And the Winner is... Hillary.

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 wonks 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-opposition party in America!" And if you'll buy that one, I've got 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.

The Trouble with Obillary vs. Hibama

As we wrap up the eight-year psychological warfare campaign against the American people known as the Bush Administration, it's time to look forward to the wars of the future, those which will be waged against us under the likely management of the Democratic Party.

But to catch the view ahead, we must take a new look behind:

It's easy to forget, after the many traumas of the past three thousand or so days, just how discontented the country was in the Clinton years.

By the end of Bubba's run, it had become clear to millions of Americans that the "Center-Democratic Third Way" was really just a fancy pronunciation of "corporate rule." We discovered that "Globalization" was the new lingo for "You are unemployed or working a double shift at the IHOP."

And the environment was, as ever, available for despoliation to the highest bidder, despite the presence of the bestselling author of Earth in the Balance in the vice-presidency.

Notwithstanding the distracting figure of Monica Lewinsky on the Oval Office carpet, Americans were starting to smell the coffee, and it wasn't Fair Trade Mochachino. For the Ruling Class, it was high time -once again-to relegitimize the system.

Enter George W. Bush, Super Good Ole' Boy Cowboy Freak Eastern Establishment Republican Man, a self-professed friend to the monied interest and a "stupid" and "incompetent" warmonger.

It was almost as though the Oligarchy was teaching us a perverse civics lesson: "Don't think there's any difference between the Parties, huh? Vote for Ralph Nader, will ya? We'll learn ya! Heeere's Dubya!"

Here's eavesdropping and secret energy deals, here's 9-11 "incompetence" and that invasion where the Pentagon somehow couldn't find the WMD they had sold to the mad dictator just a few short years before. We had George II dead to rights, didn't we?

But I would argue that we grossly "misunderestimated" Mr. Bush, though he warned us not to. You see, he wasn't the one who we should have been "estimating" in the first place. What we must always consider, to the extent we can, is the more or less permanent government, the one that doesn't change every four to eight years, the one comprised of the machine politicos, bankers, intelligence bureaucrats, admirals and generals and CEO's.

That bunch has behaved, within the limits that we the people set on them by our vigilance, just as they have since our country was founded: as badly as they can. And even as we are getting swifter at figuring out the con, they are getting better at conning the swift.

Bush was too obvious a bad guy, people! The mainstream media has sounded suspiciously like a Marxist rag for many years now, with its extraordinary renditions of crony capitalism, evil military contractors, torture and "Where's the WMD?"

Why didn't the Bushies just plant the WMD? It was done all the time in Vietnam, and it would have been easy-- the boys at the Pentagon carry that stuff in their overnight bags.

From the Stolen Election to Katrina, the Administration seemed to go out of its way to play the idiotic villain, and the media forwarded the press releases.

Why? Why so much effort on the Establishment's part to prove that Bush is a Very Bad, Very Stupid Guy? The short answer, in my view, is a campaign on the part of Oligarchy to re-delineate the "difference" between the two parties. If an election is worth stealing, then the two parties must truly be at odds, right?

Along the way, these "exposures" boosted our waning faith in the Fourth Estate, our ever-more-ironically named Free Press. The President may be incompetent and corrupt, but at least we can read all about it!

My friends, they have fooled us again. "Incompetence" is the oldest cover story in the book. Reconsider all the "mismanagement" in Iraq. If you're a Pentagon contractor, the occupation has been managed very well, hasn't it?

Where would the military brass be without their indispensable enemies? Is it too much to imagine that the occupation was designed to cause chaos and civil war, as in divide and conquer? That among the many goals of the Military-Industrial-Complex is to "create more terrorists"?

Which brings us around to Obillary Vs. Hibama. When one or the other or both of them take office, how will they dash our hopes, as they invariably must, given that they both serve the same group that Bush (and Bill Clinton, and Bush I, and Reagen, and Carter, etc.) served before them?

Let me make a prediction. There will be a reduction of the 400% over-the-top-crazy-war mongering rhetoric, by say, 35%, and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief.

Then around the time of the first hundred days or the next "terrorist attack", whichever comes first, will come the sad news from President Obillary or VP Hibama: "We're really sorry about not having affordable health care for y'all, and the deplorable state of our public education system, and the fact that we are still not using readily available electric cars. But you see, the previous administration has made such a mess of things--the economy, the environment, Iraq--we have more than enough to do just to keep our heads above the rapids...."

Did anyone catch that little moment in the last debate when Senator Obama promised that, as president, he would send more troops to Afghanistan? Of course both he and Hillary are of the conventional opinion that the war in Iraq has distracted us from our real war, war "A," the War on Terror, (an abstract noun currently taking cover in a cave in Waziristan).

Obama counts among his foreign policy advisers Zbigniew Brezinski, the man who admitted in the pages of Paris Match to creating the Mujahedeen, the forerunners to Osama's Al-Qaeda, six months before the Soviet invasion, in order to provoke the Russians to invade and so "bleed the Bear." Just the man we want guiding the "change" crusade, Barack. Hillary's people are as bad or worse.

And that's the trouble with Obillary vs. Hibama, isn't it? It's the same trouble with Republicrat vs. Demublican, Coke vs. Pepsi, and War "A" vs. War "B"-no matter how they try to dress it up, its really no choice at all.

I think I'm going to vote this year, though. There's a ballot initiative in the works in New York to hold a new 9-11 Commission, one that's not quite so obviously a white-wash. And I look forward to voting for Ralph Nader, just so I can proudly say I did. And after that? In the great tradition of Henry David Thoreau: war-tax resistance. Because what General Alexander Haig said back in the Reagen years still holds true: "Let them march [or vote] all they want, as long as they pay their taxes…" We're starting to catch on again, General.