In fact, it can’t be any other way (it terms of the dominance of the ideas of the ruling class), since if the interests of the ruling class are opposed to those of the working class, and the ruling ideas (common sense, etc) of society were not those of the ruling class, then it would be easy to organize a revolution, since it would be common sense for most people to do so.

So the dominance of ruling class ideas is one tendency. Another ID’d by Marx is the tendency for the contradictions of capitalism to push people to develop working class consciousness. When people see homeless people on the one hand and empty houses on the other; when they see people starving while there is plenty to go around; while billions are wasted on useless wars while millions lack healthcare; when they read the news and see the economic crisis, proof that capitalism cannot even consistently function on its own terms: this provides an ideological and political opening for an alternative set of ideas.

It was the latter that Marx spent his life trying to spread in books and in the streets.

uncle sam had always one party, one army, etc. thnx

Obama is a tool to help inhibit or delay mass panic, especially among Americans, but also worldwide. His role is to make the little people think that government is on their side, even as governments serving the interests of the financial elite prepare for collapse. The goal is to pacify and even stupify the masses with hopes of change they can believe in, while simultaneously bringing the system to a controlled crash for as long as possible.

And the masses seem to want this sort of treatment. They want to believe in change, and do not want to see that the change that is really occurring is not the change they are bargaining for.

The elite know that the population of the planet, for instance, is well over the sustainable carrying capacity. They know that the collapse of the financial systems and the diminishing availability of petroleum resources, especially cheap resources, means that the current phantom carrying capacity of the planet for mankind will shrink rapidly and soon. Many humans will die in the next few decades (or sooner) until a static level of no more than one or two billion humans will be reached.

The trick for the elite is to keep people pacified as long as possible, and then when all hell breaks loose, duck for cover, use their private militias to protect themselves in defensible enclaves, and wait out the storm for a period of time until statis is reached.

Obama is part of the program and he plays his role well. He pushes the right buttons and cynically manipulates the masses while he winks and nods at his wealthy financiers.

How could it be any other way?

Obama promises an end to combat, but the words are shallow and meaningless. 50,000 US troops left in Iraq are not needed to train Iraqi troops, but to guarantee submission of the Iraqi government.
Every “improvement” that Obama supporters credit to their hero has a caveat that partially or potenially wholly invalidates it in real terms.

But the Obamamaniacs hear what they want to hear and believe that he is telling them what they are yearning for. The truth is quite different.
And some of us have seen this propensity all during the campaign and realized all along that Obama is a snake oil salesman, a cheerleader for Empire, a protector of the status quo, and a pretend “friend” of people of his color and people of the working class and the poor.

Obama has NOT told the truth or even overtly discussed Peak Oil. His solutions to global climate change are those of the status quo and the financial elite and offer no real benefit to solving the problem itself. Obama protects the bankers and financiers who maliciously used the influence to downgrade government regulation and then exploited their ability to make gigantic gobs of money for themselves at the expense of the vast majority of Americans who were conned into massive debt enslavement.

Obama says one thing, but means another and does another, and yet he has bamboozled his delirious followers into self-harm even as he plots more of the same.

America gets what it deserves and Obama is what America has chosen and will have to face the consequences for. We are at the stage of American history where big bubbles will finally break and the potential of America will be revealed as finally lost and never regained.

Things are going to get very ugly within the next year or two, and Obama will backtrack from his stated agenda even as he blames forces beyond his control for the predictable failures of his policies. If and when the American people wake up, they will find themselves in a situation not unlike the citizens of Iraq with a devastated infrastructure and imploded economy and no way to rebuild at previous scales whatsoever. The American Dream will have died under the first black president and all the elation will have turned into sorrow.

Things could have been much better if Cynthia McKinney had been elected, but there was no chance in hell that a black (or white) person of character and honesty could achieve the presidency.

PS. DV commenters to this article. Your comments will be automatically included at OEN, as of the time I submit it there tomorrow morning.

As Rodrigue Tremblay, a Canadian economist <a href=”http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/obama-like-bush-is-throwing-public-money-into-a-black-hole/”/a>. “The ratio of total debt to the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is now higher than it was in 1933, when it reached the lofty and unsustainable level of 299.8 percent. It took nearly twenty years to bring down the debt/GDP ratio to below 140 in 1952. In the second quarter of 2008, all debt records were broken when the total debt ratio in the U.S. registered at 356,7 percent of GDP. If the same process of unwinding of excessive debt level plays itself out this time, this could translate into a debt deflation process lasting possibly until 2027!”

