Obama Punked Us All

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic

Posted on May 16, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.

Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.

“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.

“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”

But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.

“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”

Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.

“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.

“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.

“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

 

tl;dr: Obama works for Wall Street. But then again, so does every other politician in America. What do you expect when you have to be rich to run for office?

 

the title of this post "Obama Punked Us All" represents an assertion that is simply not true.

1) Barak Obama the President has pretty much been true to form in comparsion to the Barak Obama the candidate. There have been some things that he has promised that he couldn't do, simply because he was blocked by House and the Senate. In some cases blocked by his own Democratic party i.e. the BlueDog Democrats. But if you do a fact check, the majority of what he said he would do, he has either done, or is in the process of doing it. He has a much better record in that regard than most American Presidents.

2) Barak Obama did not run as a Progressive. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't recall him ever saying he was a progressive. I don't think he ran as a liberal, I don't recall him ever saying he was a liberal. But if he did please
provide a reference

3)PPL, looked at the color of Barak Obama's skin, and made all kinds of assumptions (e.g he's a brother!). Barak Obama did not run his campaign as a brother, he didn't run on a African American agenda, or black agenda, he didn't even run as a
African American, or as a black man. But all kinds of ppl saw
what they wanted to see and heard what they wanted to hear. But Barak did not make African American civil rights part of his campaign platform.

4)I'm not an apologist for President Obama, But I will criticize Cornell West. Cornell West's so-called critique of Barak Obama is more about Cornel West bringing attention to his own scholarship and academic achievement, than making an social assessment of the President. Cornell wants to show that he has achieved the ultimate in blackness by critizing the most important black man (in skin color) in modern times. Cornell's critique is both misguided and misplaced. His critique is from an intellectual tradition and era that has seen its time, and is no longer recognized by the new African American intelligentia. In short Cornell's critique has played out.
Its actually racist[/size] on Cornell's part to think that in order for his own blackness to be legitimate he has show that he is objective enough to criticize one of his own. We're past that kind of monkey business.

Also Cornell's reference to how many times he called Barak Obama and prayed for him over the phone, is proof positive that he is out of step with who Obama is. Barak Obama is not your old style thank you lawdy, hep me Jesus, the-lawd-will-make-a-way
black man. In fact when you listen to how Barak Obama talks about science and technology and innovation its clear that religion plays very little part in that man's life. At least religion as Cornell West practices it.

So what! Cornell West campaigned for Obama. That's a normal part of the citizen process. I campaign for my candidates all the time, local, state, and federal. Was there something special about Obama to Cornell?[/size] If Cornell Blackness is so objective that he could criticize the first black president, then he shouldn't be making a big deal that he campaigned for Barak Obama, because Barak Obama shouldn't been any different than any other qualified democratic candidate. "Could it be Cornell put so much effort into Barak Obama's campaign because he was Black" as opposed to what Barak Obama's explicitly stated policies were?[/size] If that's true, it would cancel out the whole Cornell West critiques the first Black President thing.


5) Here is a racist point. Maybe Barak Obama was raised by his
white mother and grandmother. Maybe he grew up in a white culture. Maybe he is an oreo, black on the outside and white on the inside. Maybe he is afraid of a free "black man", maybe he is more comfortable around whites and jews, Maybe thats the case, but.... First: his choice of wife.Michelle is a sista by all accounts. And she's not the kind of sista that would marry a white man whether he was black on the outside or not. Second: I saw Barak Obama make several 3 point jump shots that only a brother could make under those circumstances So the whole white on the inside, black on the outside, afraid of Cornell West and Tavis Smiley is bullshit AFAIC.

On the other hand, could it be that Tavis and Cornell campaigned for Barak as a black man that could win, and they didn't really pay attention to his stated policies, but instead looked at his demeanor and his color and put in a lot of hard work, expecting that if he was elected, that they would be shown some kind of special treatment? How racist is that?


Is the whole Tavis Smiley, Cornell West Critique of the First Black President really all about the fact that they did not end up with any important jobs within his administration?[/size]

After listening to Cornell's, Tavis, and Jesse Jackson's critique of the president, I lost a little respect for all of them. For once the spot light is not on them as prominent African Americans, but instead on a Harvard educated brother, who was a community organizer as opposed to a civil rights activist, and they can't stand the fact that he did not have to kiss their rings to become President. It looks like the classic crabs in a bucket scenario to me. Anytime one crab looks like he's gonna climb out and move on, the other crabs pull him back down. Misery loves company.


Shame on you Cornell West, Shame on you Tavis Smiley.

Obama didn't deceive anyone. He's executing the office of President pretty much like he said he would notwithstanding all of the obstacles thrown at him by the conservatives.

