As we have told you good people before, Edward Dowling stated in 1941: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."
If we unselfconsciously treat illusion objectively as a reality, Calinescu states that "we bind ourselves to its nature and become the slaves of a lifeless dogma."
Welcome to ObamaWorld.
In this, the second post of our seasonal trilogy (the first may be located at: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2008/12/rebellion-of-words.html), we address the illusion of ObamaWorld.
Our final triptychal offering in the New Year will depress you about the Depression.
After Sarah Palin was announced as Oven-Chips' running partner, the prediction markets put the two candidates for the US presidency neck-and-neck.
Despite several seriously illegal wars under the Geneva Conventions, despite numerous incursions into sovereign territories (think Ecuador, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Gaza, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Bolivia etc etc etc), despite extraordinary rendition and the liberal use of torture, despite illegal surveillance of its own citizens, despite leading the country and the world to the brink of a Depression, despite ignoring the Malthusian limits of climate change, despite all this, the Republicans stood level with the Democrats going into the final straight.
Then Hank Paulson pushed the Goldman Sachs hidden agenda a shade too far and the inevitable Depression was brought forward.
The meltdown began too early.
So, in the end, Obama wins by 52% to 46%.
This is hardly a landslide or a ringing endorsement.
Its a photo-finish in a racist state.
The marketing of ObamaWorld was based on two delusions - Black and Change.
We have stated on numerous occasions over the last eighteen months that Obama could only become US president if he ceased to be Black.
He achieved this aim.
As for Change, there is no Change.
We'll firstly focus on Obama's financial team and on the financial institutions that bankrolled the early stages of his campaign, before the gullible and the disenfranchised dug deep into their Depression-hit pockets to support the man.
Secondly, we focus on what Obama's election will change globally.
Quoting John Pilger: "Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. 'Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors,' wrote the investigator Pam Martens, 'consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.' A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. 'Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign,' said Obama in January, 'they won't run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.' According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.
Say its not so...
The gullible held their breaths collectively as Obama announced his economic team.
Would he take any actions to introduce non-free market knowledge into the analyses?
Yeah right...
According to the Economist, one hedge fund manager who, prior to the election, was terrified that Obama would introduce confiscatory tax policies and seriously enhanced regulation breathed a sigh of relief. "No Robert Reichs," he said, a reference to the leftish adviser who was Clinton's labour secretary. "There's no radicals in the whole cabinet that anyone can find."
The selection of Larry Summers as director of the National Economic Council is particularly odious.
Summers is like Cheney - he exhibits every possible -ism as a badge of honour and pride. Sexism, elitism, racism, Friedmanism, classism, the man is repugnant.
Check out Mr Summers views on Africa and climate change, for example: "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City."
Summers also backed the law that broke down the barriers between commercial and investment banks - a development that is at the foundation of the current Depression (see recent analyses by Stiglitz).
He still believes that this was the correct decision when everybody now understands that free markets are psychopathically flawed.
Other members of the economic team are hardly more encouraging.
Christina Romer has recently published a paper claiming that raising taxes retards growth while Jason Furman outraged unions with his article, "Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story". Tim Greitner, the Treasury Secretary, is a central banker who has been part of the team that has magnified the impact of the recession into a full Depression with the implementation of the policies of Paulson/Bernanke over the last year and a half.
This should not be a surprise to the blinkered hordes. Throughout the election campaign, Obama surrounded himself with Friedmanists from the Chicago School of free-market ideology.
Change?
Really?
Change?
What about globally? With America's stock at an all-time low, is our right wing free marketeer the man to make real change in, say, Palestine, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Colombia, or Lebanon, or Syria?
And what about the roles of the IMF and the World Bank, and the link between free markets and the collapse of Iceland's entire economy?
Dichotomous and duplicitous...
That is the response of ObamaWorld to global issues.
Far too busy to go through each of these scenarios in detail, so let's just take Palestine.
In his exceedingly elongated interview with Time magazine, Mr Obama devoted just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: "And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that's been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority."
As Robert Fisk states: "What is this man talking about? "Building on progress?" What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel's monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there's 'progress' to build on?"
On June 4th last year, Obama attended the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). During his speech, our agent of Change actually offered some Real Change.
But not of the sort that his supporters might have been expecting...
He promised to support an "undivided Jerusalem" as Israel's capital.
As Pilger notes: "Not a single government on earth supports the Israeli annexation of all of Jerusalem, including the Bush regime, which recognises the UN resolution designating Jerusalem an international city."
Elsewhere?
Pilger, again, "America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist... A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia's borders, the Cold War is back."
Oh, and just before he leaves office, the strange idiot child from Texas authorises the disgusting and illegal zionist genocide that is currently being unleashed in Gaza.
And, meanwhile, the Iraqi's are torturing Muntador al-Zaidi, the complete hero who launched his size tens at that same strange idiot child...
Change?
Really?
Change?
So the state-based economy and the imperial global outreach will continue.
Not Change, but More Of The Same.
In conclusion, we attempt to assess the reason that the World is Upside Down.
Many of the individuals who dominate our planet are under the influence of psychopathic personality disorder (PPDs) - see numerous previous posts.
To deal with these characters, think Bush, Murdoch, Saddam, Paulson, Netanyahu, Madoff, al-Bashir, Cheney, Blair, Kim Jong-il etc etc etc, we need to establish a new PDSA - a People's Dispensary for Sick Antisocials.
How about Bikini Atoll?
But then there is this vast pool of the Acquiescent.
Intellectuals who choose to go along with these propaganda and lies.
They too suffer the dichotomous/duplicitous split in their existence.
How does a scientist equate the search for truth with the suppression of that very same truth once she/he has found it?
What sort of quest for knowledge is this, other than intellectually blinkered and societally flawed?
Fake.
Noam Chomsky: "We can distinguish what we you might call their [the intellectuals] "task" from their moral responsibility. Their task, that is, the reason why social institutions provide them with this time and effort, their task is, say, so that they can support power, authority, they can carry out doctrinal management. They can try to ensure that others perceive the world in a way which is supportive of existing authority and privilege. That's their task. If they stop performing their task, they're likely to be deprived of the opportunities to dedicate themselves to intellectual work. On the other hand, their moral responsibility is quite different, in fact, almost the opposite. Their moral responsibility is to try to understand the truth, to try to work with others to come to an understanding of what the world is like, to try to convey that to other people, help them understand, and lay the basis for constructive action. That's their responsibility. But of course there is a conflict. If you pursue the responsibility, you're likely to be denied the privileges of exercising the intellectual effort."
Bakunin was correct - it is the intellectuals and their narrow power endeavours that are the primary danger to the planet and our species.
Finally, having already been shown to be the fools that they are, the millions of white middle class people in the alleged First World who were deluded by ObamaWorld during and after the election campaign are also guilty of exhibiting a sort of mass-racist-tendency.
When Obama made that speech last June about an undivided Jerusalem, his myopic supporters carried on regardless in their adulatory campaigning.
When his backers were shown to be the same Wall St criminals who had just stolen trillions from the people, the applause kept ringing.
The collective racism stated that things must be better, there will be Change. Because the man is Black.
Not an ounce of nous.
As the performance poet Su Andi once said to me: "Not all Black men smoke dope."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
