THE AUDACITY OF HIS MAJESTY, EMPEROR OBAMA

Obama's decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan underlines in double red lines his fundamentally reactionary politics.  While pandering to progressive social issues he has behaved as an imperialist leader rather than a stealth progressive.


Obama's face needs to be crossed out and his name removed from the list of potentially progressive Democrats.  His fate is to be that of President Johnson but with any luck his reactionary health care denial scam will also be defeated.

Obama is not progressive and those who follow him are following a reactionary man who has the audacity to prosecute imperialist wars and the hope that he will not lose the support of freedom loving progressives for it.

Of course those who advocate liberation and liberty can hardly rely on the eloquent confusion of Obama's statements.  Nor has his complete refusal to see Afghanistan debated and to simply act like a King been a cause for anything but disgust, rejection and rebellion.


The Imperial Decree of Obama has gone forth to his Generals who, of course, debated it among themselves.  The sovereign American people were completely left out and are hence, obviously not sovereign at all.

 I think, progressives should support political struggle for the sovereignty of the American people here in the United States.

  Congress, the White House and Supreme Court are all in the pockets of those with deep pockets, here at home and abroad. Virtually every elected or appointed official is bought-and-sold.  At the end of the day Obama is just another capitalist politician, a bought and sold politician running a destructive capitalist juggernaut as best he can.



Meanwhile, refusing to renounce the Monroe Doctrine, Obama positions military and intelligence forces for the reconquest of Latin
America with Honduras and Colombia being the two new beneficiaries of Yankee bases and military build ups.


People throughout the world see thorough his pseudoprogressive hypocrisy.  I hope we can do the same thing here in the United States and build a progressive movement that the Democrats can never betray!


 

OBAMA'S WAR MOVES PRECEDED BY VACUOUS CHARM OFFENSIVE

    Obama has shown his colors which far outweigh his skin tone.  Yes, he is a red, white and blue, all-American war monger, just like Johnson, just like Clinton, just like the Bushes.

   Today he slipped in an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.


   First he went to China and all the brilliant
students interrogating him wondered why he was there.  Then he invited the leader of India to a State dinner.  Everyone laughed and wondered what was up to at the time. Then "pop goes the weasel" and it turns out Obama
and Bush are brothers in mass murder.



     Meanwhile the psuedoprogressive Obamacare bill, which simply consolidates the health care denial industry, will set back American health care despite more charming lies.  So I guess what Obama meant by "Yes we can!" was "Yes we can conquer Afghanistan!  Yes we can insure the rule of the rich in America by taxing the workers."


   Yet millions are already crying out, sometimes with poor understanding and ideological confusion, "No you can't, President
Obama!"  "No you musn't!"



     The new boss, same as the old boss, a tool of the billionaires and the blood sucking capitalist system, a war monger and a charming liar.

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! 

OBAMA HAS SPOKEN OUT FOR GLBT RIGHTS IN A REMARKABLE WAY

     I think it is remarkable that President Obama has gone so far in speaking up on behalf of GLBT rights.  It is definitely a progressive feather in his cap.  Yet if he ends up serving monopoly capital he can only see a sort of social equality for folks that may be GLBT without achieving working class rule, ie. real democracy.

    He has been considerably more outspoken in this area than other bourgeois politicians in the United States.  I hope he can help shepard this nation away from the frenzied hatred of political prejudice and personal bigotry.  It's time that straight bigots get their act together and enjoy their own sexual orientation and gender without constantly and compulsively attacking others for being somewhat different.

Smiling Faces, Smiling Faces Sometimes they Don't Tell the Truth!

Obama is turning out to be an O'Bummer for progressives throughout the United States and the world. He is also making what look like huge political mistakes that almost certainly doom a second term.

For one thing, Obama has adopted the Bush Wars as his own children and now wants to win the wars he previously pretended to oppose. Like Bush he lies about withdrawal from Iraq when he and Bush mean "permanent occupation". Now Obama can be a stupid reactionary and tie a millstone around his own neck, or should I say the millstone of Iraq and the mountain of Afghanistan. Obama will conquer Afghanistan. Right! Even Bush wasn't that stupid!

In a similar fashion Obama speaks eloquently about corruption on Wall Street and then hands trillions of imaginary dollars over to the crooks. He seeks to restore the corrupt and utterly capitalistic way of doing things at your and my and our grandchildren's expense. This debt burden is something he is putting on the backs of the working classes. Bush, Obama what is the substantial difference? I don't think our grandchildren will put up with it and I don't think that their grandparents should silently allow this brutal financial coup to be consolidated.

What about universal health care? Obama got votes as he posed as someone who wants the best health care system Americans can get. Yet he has shut out "single payer" one hundred percent. He is all about big pharm, big hospital chains, big hmo's, big insurance and big medical business in all of its opulent excesses. Our health care is the last thing on his health care agenda! When the healthcare bubbles burst Obama will be one of the fools making it happen, quite eloquently he will note that he "screwed up" and yes we are the ones getting "screwed".

And the computerized medical charting is all about an Orwellian Medical database available to every insurance company, hmo and health care hustler with the gumption to pick your pocket. Thank you for the hope but what about delivering single payer, not a life time of rip offs as each and every one of us struggle to get the healthcare that is regarded as a right in the rest of the world. Only your family and the patient will have trouble getting your medical records now. Everyone else gets their own copy. Your life is a commodity to be bought and sold like pork bellies.

Of course you need only look out the window to see the Orwellian video cameras on every street corner. It's an Obamination unto the goddess of liberty and justice!

