Street pretty much predicted from the beginning what we would get with an Obama adminstration. If you're interested in this sort of thing, he's written a fairly lengthy article describing how the left embraced the myth of Obama as the liberal Man of Change rather than the reality of Obama as the "deeply conservative" Defender of the Status Quo. Even if you don't agree with Street, it's probably worth a read just so you can intensify your contempt for the kind of left commentary you're likely to see more of as the Obama administration moves on from bailing out Wall Street and the insurance industry to "fixing" education and "fighting" climate change.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23434The (Fading) Call of Obama
December 23, 2009 By Paul Street
Now that Barack Obama is being exposed like never before as a tool and agent of concentrated wealth, business class rule, and militarism, 2009 is ending on a distinct note of liberal disenchantment. His "progressive base" is restive over his actions to an unprecedented (to use Obama's favorite word <1>) degree as the president of "Yes we can" has morphed (as widely predicted on "hard left") into the pallid symbol of "No We can't - as the clarion of "change" has emerged as another Democratic office-holder whose outwardly progressive campaign pledges translate into corrupt, corporate and imperial nothingness in the real world of power.
"THIS IS A CON JOB"
The signs of liberal and progressive anger at Obama ("The Empire's New Clothes," as I described immediately him after his election to the presidency) are hard to miss. The former sixties radical and "Progressives for Obama" (PFO) co-founder Tom Hayden announced that he was "scraping the Obama sticker off my car" after the president gave his West Point Afghan War Speech three weeks ago. <2> Formed by such leading left-liberal lights as Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Cornwell West, and Barbara Ehrenreich, PFO has dropped its president's name from the organization, re-christened "Progressive America Rising." <3>
The editor of the liberal-left magazine The Progressive has noted that Obama's West Point oration read as if had been penned by "Bush's speechwriters"<4>, connecting The One to the liberal-loathed image of Dubya - consistent with the left commentator Alexander Cockburn's observation that "war
war, whether the battle standard is being waved by a white moron from Midland, Texas or an eloquent black man from Chicago."<5>
The congressional Black Caucus has undertaken some criticism of, and confrontation with, the first black president for placing "Wall Street's agenda" above the needs of black and other minority citizens. <6>
The ACLU recently issued a blistering indictment of Obama's handling of Bush administration war crimes the ACLU said the Obama White House refused to prosecute and went to extraordinary lengths to cover up. <7>
There has been considerable liberal and progressive criticism of the weak, corporate-captive climate "deal" (with no binding restrictions on carbon emissions from the industrialized states that have created the climate crisis) that Obama came back from Copenhagen with in mid December of 2009 - an outcome that was already indicated in the administration's previous efforts to undermine serious global climate reform.<8> The criticism is well founded, for, as the leading climate activist and intellectual George Monbiot notes, "The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarized in two words: Barack Obama. The man elected to put aside childish things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal which outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation; either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown."<9>
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The erudite idiocy of the liberal intellectual's belief that "Barack" (Obama's supporters often tend to fantasize that they are on a first name basis with the president) was "left" was transparent. The journalist based his opinion on, among other things, Obama's "ethnicity" (as if being black precluded being essentially conservative like, say Colin Powell or Bill Cosby of Clarence Thomas), on the preposterous belief that the University of Chicago (notorious as the breeding ground and headquarters of arch-regressive neoliberal economics) is "strongly leftist-academic" (with an implicit image, also false, of the academy itself as leftist), and, in the end, an intuitive sense that is beyond "proof" and which "I just think." Never mind that Larissa MacFarquhar - a properly "mainstream" journalist with no evident leftist sentiments - made a serious and more-than-intuitive attempt to "crawl inside head" in the spring of 2007 and found, after extensive interviews, that the future president was "deeply conservative." By MacFarquhar's account, Obama was a profoundly cautious, power-respecting conciliator prone to prefer the persistence of traditional social and institutional hierarchy over positive social progress and to question government's capacity to quickly solve social problems like poverty:
"In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good...
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