average real wages.

The average figure during his presidency ‘was $15.72 per hour (in 2005 dollars), was 7.6 per cent below the average hourly wage under Carter of $16.95, and 9.6 below the Nixon/Ford peak of $17.39.’

He summed up, ‘Reagan’s fiscal program was fundamentally about tax cuts for the rich, a massive expansion in military spending, sharp reductions in social expenditures, and an acceptance-or better still, an embrace-of large-scale federal government fiscal deficits on these terms.’

Even on the topic of environmental conservatism, Reagan nominated advisers who actively sought to break the laws for the benefit of corporate profiteers.

Jeffrey St. Clair charted the rise of these figures, known as the ‘Sagebrush Rebels’ or ‘the Crazies on the Hill,’ which featured two prominent stalwarts - James Watt, the head of the Department of Interior and Anne Gorsuch in the Environmental Protection Agency.

In an excerpt of Jeffrey’s book on Reagan’s Administration, he had this to say about Watt:

"Within a matter of months Watt proposed the sale of 30 million acres of public lands to private companies, gave away billions of dollars worth of publicly-owned coal resources, fought to permit corporations manage national parks, refused to enforce the nation’s strip mine law.

"He offered up the Outer Continental Shelf oil reserves to exploration and drilling, ignored the Endangered Species Act and purged the Interior Department of any employees who objected to his agenda."

Gorsuch, on the other hand, according to him, created a ‘climate of cronyism that infected the EPA in those days… pander to its political allies: Coors, Browning-Ferris Industries, Westinghouse and Monsanto.’

His claims were supported by Amanda Griscom on Grist.com, a Washington based environmental group.

In her article on Reagan’s environmental legacy, the writer quoted Frank O’Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era, “EPA budget cuts during Reagan’s first term were worse than they are today.”

Phil Clapp, president of National Environmental Trust said, ‘the administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal’.

While Edwards had not touched on Reagan’s foreign policy, it was the latter’s aggressive ‘anti-communism’ efforts, in the form of funding and supporting right wing Latin American dictatorships that proved most disturbing.

Reagan’s support of these illiberal and violent regimes paved the stage for repressive military assaults causing massacres and human rights violations.

The Iran-Contra scandal in which proceeds from weapon sales to Iran was secretly used to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, an illegal act under the Congress, caused a civil war in Nicaragua, leading to the deaths of 50,000 people.

In El Salvador, Reagan’s administration pumped in more than $4 billion on economic and military aid to the military government, resulting in more than 75,000 deaths, most of them civilians, who were caught in the crossfire.

He also supported General Efrain Rios Montt’s coup in Guatemala that caused the death of than 200,000, mostly indigenous people, over a lengthy 36 years period of civil war.

Reagan’s supporters may argue that the former President was an important figure, at least, in contributing to world stability for his overstated role in ending the Cold War.

Yet, scholars and historians have disputed that version of history. In fact, Reagan was purportedly ‘anti-communist’ as has been witnessed through his support of Latin American military dictatorships.

He admonished, called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ and came up with belligerent military policies which escalated the arms race. Efforts which are clearly promoting distrust and increasing tension with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

During his administration, he approved the Star Wars, or the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a military defense program (as a deterrence against the Soviets), using ground and space-based systems to protect America from strategic nuclear ballistic missiles attack.

As such, he actually extended the cold war by promoting hard-line rhetoric in the Communist bloc, and not the other way round.

Academics also argued that the end of the cold war were due to internal pressures within Soviet Union, in the form of declining legitimacy, an increasing need for reforms and widening gaps in the society as the reform process unfolded. All these were significant factors in ending the cold war.

Perhaps a Sunday Times Online article, uncannily titled, ‘Republicans defect to the Obama camp’ will provide clues as to why Barack Oabama has chosen Reagan as his exemplifying example of change.

The writer, Sarah Baxter, reported that Barack Oabama is converting, not just Republicans, but also those who used to be ardent Bush supporters.

For example, John Canning, a previous Bush supporter and investment banker; and Tom Bernstein, who co-owns Texas Rangers baseball team with the current President.

Robert Kagan, founder of the neoconservative think think, Project for the New American Century, and a supporter of John McCain, has publicly endorsed Obama, as a “pure John Kennedy”, a neocon hero of the cold war for his support of the war.

At the end of Sarah’s article, Obama was labelled, the "Black Ronald Regan" for his unwavering optimism for the future.

Is it therefore, any surprise, that Mr Obama has chosen to cite the former President as an agent of change, and perhaps, implicitly and unconsciously, his source of inspiration?