I've been reading Bernie Sanders' book. Most of what's in it, you've heard
before. However, the documentation of the deterioration of our
infrastructure and how it needs to be updated, is useful. I think he was
writing the book when he believed that Hillary would win the election and it
is a blueprint for what he wanted people to reform the Democratic Party to
be able to accomplish. The question is why someone who ran and won as an
outsider during most of his political career, believes now that his goals
can only be accomplished through the Democratic Party.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2017 10:59 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Barack Obama's Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward
Drift and Donald Trump
How many times do we need to be told that we, the Working Class no longer
have a voice in the Empire's Government? Barack Obama's Legacy will come to
be known as, "The Blah Years".
We can blame the united Republican Congress, or even the Russians and maybe
the North Koreans, but the fact of it is that, as President Truman said,
"The buck stops here". The title, Commander in Chief, ought to remind those
Obama defenders, that Obama took the job, and with it he takes the heat.
Add to his inability to "work the House"...and the Senate, the fact that
Barack Obama was never a supporter of the Working Class. He was bought
hook, line and sinker by the Empire. Do we really expect him to make any
final waves in the political waters as he exits? Not if he wants to
continue living the "Good Life". If Obama wants to take proper care of his
family, he will do as his "handlers" tell him.
And forget reforming the Democratic Party. It's nothing more than a hollow
shell, broken into a thousand pieces after it fell from the wall. The
Working Class will either wake up and build a new People's government, or go
down to the hovels reserved for Serfs and Slaves.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/4/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
president-elect.
Truthdig
Barack Obama's Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_neoliberal_legacy_rightward
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_and_donald_trump_20170103/
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Posted on Jan 3, 2017
By Paul Street
President Barack Obama. (Wikimedia
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_091026-N-5549O-249_Pr
esiden
t_Barack_Obama_delivers_remarks_to_an_audience_of_Sailors_and_Marines_
before
_introducing_President_Barack_Obama_during_a_visit_to_U.S._Naval_Air_S
tation
_Jacksonville.jpg) )
In a parting shot near the end of his depressing, center-right
presidency, Barack Obama wants the world to know that he would have
defeated Donald Trump if the U.S. Constitution didn't prevent him from
running for a third term. It was a stab at Hillary Clinton as well as the
Mrs.
I suspect Obama is right. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a much better
fake-progressive, populism-manipulating campaigner than Hillary. Also
like Bill, he has more outward charm, wit, charisma, and common touch than
Clinton. Plus, he's a male in a still-sexist nation, and he would havethe Republicans."
had some very sharp election strategists on his side.
'Inauthentic Hope'
Fine, but so what? The Electoral College has spoken. The Constitution
is a harsh mistress. And Obama richly deserves Donald Trump as his
legacy. As I predicted in my June 2008 book "Barack Obama and the
Future of American Politics
(https://www.amazon.com/Barack-Obama-Future-American-Politics/dp/15945
16316) " (most of which was written in late 2007), Obama's presidency
has epitomized the late left political scientist Sheldon Wolin's early
2008 description of "the Democrats' politics" as "inauthentic
opposition." Wolin predicted
(http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9175.html) that "should Democrats
somehow be elected," they would do nothing "to alter significantly the
direction of society" and to "substantially revers[e] the drift
rightwards. . The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by
centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that for the poor,
minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no
opposition party working on their behalf." The corporatist Democrats
would work to "marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of
base.
Wolin called it. Yes, a nominal Democrat was elected president along
with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2008. What
followed under Obama (as under his Democratic presidential
predecessors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) was the standard "elite"
neoliberal manipulation of campaign populism and identity politics in
service to the reigning big money bankrollers and their global empire.
The Wall Street takeover of Washington and the related imperial agenda
of the "Pentagon System" were advanced more effectively by the
nation's first black president than they could have been by stiff and
wealthy white-male Republicans like John McCain or Mitt Romney.
The underlying "rightward drift" sharpened, fed by a widespread and
easily Republican-exploited sense of popular abandonment and betrayal,
as the Democrats depressed and demobilized their own purported popular
corporate interests)."
'To Quell the Mob'
The first year, when Obama's party had Congress, was key. In the book
"Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a
President
(https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Men-Washington-Education-President/
dp/006
1429252) " (2011), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind told a
remarkable story from March of 2009. Three months into Obama's
presidency, popular rage at Wall Street was intense, and the leading
financial institutions were weak and on the defensive. The nation's
financial elite had driven the nation and world's economy into an epic
meltdown-and millions knew it.
