Is Obama Really the "Lesser Evil"?
With intellectual and ideological elitism,
an aura of superiority and academic smugness,
he has bambozzled millions of people who are so
disillusioned with our corrupt political system that
they have been manipulated by vacuous promises of change
The Cynicism of Hope
If you like cynicism in politics, you’ve got to love Barack Obama. There’s nothing naïve or fanciful about the way he says one thing to one audience and another thing to a different voter or funding group.
It’s all about cold calculation under the perverse, narrow-spectrum, and “winner-take-all” rules of the United States’ corporate-crafted elections system.
Obama: “Our Greatest Asset Is Capitalism"
In his remarkably power-friendly campaign book The Audacity of Hope (New York: 2006), Obama praised the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation – the United States – for the glorious workings of its savagely regressive capitalist system.
“It takes a trip overseas,” Obama said, “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,” Obama added, “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.”
How about that?
Never mind 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 untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, and Palestinian civilians.
Obama’s Audacity left it to what he considers the lunatic left fringe to note the American System’s “efficient” allocation of half the nation’s wealth to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of the common good to private profit.
“Unreasonable” Marxists, anarchists and “conspiracy theorists” were left to observe that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal “individual initiative” from millions of American workers.
They are 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 – that working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great “democracy” Obama trumpets as the Founders’ great legacy.
Obama Is Deeply Conservative & Reactionary
Beneath peaceful and populist-sounding claims to the contrary, Obama is largely on the dark side of power when it comes to each of what King called "the triple evils that are interrelated:" racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism.
It's not for nothing that Obama was tellingly portrayed last May as "deeply conservative" in a supposedly flattering New Yorker write-up titled "The Conciliator".
It’s an accurate description, but you probably wouldn’t know it from a speech he gives to black voters he’s courting in a South Carolina church... or to deluded, star-struck progressives in predominantly white Super Tuesday college towns.
Such is the harsh, cold, and cynical underlying reality of the Obama phenomenon, deeply reflective of the corporate, imperial and “winner-take-all” political institutions and culture its standard bearer falsely claims to have risen above.
Bambozzled
This general election more than most will test the courage of voters to avoid lesser-evil strategic voting that has propped up our two-party plutocracy.
People with intelligence and conscience must resist peer pressure and the temptation to vote against John McCain by voting for Barack Obama.
Of course, a McCain presidency that pursues much of the same policies and values of the totally inept and morally bankrupt Bush administration is something to loathe. But lesser-evil voting sustains our corrupt political system.
Many say they are voting for Barack Obama in a most enthusiastic and positive way. For me, this does not work.
I see no compelling evidence in Obama's history that he has what it takes to be a true, solid reformer.
All I see is a young, inexperienced terrific talker that has used slick rhetoric to sell himself.
With intellectual and ideological elitism and an aura of superiority and academic smugness, he has successfully fooled millions of people who are so disillusioned with our corrupt political system that they have let themselves be manipulated by poetic promises of change.
In reality, he is just another super-ambitious, lying mainstream politician that has taken considerable money and support from all sorts of corporate and other special interests.
Indeed, despite all the hoopla about huge numbers of small contributors to he has also relied on exactly the same kind of big, wealthy supporters as the other candidates.
As the Washington Post noted in the article Big Donors Among Obama's Grass Roots:
"Seventy-nine 'bundlers,' five of them billionaires, have tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each.
"They have helped the campaign recruit more than 27,000 donors to write checks for $2,300, the maximum allowed.
"Donors who have given more than $200 account for about half of Obama's total haul, which stands at nearly $240 million.
"...The list includes partners from 18 top law firms, 21 Wall Street executives and power brokers from Fortune 500 companies."
Sure, Obama says that small contributors will have access, but Obama's bundlers help make up a more loosely defined "national finance committee," whose members are made to feel part of the campaign's inner workings through weekly conference calls and quarterly meetings at which they quiz the candidate or his strategists. Not exactly what $20 contributors get.
I remain troubled that Michelle Obama's salary at University of Chicago Hospitals when her husband won the US Senate seat was $121,000. Within weeks of his swearing in, her salary went to over $320,000. The following year Obama did an earmark request for $1 million for her employer.
Todd Spivak of the Houston Press has documented how Obama accomplished next to nothing in his first six years in the Illinois legislature.
But then Democrat Emil Jones Jr. an African American with thirty years in the legislature became head of the senate and explicitly decided to make the young Obama a US senator.
He did this by making Obama a sponsor of 26 bills that became law. This gave Obama exactly what he needed to portray himself as a highly successful legislator.
Has Obama repaid Jones? Yes. He has provided tens of millions in earmarks for Jones' district. As to such actions, Jones famously said: "Some call it pork; I call it steak."
Also, Obama's judgments about people he has used to advance his career have been appalling. These include a former domestic terrorist, a radical hate-selling pastor and a federally indicted Chicago wheeler-dealer.
While he talks about bringing diverse interests together, he has never done that to any significant degree as a senator or candidate.
Voters have been divided along race lines whether or not it was planned. If he was not black he would not be getting over 90 percent of the African-American vote, without which he would not have beaten Clinton. There is no valid reason for making someone president because of his race.
Make no mistake; I was never for Clinton either. And I never appreciated why anyone should prefer her because of her sex.
Call me an idealist, but the only candidate for president worth voting for should have nothing to do with their color, gender or religion.
What are better options for voters?
The obvious choice is to boycott the presidential election altogether and not be a co-conspirator in the criminal conspiracy that our two-party political system has become.
It's time to face the ugly reality that voting for Democrats or Republicans will never deliver the root, systemic reforms our failing democracy requires.