PPL looked at Barak Obama and somehow saw America's first Black King that's gonna make things right. He's gonna be a black civil rights activist King that will rule by fiat (he doesn't need the congress) but if you look back at his campaign and the policies he actually ran on, he was pretty moderate. The progressives perhaps thought they could pressure him (because he is African American) to see the world through their paradigm, but look at his record as a senator. What made anybody think he was going to be a fire breathing black progressive liberal with Cornell West, Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson as political appointees

C'mon man

 

I agree.

 

Identity politics aside, Obama did run on a moderate platform. The rightward shift in his policy decisions came when he refused to close Guantanamo and he extended the Bush tax cuts. That he turned out another Washington crony shouldn't have surprised anyone, but it certainly disappointed me.

Cornel West pops up here and there in the media with interesting things to say. Whether this was our last opportunity for some kind utopian restoration of social justice is something I really can't buy, though.

 

I would argue that what West wants is not so much utopian as much as anti-Kleptocratic dystopia.

Obama says: “I am someone who is no doubt progressive”

Now he says, "That was just pillow talk, baby!"

 

The Problem is Bigger Than Obama

 

That makes a great deal of sense. But even hoping for an end to the kleptocracy from an establishment politician is kind of utopian in its own right.

 

The question is whether we can do anything to even slightly improve the disguised gangsterism that passes for the current political order. Or do we just seek to make dusty the balls of capitalism?

 

I personally believe we are past the point where it even matters. 100 years from now we'll have an army of self-replicating robots doing everything for us, and economics as we know them will no longer be relevant.

 

Here's a neo-pseudo-post-modern-transhumanist analysis

1) The evils of capitalism hides behind our so-called Democracy

2) Our so-called Democracy protects and excuses Religion/Faith

3) The belief in, dependence on, and the deferrement to the various forms of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are at the seat of ppl's apathy, ignorance, and misguided paradigms of what man's ultimate future is. This is the true evil. Far more insidious than the disguised gangersterism that passes for the current political order.

The corrupt capitalism is but a symptom. 21rst century man has to turn an intellectual page to get over the hump, and that intellectual page has to include saying good by to all those medieval, prehistoric, barbaric religions ,folk tales, mythologies, and gods from eras gone by. Once those things are gone, Then our minds will be truly free to reason, measure, observe, to quantify, to qualify, to deduce, to infer, to evaluate and extrapolate and conclude.

 

Strange post by HF

Saying "Obama extended tax cuts for the rich" is simply not accurate. Yes, he signed a bill the allowed a temporary extension, and I don't think any Democrats really like it that much, but to deny that it was entirely a Republican idea is just lying.

Politics is a give and take relationship. The Republicans won the house (because there are some very stupid and easily manipulated people out there) but he needed them to extend unemployment, and he didn't want taxes to go up on everyone (though maybe he should have)... Regardless, I fully believe he did what he had to do -- cutting off unemployment would've have been another disaster.

The Dems even introduced an 11th hour bill to limit the extension of tax cuts to those making under $1 million dollars a year and the Republicans, as always, said "NO"...

Don't get too lost in your strange, one-sided disappointment while pretending the other side is anything but the absolute embodiment of what you claim to dislike about Obama's compromises.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

Obama certainly extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Congress passed the bill, Obama signed it. He could have vetoed it. He didn't. The public opposed extending the tax cuts, which Obama did when he signed the bill. That he didn't is simply not arguable. He pretended he was getting his arm twisted; in fact it was very pleasing to his masters and their emissaries (Geithner, Summers, Emmanuel, etc.).

Of course the Republicans are swine. Their popular base is a bunch of knuckledragging troglodyte simpletons. The leaders are actually quite shrewd with their imperial, economic royalist strategies to crush working people are over the world. The Democratic leaders are similar. Remember NAFTA and the big deregulation bill signed by Clintion.

Obama is an hologram, a PR campaign by the Establishment to give us the illusion of change. He is a Benetton sticker on a Tomahawk missile.

Most of his supporters will not realize this. Even black people, who are political geniuses, are not likely to see through Obama en masse b/c of the pretty astounding fact that the president is a black guy. I am not sure that he may not be worse, at least in some ways, than a Republican because he blinds the gullible left. Now its totally fine that we are attempting regime change in Libya because we want to. It's fine that we are blowing the shit out of Pakistan with our Predator drones. It's cool that we refuse to give the alleged 9/11 plotters their day in court. It's cool that we have expanded war into Yemen. It's cool that all the worst Bush policies are still being continued.

Democrats are a bunch of Patty Hearsts.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

I didn't say anything about whose idea it was. He did what he did, and it showed a remarkable lack of backbone.