Having ridden into office partly on a wave of popular anger at the
economic power elite's staggering malfeasance, Obama called a meeting
of the nation's top 13 financial executives at the White House. The
banking titans came into the gathering full of dread, only to leave
pleased to learn that the new president was in their camp. Instead of
standing up for those who had been harmed most by the crisis-workers,
minorities and the poor-Obama sided unequivocally with those who had
caused the meltdown.
"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,"
Obama said. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's
turning into a political problem. And I want to help. . I'm not here
to go after you. I'm protecting you . I'm going to shield you from
congressional and public anger."
For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs,
there was, as Suskind put it, "Nothing to worry about. Whereas
[President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great
Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street
and famously said, 'I welcome their hate,' Obama was saying, 'How can
I help?' "
"The sense of everyone after the meeting," one leading banker told
Suskind, "was relief. The president had us at a moment of real
vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just
about anything, and we would have rolled over. But he didn't-he mostly
wanted to help us out, to quell the mob."
The massive taxpayer bailout of the super fat cats would continue,
along with numerous other forms of corporate welfare for the powerful
and parasitic super-rich. This state-capitalist largesse was
unaccompanied by any serious effort to regulate their conduct or by
any remotely comparable bailout for the millions evicted from their
homes and jobs by the not-so-invisible hand of the marketplace. No
wonder 95 percent of national U.S. income gains
(http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/
) went to the top 1 percent during Obama's first term.
'Plenty of Money to Spend When the Right People Want It'
It was a revealing moment. With (to repeat) Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress and an angry, "pitchfork"-wielding populace at
the gates, an actually progressive President Obama could have rallied
the populace to push back against the nation's concentrated wealth and
power structures by moving ahead aggressively with a number of
policies: a stimulus with major public works jobs programs, a real
(single-payer) health insurance reform, the serious disciplining and
even break-up or nationalization of the leading financial
institutions, massive federal housing assistance and mortgage relief,
and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have once
again legalized union organizing in the U.S. But no such policy
initiatives issued from the new White House. Obama and his Citigroup-
and Goldman Sachs-appointed team opted instead to pick up the ball
from Dubya in giving the U.S. populace what William Greider memorably
called "a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't."
Americans "watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial
interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned," Greider wrote,
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR200
903190 2511.html ) "that government has plenty of money to spend when
the right people want it . 'Where's my bailout,' became the rueful
punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide. Then
to deepen the insult, people watched as establishment forces
re-launched their campaign for 'entitlement reform' - a euphemism for
whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid."
Americans also watched as Obama passed a health insurance reform
(https://www.amazon.com/Empires-New-Clothes-Barack-Obama/dp/1594518459
) (the so-called Affordable Care Act) that only the big insurance and
drug companies could love, kicking the popular alternative
(single-payer "Medicare for all") to the curb while rushing to pass a
program drafted by the Republican Heritage Foundation and first
carried out in Massachusetts by the arch 1 percenter Mitt Romney.
As the retired and veteran Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren notes in
his indispensable book "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution
and the Rise of a Shadow Government
(https://www.amazon.com/Deep-State-Constitution-Shadow-Government/dp/0
143109
936) " (2016), "In 2008, Barack Obama the change agent ran against the
legacy of George W. Bush. But when he assumed office his policies in
the areas of national security and financial regulation were
strikingly similar.
Even the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans vilify with
uncontrollable rage, is hardly different in outline from Bush's
Medicare [legislation] (both expand medical coverage by subsidizing
Bargain"
Lofgren is critical of Obama's liberal defenders, who blame all his
failures on Republican obstruction. "They forget" Lofgren rightly
notes, "that during his first two years in office, he had a Democratic
majority in Congress."
'To Administer an Entrenched System'
In the summer of 2011, Obama offered the Republicans bigger cuts in
Social Security and Medicare than they asked for as part of his "Grand
puthasn't.
forward amidst the elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis. It was
after this point that hundreds of thousands of mostly younger
Americans had received enough of Greider's "blunt lesson" to join the
Occupy Wall Street Movement, which sought progressive change through
direct action and social movement-building rather than
corporate-captive electoral politics. We will never know how far
Occupy might have gone. It was shut down by a federally coordinated
campaign of repression that joined the Obama administration and
hundreds of mostly Democratic city governments in the infiltration,
surveillance, smearing, takedown and eviction of the short-lived
movement
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the
-polic
e-crackdown-on-occupy/) -this even as the Democrats stole some of
Occupy's rhetoric for use against Romney and the Republicans in 2012.
