Black Buzz News Service
Washington, D.C.
December 9, 2010
BBNS
Special Report
Wed, 12/08/2010 - 10:45
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
It was an ugly performance by “an unrepentant, unreconstructed, center-right, corporate operative,” as President Obama defended his “latest grand accommodation with the GOP.” But it is incorrect to say that Obama “caves” to Republicans. His m.o. is far more aggressive – against fellow Democrats, whom he has relentlessly pummeled since his first days in office. With Obama in the White House, who needs Republicans?
“Obama has been at constant war with the New Deal and the left hemisphere of his party.”
Barack Obama reacted reflexively to Monday’s orchestration of angry calls to the White House by lefties outraged at his latest grand accommodation with the GOP, spending much of his Tuesday press conference attempting a limp smack-down of Left Democrats. Oozing condescension and a certain cattiness, Obama dismissed Democratic critics for playing “games” while he did what was necessary to wring an unemployment benefits extension from the Republicans. As Obama tells it, he stood like a pragmatic rock – if one can imagine such a thing – between the Republican “hostage-takers” and the “purist” and “sanctimonious” Democrats – a party of one.
The president hearkened back to “the debate that we had during health care” when much of his party complained that he was too “willing to compromise” with Republicans and bargained away the public option. Actually, Obama was determined from the start of his presidency to conspire with Republicans and corporate leaders to derail any possibility of a bill that might set the stage for single-payer legislation in 2009 or some future Congress. Instead, Obama protected private insurers by locking them so tightly into the system that it will be near impossible to dislodge them in the foreseeable future. Obama accomplished this, not just by ruthlessly marginalizing single-payer supporters, but also by choosing his own congressional operatives and effectively bypassing Democratic leadership – much the same m.o. as in his latest “compromise” with the GOP. He wielded the power of the White House and the false lure of bipartisan ism to utterly smash the left half of his party, deriding the dwindling “public option” holdouts as starry-eyed perfectionists who had become the enemies of the good – a performance he reprised on Tuesday in lambasting critics of deal with the GOP on taxes on the rich.
In the course of the long health care battle – a struggle waged entirely within Democratic ranks –Obama let the air out of the Democratic balloon, and the GOP steadily rose from its valley of near-death. The Republicans wound up conceding nothing on health care, while their corporate patrons won more than they could have dared imagine back on Election Day, 2008, when it seemed that single-payer was an idea whose time had come.
“Obama let the air out of the Democratic balloon, and the GOP steadily rose from its valley of near-death.”
The health care victory that Obama still celebrates was a defeat of fellow Democrats by the combination of a solid Republican minority, the right wing of congressional Democrats, and Obama’s White House. This is Obama’s formula for governance – what I call his “comfort zone” – a political space previously inhabited by Bill Clinton. Whatever the Clinton's and Obama think about each other on the personal level, they have together laid a great money pipeline that flows from Wall Street to the coffers of corporate Democrats – most dramatically, bankrolling much of Obama’s $700 million presidential campaign. In return, Obama reinstated the Clinton finance capitalist team that had a decade earlier reversed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal banking regulations. Obama turned the Wall Streeters loose to engineer the greatest transfer of wealth in human history – an ongoing project that has in less than two years transformed the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve into sugar daddies and guarantors of finance capital, worldwide, at a cost of tens of trillions of dollars. The bailouts have melded with and overshadowed in the public mind Obama’s tepid 2009 stimulus, so that Republicans can speak effectively of the two phenomena as if they are the same thing – a trick made much easier by the fact that Obama also rhetorically linked the bailouts and stimulus as one-two Democratic economic punches.
With the Democrat Party, particularly the First Black President, so thoroughly and deservedly identified with Wall Street, the Republicans were empowered to pull off what would have previously been thought impossible: the GOP’s brown-shirted wing, the white supremacist-based Tea Party, which purports to abhor government and, therefore, regulation, claimed with some success to be the anti-bailout, anti-Wall Street party. Meanwhile, Obama guided the Democrats to pass a fraudulent financial regulation bill that left the derivatives casino-economy intact, if not more strongly entrenched.
“Obama’s brief presidency has been a period of breathtaking dissolution of the Democratic Party.”
The Great Recession, which by all historical rights should have sent the Republicans into eclipse for a generation, instead saw a miraculous GOP rebound that left the Democrats shattered and pitifully incoherent. That’s the real big picture of Obama’s brief presidency – a period of breathtaking dissolution of the Democratic Party as Obama facilitated the swallowing whole of the American state by Wall Street.
