blackascoal
The Force is With Me
Democrats could accomplish nothing during the Bush years, they told us, for the first six years because they were a minority, and during the last two because Republicans could filibuster. Now, with both houses of congress, a filibuster-proof senate majority and a "transformative leader" in the White House Democrats can only continue the wars, the privatizations, the torture, coverups and kidnapping. In power, Obama and Democrats can bail out Wall Street but not homeowners; they cannot accomplish anything voters want, like universal health care, Medicare For All. Some Democratic activists are sobering up, looking around, and heading for the exits.
Somewhere there's a president who stands up for homeowners facing bankruptcy and eviction. Somewhere there is a transformative leader who fights to deliver hope, universal health care and equal rights for everybody, who will bring the troops home from Iraq and other places and who is a relentless foe of Wall Street's excesses. This president's very career is a repudiation of racism, ancient injustice and unearned privilege. Of course, that guy is not the president of the U.S. He's the president of an imaginary realm we call Obamaland.
In Obamaland, the president never keeps the truth from us except to deprive the nation's enemies of more bad things to say about us, because he's so busy looking forward. Crimes maybe, are in the past, hope is in the future, right? In Obamaland the president isn't to blame if the wars continue and the troops don't come home, and the government keeps kidnapping and torturing people --- he didn't exactly say all that would stop right away if at all anyhow, did he, really? In Obamaland,all this can be overlooked or forgiven, or at least put off till Democrats somehow obtain a bigger advantage than a mere crushing majority in the House, sixty votes in the Senate, and a new president.
And in Obamaland, even though the president told us to judge his first term on whether he delivers effective, affordable health care to millions of Americans including the uninsured, it's not the president's fault if he appears to moonwalk away from a health care bill to a health insurance bill, from single payer to a public option, to insurance co-ops, and to a plan that doesn't cover the uninsured till 2013.
We could go on for quite a while --- and actually we have been for several years now, about how this mystical, magical place called Obamaland was conceived and constructed, and marketed as the answer to the abuses of the Bush years.
Back in June of 2003, when Glen Ford and I introduced Barack Obama to our audience at Black Commentator, he was a Democratic primary election candidate for the US Senate in Illinois. Candidate Obama, we noted at the time, seemed to be playing a double game. He offered progressive, black and antiwar constituencies a hook just big enough to hang their hopes on, while through his affiliation with the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council, Obama actively courted the support of the full range of corporate America, from the energy, insurance, military contractors and financial sectors to the airlines and Wall Street. This video clip of a much longer interview with BAR executive editor Glen Ford explains how we discovered Obama's affiliation with the Democratic Leadership Council, along with his apparent repudiation of his previous criticism of the Iraq war in the wake of Bush's declaration that Iraq was a “Mission Accomplished.”
-- more at link
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/leaving-obamaland
Throughout my time watching the mindfuck that is politics in America, nothing has been more clear or obvious then the truth than Obama is and always has been a frontman for the plutocracy.
