The president has been mouthing this sort of progressive-sounding rhetoric for some time now......Nice. Too bad about his presidency. “Our black president” (as the progressive editor and commentator Matthew Rothschild mistakenly called Obama in October of 2010)[13] has belonged to Wall Street and corporate America from the start. With its expansion of the monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down parasitic financial institutions, its passage of a health “reform” bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love (consistent with Rahm Emmanuel’s advice to the president: “ignore the progressives”), its cutting of an auto bailout deal that raided union pension funds and rewarded capital flight, its undermining of global carbon emission reduction efforts at Copenhagen, its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its green-lighting of escalated strip mining and hazardous deepwater oil drilling, its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?), its freezing of federal wages and salaries, its appointment of a Deficit Reduction Commission “headed by avowed enemies of Social Security” (to quote left economist Michael Hudson), its cutting of a deficit reduction deal was that all about slashing social spending instead of raising taxes on the rich, its refusal to embrace the remarkable 2011 public worker rebellion against the epic union-busting efforts of Wisconsin’s hard right Governor Scott Walker, its role in coordinating the militarized police-state assault on Occupy Movements across the U.S. and much more terrible to mention,[14] Obama’s “change” and “hope” presidency epitomized the power of what the radical critics Edward S. Herman and David Peterson have called the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money.”[15] During the sleazy soap opera that was the reactionary, elite-manufactured “debt-ceiling crisis” last summer, it is worth recalling, the “progressive” Obama was ready to advance massive cuts in Medicare and Social Security that went beyond what the rightmost of the two dominant parties was seeking.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 23:14:15 +0000
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