Obama doesn’t really want folks to take the long view of his time in office. His modus operandi after every debacle is to claim to have rescued bits and pieces of the Democratic agenda from GOP savaging: a health care bill that, in total, is worse than none at all, a financial “reform” unworthy of the name. He early in his term set in motion his infernal deficit reduction commission, knowing it would attack social spending across the board, so that he could later “rescue” selected programs from extinction and claim savior hood. Obama will claim to have “saved” extension of unemployment benefits by this week’s “compromise” with the Republican minority in the lame duck Congress when, in reality, it is Obama’s center-right modalities of governance and back-channel dealings that have allowed the GOP minority to behave like a majority.
The overarching truth of the last two years Is that Obama has been at constant war with the New Deal and the left hemisphere of his party, acting as Wall Street’s Trojan Horse in the White House. Tuesday’s press conference starred an unrepentant, unreconstructed, center-right, corporate operative who sees his primary duty as destroying what remains of the Democrat’s progressive legacy. And the first term of the disaster is less than half over.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Comments
Obama is a cut-throat, egotistical, backstabbing opportunist
Enlightened Cynic - 12/08/2010 - 17:19
If one were writing a script for a failed Presidency, for one of the biggest political swoons in ages, they'd look no further than Obummer.
Mr. Ford wrote:
"His modus operandi after every debacle is to claim to have rescued bits and pieces of the Democratic agenda from GOP savaging:..."
Dead on Mr. Ford. Obummer is a pathological liar, a cynic and an opportunist. If he were strong from the get go, he'd never be bargaining from a position of weakness. But, alas, he is who he is, a DLC corporate troll, a sepia-toned version of GWB with speech lessons.
The Politico.com is a right wing/ centrist rag, but it's articles do occasionally provide some insight. Read and reread Mr. Ford's dissection of Obummer's m.o.,---the "rescuer" who gave away the kitchen sink. Here's a worthy tidbit from the Politico:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46114.html
Article title: "For White House, upside in fight with Hill Democrats"
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46114.html#ixzz17YVaUyOz
How long will Obama continue to fool the sheeple? Whom he throws under the bus at every turn? Here's what his advisors told Politico "on the down low."
"Obama’s advisers insist he didn’t go out of his way to pick a fight with fellow Democrats when he cut his highly controversial deal with Republicans to temporarily extend all Bush-era tax cuts earlier this week. But if the deal served to distance Obama not only from them but the entire partisan culture of Washington, all the better, they say.
Differentiating Obama from congressional Democrats “was a positive byproduct” of the tax cut deal, a person close to Obama told POLITICO.
“Compared to these guys, the president looks mature and pragmatic,” the official said."
There you have it. Mr. Pragmatic, Mr. Bipartisanship, the only "grownup" in the crowd screws his "base" once again. Apparently Obama "gets it," when will his "base?" When will Obama's "base" understand they are his "base"ment? The suites and penthouses are reserved for Right Wing bullies, warmongers, and those hostile to democratic principles. The poor "base" has a broken elevator and leaking pipes, the heat only works every other weekend, for intermittent periods at that. Pretty soon they'll be busting up the furniture to stay warm.
The one thing I will say is that even the "faithful" are starting to "get it," starting to open their eyes to the Manchurian Candidate, White folks anyway. Blog after blog, the comments are pouring in. I can't wait till he "saves us" from HIS Catfood Commission's draconian recommendations. This guy really thinks he' smart when he's nothing but a village idiot, thinking people can't see through his charade.
To be brutally blunt, I hope White folks or Hispanics or whomever calls themselves a Progressive/Lib mount a primary challenge to Obama ( don't worry, Blacks are too mummified to lead it, to caught up on symbolic bullshit to lead it). I hope that non-African Americans who call themselves progressives not give a shit if their Black friends roll their eyes at them backing a more progressive candidate than Obama. Given the screwed up situation in America, the skeleton of what's left of the "Black Movement," I have long posited that it just might take the White Right Wingers to save us from government excess, unfortunately the Tea Party turned out to be Bush's base and co opted from the get go. Al Sharpton's too busy trying to get the FCC to mute Limbaugh, what a fucking waste of time. I don't suppose he would have been better off getting Obummer to change the fucking composition of the FCC, or NPR's Board of Directors for starters?
To all you White Libs and Progressives out there, you heard it here first, you have Black folks unequivocal permission to stick it to Obama. It is long past time to send a message to the Dimocraps that enough is enough. (Let alone abandon them altogether) When your Black friends denounce you as racist or roll their eyes at you, or stop having lunch and drinks after work with you, fuck em. Just keep in mind that you are saving them from themselves. Take solace in that fact and do the damn thing. They'll appreciate and understand it later.
