Forum Post: wall street obama by paul street

Stealthier Service to Reigning Hierarchies

A major national re-branding was required to re-cloak American Empire and Inequality in false democratic clothes in the wake of the long Bush-Cheney-Rove nightmare. The fake-progressive and in fact “deeply conservative” [2]) and carefully establishment-vetted [3] Obama phenomenon provided a seemingly heaven-sent vehicle for Washington’s required image overhaul. It was made to order and right on time as the financial system and broader economy began to implode, necessitating a massive taxpayer bailout of the parasitic financial institutions that created the disaster in the first place. The Republicans’ long and all-too plainly plutocratic presence in the White House and the GOP’s reputation as the leading party of Big Business made it preferable for the moneyed elite that the president overseeing that populace-nauseating transfer be a supposedly liberal Democrat, not another rich white Republican. That the “liberal” Democrat who rose to instant celebrity at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was technically black was a great faux-democratic, identity-politicized neoliberal bonus[4]. “Brand Obama” held further plusses for the imperial project: the next president’s technically Muslim nomenclature and his deceptive “antiwar” credentials promised to combine with his color to promise to help the US undo some of the injury Bush43’s excessively barefaced imperialism had done to “Brand USA” in the Middle East and around the entire, mostly non-white world.[5]

Consistent with his longstanding “vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics” (Adolph Reed, Jr.’s description of an unnamed, freshly elected state senator Obama’s world view in January of 1996[6]) and the historic elite campaign finance and corporate media backing he received in 2008[7], the nation’s first half-white (“black but not like Jesse”) president has dedicated much of his time in the White House to picking up the Machiavellian ball of deception on behalf of the rich and powerful. He is no less beholden to or enamored with the nation’s reigning hierarchies than his blustering and buffoonish predecessor. He never was. His mission, however, has been to serve the nation’s great white capitalist and imperial masters in a less clumsy and more stealthy, cleverly deceptive fashion, consistent with Machiavelli’s counsel. It’s not mainly about him. The princes who are served by his great pretending and dissembling are the nation’s real rulers at the pinnacles of “the 1 Percent......................

Wall Street Obama Obama44 has been no less solicitous of the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money” [19] (the US corporate and financial ruling class) and has done little more for the nation’s working class majority than his more ham-fisted predecessor. Consistent with his early staffing of key White House economic posts by top neoliberal Wall Street insiders, he has made no serious effort to regulate or prosecute, much less nationalize the nation’s reigning arch-parasitic financial institutions, whose record of pushing the US and global economy into crisis in pursuit of the endless upward distribution of fortunes is surely far from over[20]. He worked assiduously to shield the financial chieftains from richly deserved populist anger[21]while he stealthily expanded the massive Wall Street bailouts initiated by his maladroit predecessor and launched a woefully inadequate stimulus bill heavily weighted towards tax cuts for the affluent. There were no comparable bailouts for the non-affluent majority, thrown into recession through no fault of their own, by the greedy excess of the Few. The venerable liberal-left commentator William Greider put it well in a March 2009 Washington Post column titled “Obama Told Us to Speak But is He Listening?”: “People everywhere learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They have watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests who caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend – when the right people want it” (emphasis added). And little to spend on the rest of us, the wrong people, soon to be known as “the 99%,” left to ask “where’s my bailout?” [22]

Obama’s subsequent health insurance legislation– the absurdly titled “Affordable Care Act” – was designed by the Republican Heritage Foundation. It preserved the unchallenged profit-making and price- and rate-gouging power of the nation’s leading insurance and drug companies in cold defiance of public opinion. The single-payer model long favored by most Americans was banned from serious consideration in White House “reform” deliberations, consistent with then White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s advice to the president: “ignore the progressives” [23].

Obama has never lifted a finger for the Employee Free Choice Act, upon which he campaigned in 2007 and 2008. It would have substantively re-legalized union organizing in the US. Obama offered no public support for the historic pro-union public worker and citizen uprising against Wisconsin’s hard right Koch brother-backed Governor Scott Walker in February and March of 2011. The president managed a single mild Tweet for the Wisconsin Democrats’ campaign to recall Walker the following year. And when the remarkable Occupy rebellion against the nation’s gaping class disparities and the corporate and financial elite’s domination of US politics and policy spread across the nation in the fall and early winter of 2011, the Obama administration undertook a federal campaign of surveillance, infiltration, and repression that led to the coordinated police-state dismantlement of the neo-populist encampments before the end of the year.[24]