It's nauseating to see Obama’s
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
Obama is the Culmination of the Me-Generation
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. Or maybe it’s because he believes in his “deeply conservative” 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 waffling his way across the country, 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.Obama Is Deeply Conservative
It is nauseating to see 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”, 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” and when he pens the following sickening 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?”
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 appalling 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: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.The Audacity of Hope leaves it to hopelessly alienated and insufficiently realistic carpers, “cranks” and “gadflies."
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.
This is Obama’s insulting description of the late progressive U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone and other dangerous “zealots” of the “morally absolutist” and insufficiently “pragmatic” Left (Obama's insulting description).
These 'Cranks" 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.
Labor is 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.
Working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great “democracy” Obama trumpets as the Founders’ great legacy.
“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.