Obama's change is superficial change, a change in style, and a big lurch to the right after a deft feint to the left. Obama is technocratic, a public relations whiz, a Kennedyesque monster that seeks to conquer, murder and maim with a little more stealth and even more secrecy than Bush. Hence, the so-called counterinsurgency strategy he seeks to apply to Pakistan and Afghanistan and perhaps Latin America once again, if he can get away with it! Is Obama's change just a different kind of killing? With drone murdering hundreds at a strike he is outdoing Bush in that sort to killing. Maybe Obama meant more killings the same way when he was referring to "change". He was and is always vague about "change", big vocabulary though.

Even more than Bush he has the press corp on a leash! Every question is approved. Sounds like a press conference in a dictatorship. President Obama is President Big Brother?

Skin color does not a progressive make as anyone with any experience knows. And now President Obama refuses to release memos, and other documents he already promised to release while he attacks the ACLU. It's all about hiding American crimes just as with Bush. Is this Bush III or what?

Then, Obama tries to pass the buck about prosecuting Republican criminals and various conservative, torturing criminals to others like his appointees, as if someone else was the President.

Obama is a rightist! We can't count on Obama or the Democrats for anything but the same old conservative crap or an even worse financial dictatorship strangling our individual lives, families,communities, nation and world!

So when it comes to the next Supreme Court nominee we can bet that Obama will hem and haw and say this and that and then he will say the exact opposite of this and that. This may pass through several complete cycles as he dances around the issues while endeavoring to appear to be addressing them. At the end of the day he may be looking for a torturer or someone who authorized torture for the Supreme Court, just to prove he is soooo coool, sooo broad minded, sooo loyal to the elites and sooo liberal in one of the worst senses of the term "liberal".

There are, no doubt, klansmen and Republican party leaders who are willing and able to prove Obama is no racist by serving on the court as his nominee and Obama fighting for them in the Congress to quash any progressive opposition. Too bad, Obama probably can't find any old Nazi's to serve on the court but Naziphile, Arnold Schwarzenneger's dad was "just a policeman" during the Third Reich (yeah an SS policeman!) Maybe Arnold can be Obama's kind of Supreme Court Justice?

So am I being too hard on Mr. Obama or not hard enough?

Let's see, if Obama nominates a progressive and then withdraws or sabotages the nomination of that progressive? President Progressive Poser, that would fit!

"Smiling faces, smiling faces, sometimes they don't tell the truth!" Mr. Obama, shame on your smiling lies about being for the average citizen, for children, for the workers, for women and for the eocnomically and racially oppressed. Or did you ever even say those things? Were we just wishing and hoping that you were progressive even though you said again and again things that make you sound like a pseudoliberal who fears any struggle against any real world conservatives.

Mr. Obama looks more and more like a technocratic deracialized whiz kid of the ruling class. Obama dances a good dance but any fool can see whom he is dancing for, whatever their vocabulary!

Mr Obama, you are dancing for the past, for the rich and for the financial elites. You are dancing for the capitalist empire capitalisms would be conquests. You are yet another emperor serving the empire of greed and total capitalist domination. You should be known as President Wallstreet not President Obama!

Too bad, too, you seemed like such a "nice guy"!

Posted by PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION at 4:04 AM

OBAMA TAKES ON BUSH'S LINE ON SO-CALLED MISSILE DEFENSE

Obama's trip to Russia seems to offer up some things that could be progressive, maybe, and then some old Bush policies.

Were real commitments to meaningful reductions made? I hope so but I need to look at what the reduction in nuclear weapons and missile launchers is really all about. Sometimes they just take out the warhead or some warhead component that could be reattached in a few hours or less.

So what is the fate of the decommissioned weapons and were they already decommissioned. I am skeptical.

It would be good to see the nuclear weapons decommissioned and is a step that is in the progressive direction but if both powers still retain thousands of weapons the reduction will still look relatively meaningless to nuclear have nots or those with relatively tiny arsenals like Pakistan, India, China, Israel and Korea.

As for the ridiculous advocacy for the so-called "missile defense system"
it is Bush Lite all over again.

The big change is the willingness of Russia and the United States to work together in fighting the wars to Russias southeast in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran may feel safer now that the Russian ally is providing a corridor for United States military forces. I suppose this may be necessary because Uzbekistan is closing the US military base there.
I don't really know but I suppose supplying these remote wars is a real
problem for the empire.

Once again, the apparent willingness of the United States to call Russia
"equal" appears to be a recognition that Russia is a regional power to be worked with rather than an enemy to be continuously opposed. It almost looks like an alliance?

WHAT IS PROGRESSIVE ANYWAY?

I suppose we can hardly wonder how progressive some political policy, theory or act is unless we have a standard by which to judge what is progressive and what is not.

One might say that to side with the have nots against the haves is progressive but a little history suggests not always. Do you side with this set of have nots or that other set? Women and Blacks saw themselves as at odds in the post civil war era and we can easily see that individuals and groups adopt a hodge podge of progressive and not so progressive views.

An oppressive patriarchy may characterize a progressive nationalist struggle. Workers may become Nazis rather than progressive socialists. Of course all these persons, supposedly animated by this or that ism acts in a world of unfolding realities that may or may not be under any influence by the actor.

Obama is an imperialist leader. If so, it seems difficult to characterize him as a progressive imperialist leader but he certainly seems able to unite with more nations than his predecessor.

He seems committed to some sort of draw down in Iraq but I would be surprised if he actually goes for one hundred percent withdrawal.

Obama has adopted the war in Afghanistan as his own and Iraq may now descend into a civil war or civil wars. If the Taliban are routed by the current offensive in Afghanistan I will be surprised. It seems they are not making themselves easy targets this go of it. Taliban positional warfare in Pakistan seems to have failed in Swat. Are the Taliban really there in South Afghanistan and if so in what numbers?