All serving one master, just not us...
Doidice - 12/08/2010 - 14:53
As I view the Obama administration I am reminded of two oft-used cliches... One, two sides of the same coin, and the other "good" cop versus bad cop...
With a smile and barely raising his voice Obama and his more aggressive republican "teammates" are working the same program, just a two-pronged attack to frustrate and stop the change we really need...
Sadly, many are clamoring for him to gain a spine and some backbone, yet when the time is taken to really view his entire political record - unfortunately, quite a few were stuck on the fact that he married a "real" Black woman and the powerful image of that family together to do the kind of analysis BAR did from jump - we are not surprised by his positions...
That is certainly not to underestimate the importance of symbolism to the African psyche, but after that what do we collectively have to adequately combat subterfuge?
BLACK BUZZ COMMENTS
http://blackbuzz.blogspot.com/
Obama's most loyal followers are Negroes who are in a trance
when it comes to really understanding the deceitfulness and duplicity of Obama's presidency.
Negroes wonder and get mad at sinister neo-racist like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein who have written books stating that Black people are not as intelligent as whites and others in their modern -day Mein-Kampf called the "Bell Curve." Arthur R. Jensen another one of the those race base scholars of the latter part of the 20th century also showed with flawed data that Blacks were simply not as intelligent as whites and all three of these neo-racist scholars hid behind the walls of Academia promoting their academic dishonesty disguised as scholarship.
I was one of those dumb stupid Bell Curve Negroes who supported Barack Obama's drive to the presidency in 2008. As a matter of fact my family was even featured on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the day after Obama won the Presidency praising Obama's victory.
My faithful and great brother whose been on Air-Force ONE with three American Presidents told me that I was a foolish for supporting Obama.
My brother further stated that Obama had sold out to the Corporations of America while running for the State Senate in the "Land Of Lincoln."
He also stated that Obama is the worst kind of sell out who was a dyed-in-the wool knee jerk corporatist accomodationist.
Furthermore my brother said Obama would never appoint a Black person to the U.S. Supreme Court and that he would not be in support anything that remotely resembles a progressive Black Agenda, Middle class, or Poor people's Agenda.
My brother also informed me that Obama never went too bat for Blacks when we won President of The Harvard Law Review, and he was widely criticized at the time for not giving Blacks various positions within the hierarchy of the Harvard Law Review staff. According to my brother Obama never once marched in protest marches or participated in demonstrations about the lack of Minority/Black hiring for faculty positions at Harvard. My brother suggested that I contact Derrick Bell a former Harvard Faculty member who is also a Black Pittsburgh er that stood up against the overt injustices and rampant racism at Harvard throughout his career about Barack Obama. I am still waiting on a return call from the highly distinguished Law professor Derrick Bell who's on the Faculty at New York University Law School.
Furthermore my brother states that the Media gave a Obama a free pass and didn't scrutinize thoroughly for authenticity his books titled The Audacity of Hope, and Dreams From My Father.
I Say Obama's has too Go
In Fo
I guess when White people in great numbers cut Obama loose the Negroes voters will follow suit just as they did back in the Iowa Caucus in 2008.
The naive Negroes always need White people to lead the way in telling then who or what they should vote for in any kind of election.
Anyone ever hear of the slave-mentality? And most Negroes still have that disease called the slave mentality.
So many of these pathetic Negroes have their heads so far up Obama's posterior that they can't even think straight and clear when it comes to Obama and his recalcitrance.
Most Negroes have been psychologically conditioned to accept mistreatment by whites in power and second class citizenship in general which is evidence by how they behave and act in the context of Obama's presidency.
Watch how the Negro front men and women in the media particularly at the Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, NBC ( Harold Ford Jr.) CNN and white liberals jump on any potential White Democratic Insurgent who shows any semblance of independent critical thinking when it comes to Obama's candidacy for 2012. Watch how these Negro front people and white liberals play the race card when it comes to anyone that will challenge Obama in 2012.
The only thing Black about Obama is Michelle Obama, who also may have sold out to corporates many moons ago in the corrupt city of Chicago.
My definition of Blackness maybe a little different than the Negro jackals that work for the Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, NBC, CNN and NPR. Note the Great White Hope liberal NPR only employs one person of color on its on the air daily news. NPR is truly an Equal Opportunity Employer.
I will use brothers Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Dr. Henrike Clarke, sister Nina Simone, Kwmae Ture, W. E. Dubois, and the great Frantz Fanon as my guide in defining what Blackness is or aint.