For another thing, there is little in the way of a working class consciousness that existed in the 30′s. That was essentially killed by the post WWII purge of radicals from the unions and subsequent cooptation of union hierarchy by corporations that transformed union bosses into corporate friendly labor managers.

Hence I don’t believe that Obamamania will last long enough for the ruling class to save itself. That begs the question, what happens next? I think that the solution that the US ruling class will opt for is the fascist one as they chose in Germany and Italy in the 30s. Bush put in place all the police state apparatus in terms of prisons and laws (Patriot Acts) to make this easy to accomplish.

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Yes, it is pathetic, isn’t it. All of this fawning over messiah Obama. That’s exactly how many so-called “liberals” and so-called “progressive” see this man. As some messiah. I don’t understand it, other than some/many people seem to need someone to worship and they need a savior and he has a D behind his name. That is sufficient. I heard one talk show host ask his audience during the campaign if they really thought anything would change with either Obama or Clinton in the White House? He was essentially saying: Don’t expect anything to change. But since that time, he has drunk the kool-aid. Now he doesn’t want to say anything negative about his messiah/savior. The other night he said that he couldn’t imagine messiah (well, he said Obama) continuing anything that Bush did. (Sigh.) After messiah rushed to kill innocent people in Pakistan this talk show host tried to justify that by saying, “it MUST be left over from Bush.” Uh no. If you recall Mr Talk Show Host, messiah talked about attacking Pakistan and Iran during the campaign. So why would you think it’s left over from Bush especially considering Bush’s Robert Gates is at messiah’s side? And if it were “left over from Bush” don’t you think your messiah would have the sense to make a statement to the world saying that?

I was on the forum for this talk show host the other day and it was a very negative experience. They couldn’t stand me referring to Obama as messiah. They called it a “right-wing talking point.” I’ve only noticed some progressives using the term. I don’t know what the right-wing is using because I don’t pay attention to them. I was called the usual stuff: a Republican, a right-winger trying to spew Republican talking points. When reality, I’m a true progressive, vegetarian, independent and I voted for Nader/Gonzalez.

I don’t know how long this messiah-fest will continue. I expect at least 2 more years. There is an anti-war protest/demonstration in March, but I’d imagine it would not be very well attended because the Obamabots will not want to protest their lord and savior. But if it were Bush doing these same things, it would be a different story. It’s called switching, based on party-line.

You might want to check these out:

http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2008/02/barack-obamas-messiah-complex

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2008/02/obama_the_messiah.html

The organization mentioned by Mr. Page are dubious on its face. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink deliberately sabotaged the Green Party in 2004 and Code Pink’s theatrics has done nothing to build solidarity which is needed in order to alter the course where things are going. MoveOn and the Progressive Democrats are too wedded to the Zionist loving Democratic Party to really push for new directions on Middle East policies and even to challenge Zionism and Capitalism within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Much of the Left has been extremely late educating the American people about the ills of the Fed and its debt-based control of the economy which was constructed siphon wealth from workers to the rich. The organization sited by Mr. Page are “elitist” and really has no affinity with the working class which is why the he gets the kind of responses he is critical about.

For example Democracy Now on the issue of the economic collapse has yet to interview any radical or Marxist economist. Such a perspective is missing from the line-up of liberal/”progressive” economists that has been paraded to explain the crisis on the show. Such “progressive” voices and phony leftists such as Noam Chomsky are all perpetrators of the miseducation of the American people that it is no wonder they are ignorant and act against their best interest and are distrustful of sound ideas.

Before people can take real action they must be educated. Unfortunately that education will most likely come in the form of further degradation of their economic conditions. At that point they may “rediscover” Marx.

But the real problem as it stands is not Obama but the lack of SOLIDARITY and the drive to retard solidarity especially by certain members pretending to be on the “Left” and especially the avoidance of building solidarity with people of color. None of the organization sited by Mr. Page has a history of working with communities of color. This vacuity in Mr. Page’s analysis looms large especially since it is in Latin America where the greatest changes and challenges to neoliberal capitalism is occurring.

Chicken Little Politics: Moderate Obama Causes Progressive Panic

Free at Last? No!

he saw obvious. to observe it, all one needed was ?total freedom from religion and ‘education’
i, self, had three yrs schooling and finished last in each class.

he saw that basics structure of society had not changed anywhere. and upon this, he predicted that as the wealth increases, lower classes wld weaken and higher classes strenghten.

prestidigitation by higher classes, renders out of simplicity a complexity and out of a complexity a simplicity.
and well ‘educated’ child or even adult is made to evaluate exactly as s/he is programed to evaluate.
and you got self a serf for a life time! thnx