Black Bill

So, Obama isn’t a Democrat after all.

The signs have been evident for a long time, starting with Obama’s reluctance to prosecute criminal bankers, to make good on his promise to shut down the colossal embarrassment that is Guantanamo prison, and his willingness to abandon a public health care option before debate even began.

Obama drifted further from his base by expanding drone warfare in Pakistan, cracking down on whistleblowers at home, and waffling on his support for real action on climate change. He talked about “clean” coal when he knew full well that no such thing exists; he expanded oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico -- after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Obama is the black reincarnation of Bill Clinton, a Democrat ever willing to abandon the party’s long standing principles in favor of a slick deal with his political opponents and campaign contributors. Let’s not forget that Obama surrounded himself with Clintonites in his first cabinet, including alumni like Lawrence Summers, Rahm Emanuel and Hilary Clinton herself. Like the consummate snake oil salesman that he is, Obama used soaring rhetoric about hope and change to get people – particularly young voters -- excited enough to elect him, and then, once in office, he methodically abandoned every one of his rhetorical positions in favor of “bipartisanship,” which means, of course, terrible proposals and awful legislation, or, more often than not, no legislation at all.

Obama has now made a budget proposal that offers to reduce Social Security benefits -- long a goal of political conservatives who abhor any government initiative that actually works as it was designed to -- in exchange for GOP concessions on tax hikes on the wealthy. Is this a savvy ploy to gain political advantage, the equivalent of a jujitsu move? Is Obama a master pragmatist? Or does he really believe the only way to save Social Security in the long run is to castrate it in the short run?

I don’t know.

What remains of the political left is angry with Obama, but we are an impotent, disorganized lot easily ignored or discredited by the corporate media. John Boehner and his little henchman, Eric Cantor, are probably giddy at the prospect of finally starting the process of dismantling Social Security as we know it, and even more ecstatic that a Democratic president opened the door. Wall Street bankers and money managers are salivating at the thought of the millions in fees they stand to rake in if Social Security is changed from a public trust to a semi-private one.

I’m not surprised that Obama bends his base over a chair and sodomizes it; he’s a stooge of Wall Street, as are most Democrats and almost all Republicans. Politicians of whatever stripe pay lip service to the will of the “American people,” and then proceed to do exactly what their masters tell them to do.  My own congressional representative, Lois Capps, who I believe is a decent person, nearly always votes with the president. I start every letter or e-mail I send to her like this: “You don’t represent me or my interests, and I know you never will, but you’re the only game in town…”

Our political duopoly is rotten, rotten from within, corrupted by money and influence peddling. The Obama campaign spent billions of dollars in 2012 to convince voters of how different he was from Mitt Romney, and of course Obama is different, but the differences are not as stark as his spin-machine wanted us to believe. Obama lives comfortably on the center-right of the political spectrum, rubbing ideological shoulders with financiers and bankers, playing golf at the country club with neoliberals and oil company oligarchs.

Obama is Black Bill, Clinton’s brother of another color.