Obama is always reminding White people about some little tid-bit about his mother, which is designed to curry favors with whites and to make Whites feel he Obama is one of them. And you can't count on one hand the number of times he talks about his Black Kenyan father.
Remember last year the New York Times ran that fake story about Michelle Obama having a white rapist Great-Grand father in her family tree? That story too was designed solely for white Americans to make them feel like she was one of them because she has some white blood in her DNA.
Barack Obama is only tan in skin color, and he taint Black. This well orchestrated campaign by Obama's front interest of marginalizing potential progressive White challengers and other potential candidates like Cynthia McKinney is designed solely for the maintenance of the status quo because if these Negroes and white liberal exposed Obama for the true political fraud that he is these Negroes would not be working at the Post or the New York Times.
Barack Obama raised and spent over 700 million dollars for his Presidential Campaign in 2008. So its quite apparent that he owes many many many political and economic favors to those folks that backed him for his run for the presidency. I had a banker who is a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity tell me that any Negro that raises that kind of money (700 million dollars) must be doing something shady or he has sold his soul for a dry bone from the master's table.
George Bush number I (one) gave us Uncle Clarence Thomas. The George Soros crowd along with certain International Bankers gave us Barack Hussein Obama then convinced Negroes that it would be in their interest to vote for Obama's fraudulent candidacy. Now these same Negro voters find themselves in a "Catch 22 Compromise."
Obama's Great Compromise of 2010 was about saving his political hide as the cankerous Obama positions to run in 2012.
Obama forgot to tell the public in his scolding misleading Gong Show News Conference that he will have to borrow mucho dollars from China to pay for tax breaks for Billionaires for the next two years while folks on Unemployment Insurance will only have 13 months. Obama also forgot to mention that all of those fat greedy Billionaires that he wants to continue with the Geo Bush tax cuts have taken over 3.4 million good paying American jobs overseas and to Mexico and other nations in Central and South America since the ill advised NAFTA and other bogus Agreements signed by the other spineless corporate puppet "Slick Willie." Obama doesn't care about the National debt or deficit, and he is only truly concern about racking up and scoring political points. How many jobs have those fat greedy B's created under the Bush tax cuts for the last ten years? Where are those jobs?
In his news conference this week in front of the national news media Obama acted and behaved just like a jilted spoiled little brat who didn't get selected to the Student Council or the Cheer leading Squad or the Class play. I'll bet anyone that most of the questions asked by the media were previously chosen in advance by Obama's team.
Obama also stated in December 7 news conference that he is a fighter who is willing too go toe to toe with the Republicans on any issue of importance to the American people. Anyone with a slight modicum of intelligence knows that is a lie because Obama hasn't fought for one damn thing for the middle class or poor people since he has taken office.
He sent his "Lap Dog" VP Joe Biden up to Capital Hill in a vain effort to sell his poorly constructed Compromise Bill, and his fellow Dem's basically told old Joe that they were not buying this Compromise Bill in its present form. This same fighter Obama has never requested that the U.S. Congress hold hearings on the proposed backroom Compromise Bill.
This Great Compromise of 2010 was not about saving the middle class it was about saving his own grotesque political career.
Obama must have the most inept advisers in the White House since President Ulysses Grant. Mediocrity loves comfort.
Obama is holding the middle class hostage because he doesn't have enough political smarts, guts or leadership skills with coping with the reality of the Democrats losing the Super Majority, which was caused by his terribly flawed economic and foreign policies.
If there is a Democrat Insurgent out there with any semblance of credibility they may be able to present a formidable challenge to Barack Obama in 2012? Let The Games Begin!
Is Barack Obama the tan version of Jimmy Carter? Personally I like Jimmy Carter, but he was just a poor politician who lacked good leadership skills. Obama's Political I.Q. is considerably lower than Jimmy Carter's, and I don't trust Obama.
Maybe the good old boys up at Harvard University should make it mandatory that anyone graduating from HLS take in-depth courses in Sellsmanship, Negotiations, and Integrity from a professor with a demonstrated track record in teaching these subjects.
LBJ had an A+ political IQ and he accomplished much during one of the most turbulent periods in U.S. history because of his vast experience and great leadership skills. But even the great Lyndon Baines Johnson was not able to lead the U.S. out of its war of aggression against the people of Vietnam. Remember LBJ's big lie about the Gulf of Tonkin.
Its quite apparent that President Obama is not a good student of history because he should have learned that once you maintain a pattern and practice of lying to the public those lies are bound to catch up with you in the final analysis.
Can I Get A Witness!
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