100 Days of Marketing Obama

[Peter Presland]

As a non-US citizen I hesitate with posts that may appear to lecture/hector/judge - whatever - US citizens on US politics. However, the nature of the US as aggressive world hegemon inevitably invites keen interest in its internal politics from outsiders. I am acutely aware that this can lay one open to patriotic emotional charges of 'anti-Americanism' so, for the record I am NOT 'anti-American'. I have some very good American friends and some of the very best US-critical geo-political and Deep-State research and analysis originates in the US. So, with that out of the way, here is another scathing view of Obama's first 100 days - From an American woman too would you believe. Her style is a sort of RAP-verse and it can ve VERY effective.

Another source of prescient Obama criticism from the American left is Dennis Perrin's Blog and I heartily recommend his book 'Savage Mules' for a devastating deconstruction of the Democratic presidential campaign and the incipient Obama presidency well before it got fully under way


By Vi Ransel

5/7/09

Obama’s coterie of courtiers
sings his praises as he picks a fight
with the “formidable” power
of organized labor,
knocking the UAW to its knees.
He was supposed to be
the people’s savior.

The press and the pundits laud his skill
in handling the betrayed expectations
of the “common” people,
as if the people, unionized, or not,
were the power pulling the strings
in Washington and not the Ministers
of MOLOCH and MAMMON dwelling on Wall Street,

and beyond them, the invisible men
behind the Davos, Trilateral,
Bilderberger and CFC curtains.

Obama was elected
to protect and serve state capitalism,
to provide a curtain of legitimacy
for the undemocratic supremacy
of a savage class system
undergirding the privileges of the plutocracy.

Their president took in 38 million.
He set a record for campaign contributions
from F.I.R.E., the finance,
insurance and real estate industries,
since G. Sax and Morgan Stanley
weren’t putting the reins into anyone’s hands
who wasn’t wholly owned
by the Empire of Financial Inequality.

So we have no right
to be disappointed or surprised
(so said Naomi Klein).
Obama telegraphed his perfidy perfectly
from his very first slick and manipulative line.

He fed us “hope” and “change”
which were public relations slogans,
tokens tossed to us. Oh, it was very clear.
And the message was hand-delivered to us
by advertising’s 2008 Marketer of the Year.

Then he recruited the agents
of the people’s economic enemies,
tainted officials who stink to high heaven
of brown-nosing the worst of the plutocracy:

Emanuel, Geithner and Summers.
Schapiro, Vilsack and Duncan.
Salazar, Orszag and Volcker.
Patterson, Locke, Romer and Furman.

They don’t even try to hide it any more.
And if you look carefully
at the White House and Congress at night,
you’ll see the faint, proprietary glow
of a neon sign beginning to glow harshly and brighten.

It says “These institutions
are now fully-owned subsidiaries
of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America,
Citibank and Chase, Morgan Stanley.

Obama’s tepid and tawdry stimulus package
is dwarfed by his homage to the banks,
because the mission of “The Mask”,
as I like to call him,
was, is and always will be
to put a more benevolent smirk
on the brute face of capitalism.

And what passes for The Left
in this country has no backbone,
and demands nothing at all
from their “respresentatives”
than that they are careful
to call themselves Democrats,
because the name is all
that differentiates them from Republicans.
And this allows our corporate owners
to put in place
whatever “conservative solutions
to radical problems” that might please them. (1)

And the anti-war movement in America
has been effectively neutered,
since an “imperialist with charm,
a warmonger with a winning smile,
(in the disguise of progressivism)
Obama has whipped them…good.” (2)

The Left, the pundits and the press
are seriously delusional if they believe
the fairy tales they feed to the rest of us.
We all need a basic lesson about threat,
action and social disruption’s effectiveness,

because that’s the only way working people
ever got any change at all,
by forcing it from the bottom up
and being willing to go over the wall.

The 30s and the 60s were the last time
the plutocracy paid any attention,
because they encountered rebellion from below.
That’s the only way real change ever happens.

Our legislation is written by lobbyists
to the specifications
of corporations that demand it.
And its passage ensured
by our erstwhile “representatives”
that K Street has roped, tied,
bought and branded.

We allow this because
we’ve been socially-engineered
to be obedient peasants,
who’d never take their anger out
on their lords’ and masters’ excesses.

Instead we turn on each other
rather than the Robber Barons on Wall Street,
who are the ones who are fucking us over,
not our neighbors here on Main Street.

And we rant and rave at starving farmers
driven here from Mexico by NAFTA
at the behest of our low wage-seeking,
craven, corporate masters.

Though we need a target for our frustration,
we won’t/can’t take it out on the bankers,
but we need some place to deposit
all our burgeoning, free-floating anger.

So Massa picks a strawman for us,
the “losers” in foreclosure,
greedy Social Security recipients,
“overpaid” auto workers,

Afghan and Iraqi resistance fighters
busy ousting the occupiers of their countries,
anyone but the cause of all our misery,
since we’re submissive, corporate abuse stone junkies.

And when the mass of American peasants
is confronted by the visage of “The Rich”,
the shucking, the bowing and the groveling
rise to an awesome fever pitch,
as we bend over and do all we’re allowed to,
kiss capitalism’s big, black leather whip.


(1) Robert Kuttner
(2) Glen Ford