I’ve said this before: I think Obama believes our evolution to a third-world country is inevitable, and sees his job as presiding over a orderly transition. Hence, the deals like this:
WASHINGTON – Congress — if you listen to pundits and Washington politicians — is completely broken. But when multinational corporate interests are at stake, suddenly the institution figures out how to get to work. On Wednesday, both chambers passed three sweeping trade agreements with bipartisan majorities, against the opposition of labor unions worried about job losses that would result.
President Obama and members of Congress from both parties have trumpeted the agreements for their job creation potential, but that assertion was undercut by the deal itself, which included funding for workers whose jobs will be lost as a result of the deals.
Prof Michael Hudson, whose lectures are riveting (and good if limited exercise for the neck since listeners, this one at least, keep nodding in agreement with what he says), says that Obama believes American workers (not upper echelon executives, of course) must work for lower wages in order to be competitive in the global market.
30% lower average wages is the purported goal for Obama.
Now, given that the buying power of the average American worker has not increased since 1978 (or is it ’76?), that is going to be harsh. But the lowering of wages has begun quite nicely and will continue under the beneficence of the Corporatists and their Congressional and administration lackeys (aka running dog Corporatist lackeys).
Savvy businessmen may continue to accrue great wealth with which practice their malefactions.
“In its struggle against the united power of the ruling class, only the working class—as an organized class–can activate a party of its own to oppose the other old, reactionary parties….” Marx had it correct again and the OWS movement worldwide knows that.
Obama is the worst President of my lifetime. He makes Bush look like Mother Theresa.
Obama is just the next President in a long line of Presidents, including Clinton, whose job it is to carry out the oligarchy’s plans. The top 1% believe themselves to be, by rite of birth, the only ones wise enough to lead us all back into the Garden of Eden. The problem with their plan for what constitutes the correct path to Utopia is that they have been for so long disconnected from reality the end result of their plan would be a deranged “new world.” In Biblical terms they have become the Sons of Darkness (1%) at war with the Sons of Light (99%).
at Rortybomb regarding the We Are the 99% Tumblr –
“historian Moses Finley, who identified “the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class.” And think through these cases. The overwhelming majority of these statements are actionable demands in the form of (i) free us from the bondage of these debts and (ii) give us a bare minimum to survive on in order to lead decent lives (or, in pre-Industrial terms, give us some land). In Finley’s terms, these are the demands of a peasantry, not a working class.”
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/parsing-the-data-and-ideology-of-the-we-are-99-tumblr/
Pretty clearly, the illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet is going to come to an end. So, yes, you need a transition leader – but a transition to what? Back in the days of “Change”, the best change someone could have made would have been to say the growth times are ending, and we will work together to make the subsequent changes as humane and democratic as possible.
That’s my biggest gripe about Obama. Instead of siding with the people to make these changes in a decent fashion, he sides with the plutocracy to help set up a nation of serfs.
And the comment about the OWS demands sounding like the demands of peasants rather than a working class is right on.
Cynic that I am, I can’t say any of these plutocratic machinations surprises me, except I am surprised at how aggressively Obama has pursued these policies. I figured he might be worse than Bill Clinton, but he really is worse than Bush too, and 100 times more dangerous because he has no opposition from the left. I’ll give him credit for being flagrant enough that he has revealed what a fraud democracy and “free market” capitalism are in Amerika anymore.