Adolph Reed, Jr. has never been fooled by Barack Obama:
“He’s a vacuous opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.”
This has been confirmed ever since Obama chose his cabinet, and the reality just keeps getting repeated by Obama himself. The neoliberalism (not my favorite word — I prefer plain old “capitalist,” or even “market totalitarian,” both of which are less confusing and more penetrating) is an article of faith with this empty vessel/mainstream Democrat.
First, there was the recent “We believe in capitalism; we believe in people getting rich” profession of the Faith.
Now, it’s quite literally church time.
And the head preacher’s core message is the same old tired, outdated, utterly disproven one that capitalists and their minions always preach: capitalists need more money.
This claim has been around for ages. In Das Kapital, Marx ripped into its expression as the early 19th-century businessman’s dogma known as Say’s Law. A century later, when the dim war criminal Ronald Reagan took office and began fronting for corporate capitalism’s Great Restoration, “Say’s Law” was repackaged as “supply-side economics.” Ever since then, as Big Money has enjoyed unbroken market-totalitarian conditions, all “serious” politicians have had to pass this litmus test. Even if they don’t openly preach “supply-side economics,” each aspiring “major” leader must adhere to capital’s insistence that the one and only possible cause of economic problems within capitalism is insufficient money at the top, in the hands of the overclass.
Think Obama sees through this sociopathic mantra? Think again. Here is what he is now preaching to us from in front of stained-glass windows:
And since the problems we face are all working off each other to feed a vicious economic downturn, we’ve had no choice but to attack all fronts of our economic crisis at once. The first step was to fight a severe shortage of demand in the economy. The Federal Reserve did this by dramatically lowering interest rates last year in order to boost investment.
How do you combat a severe shortage of demand — i.e., the lack of buying power among the masses of ordinary product-purchasers? That’s right: You make sure the investing class has more money! Then they’ll…
And there’s the rub. The obvious problem is that the rich are too rich for their own good. Capital, as it usually does, got what it asked for, and now it is too powerful. The overclass has, once again (think 1873-1893 and 1929-1940), won its own poker game.
As a result, there are really only two possible ways out of this New Depression: 1) the temporary fix of a new round of credit-cards for the commoners, or 2) major economic reforms plus a big new dose class-struggle-from-below.
Alas, Obama, for all his supposed smarts and “community” compassion, is unable and/or unwilling to understand this, being the social-climbing mainstream Great Restoration/market-totalitarian politician that he is. He simply ain’t gonna do it, folks, no matter how much pain he has to pretend to feel. Like all good New Democrats, he will choose ignominious defeat over opening the slightest crack toward questioning the system. Just listen to him.
Despite the continuing complacency of his entranced supporters, Obama is proving, as Reed has long argued, that he’s 100 percent hopeless in this core area of our collective conundrum. He is indeed a vacuous neoliberal opportunist.
I have the strong feeling that 2010 is going to look a lot like 1994. And God only knows what we’ll get in 2012, if people don’t rise up and fight this corporate bullshit . . .