Many months ago I made a bet with certain of my political friends. It was my contention that the bipartisan oligarchy that rules our country had manufactured a crisis of electability for Barack Obama with the Reverend Wright imbroglio. They would limit our expectations by handing the nomination to Hillary. I also contended that Obama was himself a willing pawn in that game. It turns out I was right... I was just a hair early on when the switcheroo would go down.New York Times columnist Gail Collins caught wind of it in September when she wrote that "Barack Obama had turned into Hillary Clinton...fooling the voters with oblique promises of change." Now the new cabinet choices (selected by Obama personally? More likely by our shadowy cabal) remove all doubt about the actual outcome of the election. It's the second Clinton administration!
Of course, since the country is governed by a shadowy cabal, a bipartisan oligarchy, a ruling class interested in maintaining the power and wealth of the few, it doesn't really matter who the president is; that is largely a cosmetic choice having to do with manipulating the electorate. It is the men behind the president that matter, and in the case of the administration-elect they haven't even bothered to mask their ugly intent with a fresh-smelling retinue of evildoers. No they're doing it to us in plain sight, with the same old evil-smelling suspects! In fact, the wholesale importation of the first Clinton administration into the Obama White House is being hailed by many of the wind-up policy won
ks as signs of a healthy political realism! After all, we are a center-right country, as the last election so clearly proves!Not only is the vile and freakish Larry Summers being seriously considered for his old post as Treasury Secretary, (the man who once suggested as chief World Bank Economist that sections of Africa that were underpopulated and "underpolluted" would make great toxic waste dumps), but Rham Emmanuel has been selected as Chief of Staff, often considered the second most powerful post in Washington. (Who it's second to, I suppose, depends on who is president. The presidency may have power if the president was also once CIA director.)
Just who is Rham Emmanuel? Only the mafia goon who, as Senior Policy Advisor to Clinton I, rhammed NAFTA down the country's throat. Remember the North American Free Trade Agreement? It's the series of supra-national trade deals that made it impossible not to close factories all over the country and ship the machines to Mexico, thus destroying the middle class! Because you see, that's what they do under the cosmetics line labeled "Democrat;" they viciously attack the 100 million poor people in the country!
They dissolve the middle class! They conduct more interventions, but they call them "humanitarian!" For the environment, they introduce the SUV by way of the CAFTA laws! Stuff they wouldn't get away with quite as easily under brand "Republican.""But maybe Rham has changed," you say! Maybe the Obama campaign has infused him with the bonhomie of Hope and Change! Well as of September 2008, as the columnist David Sirota quoted from the pages from Inside US Trade, it hasn't a bit. The expansion of NAFTA (to South Korea, Panama, and Columbia, this last the number-one place where unionists are assassinated) is being led by none other than... Rhamalama Ding-Dong Emmanuel!
"...Democratic Caucus Chair Rham Emanuel (D-IL) is actively advocating that Democrats would be better off having the votes on pending [free trade agreements] this year for a number of reasons, sources said. They said that one of the reasons Emanuel cites is that there are likely more Republican members in this Congress than there will be in the next, which would mean that fewer Democrats would have to take a potentially divisive trade vote now."
I added the emphasis, for as Sirota rightly points out, this means that the Democratic leader, Emmauel, is "effectively acting as the House Republican whip. He's saying that he wants these bills up for a vote because there are enough Republican votes right now in the House to pass it over current Democratic objections - and there won't be enough GOP votes in the next Congress." (My emphasis).
So that's Mr. Hope for a Change you can Believe In's choice for enforcer and congressional liason. A man very interested in continuing the impoverishment of Americans and the enslavement of the Third World. He will (baring divine intervention) champion the continuation of policies that have caused incalculable suffering to millions of Americans, especially poor and middle-class black Americans. Great.
Maybe this is all part of the plan to limit our expectations. That plan proceeds nicely. As Christine Amanpour seems paid to do, she said for the millionth time last week that Obama has the "in-box from Hell." What with two hot wars and a trillion dollar defecit, everyone is talking about what part of his plan (health-care, green-energy, education) he will have to scrap first...And now the latest attack in the anti-expectations crusade: a stimulus package! A spending package to "get the economy moving again," (more pay-offs to big business?) even though as Paul Krugman himself is compelled to admit in today's Times, that grand-daddy of them all stimulus package, the New Deal, didn't work very well until the public-works project known as World War II got things going again. Hey! Maybe that's why Obama has been promising us a wider war in Afghanistan!
How will they excuse their excuses? "It was all the last administration's fault, you see. No, no, the Republicrats and Demublicans aren't in it together! Noooo. Nancy Pelosi took impeachment "off the table" because she really is among the leaders of an-honest-to-goodness-
a fine looking bridge for you, only 100 or so years old, for sale here in Brooklyn...Meanwhile, good-bye Hope! Farewell, Change! Will we fool ourselves into believing you might come again in 2012? Or will that be a year of malaise and reaction? Another retrenchment after yet another suspiciously easy terrorist attack?
Some CNN lovely opined after last Tuesday's election that the Russian leadership weren't gracious to Barack because they were mad that we had a "real" democracy, where their's was only nominal. They had all cynically assumed, as I did, that our presidential history would go "Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton." Well, turns out me and the Ruskies won the bet after all. Yippee. But to the half dozen or so I bet a bottle of whiskey with, not to worry. I will share it with you as the realization that we live under a sophisticated techno-fascist regime slowly begins to dawn on you....
In the meantime, what do I have to do to convince people that our democracy is now completely phony? Make a movie about it? Oh wait, I did, imperfect as it is: The American Ruling Class.