After his re-election, Obama spoke to some of his rich friends at an
event called The Wall Street Journal CEO Council. "When you go to
other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and
wider. Here in America, the difference between Democrats and
Republicans-we're fighting inside the 40-yard lines. . People call me
a socialist sometimes. But no, you've got to meet real socialists.
(Laughter.) I'm talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My
health care reform is based on the private marketplace." It was a
"touching ruling class moment
(https://socialistworker.org/2013/12/11/meet-the-real-socialists) ,"
wrote Danny Katch, author of "America's Got Democracy."
The rightward policy drift got worse until Obama was a full-on lame
duck and could make some more progressive-sounding noises with
knowledge that nothing he claimed to be for (like an increase in the
federal minimum wage) was in danger of being passed. By Lofgren's
insider account in "The Deep State":
For six years running, Obama sought bipartisan compromise with the
deluded persistence of Captain Ahab, despite abundant evidence that
the GOP was in no mood for it. . After frittering away those six years
when he had at least one house of Congress in Democratic hands, Obama
emerged from the 2014 midterm debacle with an epiphany: now was the
time to display the populist president that his supporters thought
they had elected in 2008. . There was only one problem: how was a lame
duck president going to get this agenda through the most numerically
dominant Republican Congress since 1929? That absurd dilemma sums up
the reality of his presidency. . Obama.may be, like Napoleon III, a
sphinx without a riddle: merely an ambitious politician who tested
well with focus groups, and who arrived at just the right moment,
promising hope and change as a pretext to administer an entrenched
system without any conviction.
The only part of Lofgren's passage I might take some issue with is the
phrase "without any conviction." Obama brought a fair amount of
capitalist, imperialist, neoliberal and even subtly white-supremacist
conviction to his privilege-serving role. Read his deeply conservative
and American exceptionalist, Ronald Reagan-praising 2006 campaign
book, "The Audacity of Hope," or any of the speeches Obama gave to
elite business and foreign policy groups during his years as a U.S.
senator and presidential candidate (I covered all that material at
length in "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics").
Candidate Obama bent over backward to distance himself from "angry"
black calls for racial justice and equality, preening as a
"post-racial" leader ready and willing to blame poor blacks for their
position at the bottom of American society (this too is covered at
length in my 2008 book. See the third chapter, titled "How Black is
Obama? Color, Class, Generation and the Perverse Racial Politics of
the Post-Civil Rights Era").
And recall that Obama spent no small part of his last years in office
trying to pass the secretive, undemocratic and global-corporatist
Trans-Pacific Partnership
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/19/progressive-obama-hes-melting-
hes-me
lting/) .
'We're Worse Off Than Before'
How strange after all this to hear the liberal black author Ta-Nehisi
Coates recently proclaim
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/obamas-unique-background-shaped-outloo
k-race
/) that Donald Trump is the radical backlash "price we have to pay"
for Obama's "revolutionary" presidency. "Revolutionary," that is,
simply because Obama was half-black.
I wonder if Coates caught The New York Times' memorable report
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/many-in-milwaukee-neighborhood-d
idnt-v
ote-and-dont-regret-it.html?_r=0) on widespread black non-voting in
Milwaukee (the most populous state in the contested state of
Wisconsin) during the 2016 election. By the account of Times reporter
Sabrina Tavernise after a visit to the heavily segregated city of
Milwaukee's black North
Side:
At Upper Cutz, a bustling barbershop in a green-trimmed wooden house,
talk of politics inevitably comes back to one man: Barack Obama. Mr.
Obama's elections infused many here with a feeling of connection to
national politics they had never before experienced. But their lives
have not gotten appreciably better, and sourness has set in.
"We went to the beach," said Maanaan Sabir, 38, owner of the Juice
Kitchen, a brightly painted shop a few blocks down West North Avenue,
using a metaphor to describe the emotion after Mr. Obama's election.
"And then eight years happened."
All four barbers had voted for Mr. Obama. But only two could muster
the enthusiasm to vote this time. And even then, it was a sort of
protest. One wrote in Mrs. Clinton's Democratic opponent, Senator
Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The other wrote in himself.
"I'm so numb," said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He
said no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the
lives of black people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice.
"It's like I should have known this would happen. We're worse off than
before."
"Mr. Fleming, 47, who has been trimming hair, beards and mustaches for
30 years, had hoped his small business would get easier to run. But it
suppression.
"Give us loans, or a 401(k),' he said. . His biggest issue was health
insurance. Mr. Fleming lost his coverage after his divorce three years
ago and has struggled to find a policy he could afford. He finally
found one, which starts Monday but costs too much at $300 a month.
