Barack Obama finally got the grand, bipartisan consensus he’s been working towards for two and a half years. His implacable, deep-seated hostility to the left half of the Democratic Party (“retarded,” said his boy, Rahm Emanuel) – which includes most of the Congressional Black Caucus – transformed a 2008 popular mandate for progressive change into its opposite: a de facto center-right governing coalition of Republicans, rightwing Democrats and Obama’s Executive Branch arrayed against roughly half the Democrats (on a very good day) in the House of Representatives, plus a handful of liberal Senators.
Obama’s unrelenting hostility to “entitlements,” which he vowed to put “on the table” for cutting two weeks before taking the oath of office in January, 2009, came to fruition this week, setting in motion a rolling implosion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. It is a monumental catastrophe, worthy of a Mt. Rushmore in reverse (say, deep in a guano-filled bat cave). History will, without doubt, lay this ruin of a nation at the doorstep of Obama, the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse whose complexional characteristics neutered, neutralized or outright made insane the bulk of Black America and most of those whites that pass as “progressives.”
Black Agenda Report and author Paul Street, among a very few others, warned long before the 2007 launch of Obama’s campaign that his own words, deeds, financial contributors and political associations showed him to be an eager operative of Wall Street and the Pentagon. As president, Obama has embraced or launched so many wars, he feels compelled to deny that his latest aggression, against Libya, is a war at all, lest he seem too full of bloodlust. Under the austerity regime jointly imposed by Obama and the GOP (his “Big Plan”) through a manufactured debt crisis (abetted by Obama over the years), the actual reins of the legislative process will pass to a Super Committee, a formalized version of the center-right senatorial “gangs” (health care and debt) and appointed commissions (debt reduction) favored by Obama as embodiments of his “grand consensus” politics. The formula guarantees a shutout of the Left – although, as long as Obama is around, the corporate media will continue to claim, nonsensically, that he represents the Left.
