The Mystery Continues Obama Flies Like a Conservative, Stings like a Progressive?

     It seems to me that Obama is in many ways an improvement over Bush.  These improvements are relative, however, and do not represent a departure from unwavering support for the rule of private capital, albeit with massive support from the state.  That is to say that the system we have now is some sort of capitalist system where private capital retains the reins but the horse pulling the cart is fed and owned by the state and paid for, once again by the taxpayer.


    So the modern capitalist exploits the worker twice, once at the point of production by paying her less than the value of her labor and then again through taxes which is funneled by the government to the coffers of the finance capitalists, banks and insurance companies.


  Obama convinces this observers that he has a considerable competence which Bush seemed to lack.  His comments generally indicate a deeper degree of understanding than he may be articulating whereas Bush seemed to have difficulty putting his thoughts, however simple minded, into words.


     On certain social issues Obama has stood up for LGBT people in a way that other Presidents have not.  His Supreme Court nominee is most likely better than one McCain would have delivered. It seems that Obama has gone along with the liberation of women theme in his foreign policy in a way that may actually cramp some patriarchs somewhere.


    But the Clinton-Obama version of women's liberation is no substitute for proletarian feminism which would struggle for not only women's liberation but working class rule.


  Certainly he is an example of an extraordinary leader who is also an African-American.  I think his ascent as a person of color has shattered a lot of myths and cynical beliefs.  So many people in the United States and abroad are surprised that a person of color became the President of the United States.  That is the one area where Obama is  broadening the political vision and career possibilities people of all colors are willing to believe in and conceive of.


Of course he continues to frighten this observer with his close relationship to Israel and the Israeli lobby which seems to dominate his foreign policy team.  He has had no backbone with regard to Israel, immediately caving on his insistence that settlements halt further construction.  It was a somewhat trivial and modest position for him to take given that all the settlements are illegal but even this was too much for him to live up to.  Obama promised hope and delivers a lot of the same old dung.  It may be processed manure but it is still the same old colonial s~t in Palestine.


He seems to be menacing Iran and I wonder if he will attack Iran just the way a Republican or a Likud Party member would like to do as well. If so it will be impossible to defend him and call yourself progressive.



Obama's bailout of the capitalist financiers is troubling and appears to intensify the problems of concentration and bigness that so many policy wonks talk about.  Nothing has been done about it by Obama.


Health care reform may or may not look progressive later.  Obama and the Democrats will pass a bill and perhaps route the Republicans for some years but now it looks like the health plan is written primarily by those entrenched profiteers who make good health care less and less available to the American population.

Obama is better than Bush but his progressive credentials are still uncertain and he seems to have a lot of rightist exploitative policies.  We shall see who the real Obama is.  You can't rope a dope past the fifteenth round!