"Ain't none of this been working," he said. He did not vote.
There's a real and nationwide material-economic basis for such complaints.
By the fifth year of Obama's presidency, U.S. black households' net
worth had fallen to 1/13th of the wealth of U.S. white households
(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama
-faile
d-black-americans/511358/) at the median. This helped generate a
sense of futility about voting among black citizens-a sense that
contributed significantly to Mrs. Clinton's failure to recreate the
electoral coalition that elected Obama in 2008 and 2012. Talk about vote
(The smart reparations advocate Coates knows all this, of course. He
persists, nonetheless, in seeing Obama's presidency as racially
"revolutionary" because of its symbolic significance. But even the
symbolic victory was a double-edged sword. "For many white Americans,"
the black economist William Darity Jr. has noted, Obama's "elections
confirmed their belief that American racism is a thing of the past.")
'Three Tours in Iraq and No Bailout for People Like Us'
Yes, it's true that Obama won a second term with a convincing victory
over Mitt Romney in 2012. But Romney was a perfect foil for the fake
populism the Democrats were brandishing in the wake of the Occupy
Movement they helped crush the previous year. Romney was like
something out of central casting when it came to helping the Democrats
pose as a party of the people. He was a rigidly aristocratic and
super-wealthy Wall Street Republican who was dumbly caught on a smart
phone calling "47 percent" of the U.S. population lazy moochers and
welfare cheats. Throw in the Mormon thing and the Obama two-peat was
an easy slam dunk. Who knows how a more charismatic and "authentic"
Republican opponent might have done in 2012?
The misery and betrayal of the working class (both white and nonwhite)
continued apace without serious presidential opposition during Obama's
second term. So did the savage upward concentration of wealth and
income; the deadly expansion of the permanent U.S. imperial war
machine; the systematic deportation of millions of "illegal" Latinos;
the hyper-segregation, shakedown and militarized policing of black
ghettoes; the neglect and suffering of Native America; the relentless
federal subsidization of parasitic finance; the creation of millions
of precarious low-paid, no-benefit, part-time and contract jobs
(http://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all-job-growt
h-duri
ng-obama-era-part-time,-contract-work-449057) ; mass debt servitude;
ridiculously high health care costs and college tuition; the "geocidal"
cooking of the planet by Big Carbon.
In the excellent 2016 movie "Hell or High Water
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/08/12/hell-or-hi
gh-wat
er-may-be-the-first-great-film-about-the-failed-economic-recovery/?utm
_term=
.55278a9f9f47 ) ," the following complaint is written on the side of a
building in a depressed eastern Texas farm town: "Three tours in Iraq
but no bailout for people like us." That sums up the
neoliberal-imperial era as experienced by the nation's "heartland"
working class and epitomized by the age of Obama. American government
has billions, nay, trillions of dollars to spend on rescuing and
recapitalizing giant parasitic financial institutions, restoring
outrageous Wall Street "compensation" levels, overturning the Libyan
government, destabilizing Syria, militarizing Africa, undermining
Venezuela, occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing governments in
Honduras and Ukraine, and on keeping "more people in prison than any
other country, including China, which has four times our population,"
writes Lofgren. It has nothing really for the nation's hard-working
and increasingly surplus everyday people, a remarkable number of whom
are thrown into jail and prison for victimless crimes like drug
possession. The financial executives who criminally crashed the
economy and threw millions out of their homes and out of jobs continue
to escape prosecution. They live in style above the law.
One does not deny the catastrophe that is the incoming Trump
administration by saying good riddance to the Obama administration.
The two presidencies are joined at the capitalist, imperialist and
white-supremacist Deep State hip along with all the other dismal
presidencies of the long neoliberal era, starting with Jimmy Carter.
Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, tea partyers and now the noxious,
geocidal atrocity that is the forthcoming Donald Trump presidency.
Trump is what America gets after "the inauthentic opposition"
party makes it into the White House.
The resistance we need to form against Trump and Trumpism must not
repeat the mistakes of the past. It must not allow itself to be
hijacked by the dismal dollar Dems and their timid centrist and
electoral nothingness, which only pushes the country further in the
same direction as the arrow on Hillary's 2016 campaign poster-to the
right.
Chris Hedges: The War in Vietnam, Like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars,
'Is One Long Atrocity' (Video)
The Chinese Solar Juggernaut That Donald Trump Can't Stop (Video)
Rick Perry Doled Out Billions in Grants and Tax Incentives for
Corporations While Governor of Texas
NBC Hires Megyn Kelly, Racist Attitudes and All
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