I'd also like to point out that the healthcare reform he passed was modeled after Republican legislation proposed back in the 90s. Again, this was another somewhat craven and half-hearted reform after a protracted battle with Republicans, this time with the Dems solidly in power.

I don't see why you want to apologize for Obama. He's more of a Clinton-style democrat in terms of ideology, not anything resembling the socialist the Republicans try to paint him as.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

Soooo.... Happy_Friend[/size], now tell us what you really think about the Republicans

Touche my good man...

 

Re: Strange post by HF

You guys are ignoring the fact there's two parties, and that the Republicans actually can get their two-cents in whether I, you, we like it. Even they don't vote "no" they could filibuster until time ran out no matter what the Democrats tried to do. Obama is not this false prophet you claim him to be, not at all; nor is he a hologram for some truly silly, unrealistic, vast conspiracy theory about "the Establishment" (sounds like you should just replace that with "the Illuminati" or something similarly fantastic).

I really, REALLY encourage you to stop trying so hard to frame all of these extremely important, and difficult decisions in a vacuum. Every single decision, in the government, and in life, is made as a choice against an alternative, there's is not any real situation you can apply that type of thinking to - just isolating one side of an issue and (I guess) venting about it is truly worthless and it hurts your reasoning. Should we not have voted for Obama-the-hologram (LOL) while we pretended that wouldn't result in McCain and Palin ending up in office??? What a terrible, myopic idea that would've been, be serious, please.

If you actually think the Republicans would be better for this country, in any way, I personally think you're dead wrong. The Republicans, in their current form, are truly not a viable alternative, they're not even close to a viable alternative... I actually would go so far as to say they're on the borderline of downright evil. In reality, they are everything you/I DON'T want, at all.

Therefore, before you go off on Obama as the bad guy and the face of some imaginary conspiracy, you need to slow down and try to remember the actual details and facts of each situation you seem overly eager to lay at Obama's feet. I'm actually quite confused what you're aim is and if you're being serious or if you're just venting.

When Obama signed the bill extending Bush's tax cuts, he signed a bunch of other things into law as well, most of which sought to help regular people; again I stress the unemployment extension - he didn't get a piece of paper with JUST tax-cuts for the rich on it. I think it's foolish of you to be upset that he wasn't willing to play chicken with the lives and well-being of several millions people, just to take an ideological stand as if there was nothing on the line. You think you would have preferred a veto in an alternate reality that never existed, nor will it ever exist. You don't know what the consequences of that would have been cause it didn't happen, no one knows, so it's literally just in your head. Fortunately, it's just your opinion; what you've decided your opinion is wouldn't have potentially put families out on the street starving (cause those were absolutely REAL potential consequences of useless and potentially disastrous, ideological brinkmanship...

I don't think you're being realistic, and that's not an insult. I believe you're still espousing left-wing beliefs here, so it's totally unfair to use the term "gullible left", I'm not really even really sure what you're getting at. If you look at the entire picture, I don't think you have ANYTHING to gain by believing that anyone who likes Obama is somehow being gullible. It's actually one of those conceited, self-aggrandizing statements that backfires every time.

Gullible is birtherism. Gullible is voting for trickle-down after watching it fail as an economic policy over and over for 30 years - all while your earning power has stalled, or even shrunk, because you've gotten no help and your "leaders" in GOP pander to the Koch brothers, and dishonest, heartless monsters like Scott Walker rob you of your right to organize. It's also gullible to blame a lack of monumental change on Obama, as if he hasn't been blocked and tripped up at every turn by what I can only call the greatest threat to the future of this country, the current Republican party. It's far too much of a sweeping statement to be true under any circumstance, it's also not helpful and, in a way, you're shooting your own beliefs in the foot.

What you think is of no consequence, what Obama thinks actually matters, A LOT. You want Kaddafi to stay in power? That's fine, but you're not sitting in Benghazi waiting for your death sentence if no one steps in. Maybe you weren't on unemployment when that battle was being fought so it allowed you to worry just about what YOU would want for you own, small, insignificant life. You and I are but two people, your opinion is peanuts compared to the life and death of millions - or even thousands.

Don't give yourself so much credit, you don't deserve it.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

Gernbergs, much of what you say is true about trickle-down and the death of the middle and working classes in the US, but where you err is in the assumption that because there are two parties, they must be oppossed to each other.

Bill Clinton's favorite professor at Georgetown wrote the following: "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies."

Well, America threw the Bush bums out and voted for change. But Obama has pursued the same policies regarding the economy and foreign policy, the two most important areas.

And as far as Ghaddafi is concerned, you literally can believe nothing that you read in the corporate media or in the controlled alternative media like Democracy Now!

The goal is and always has been either regime change or partition of the country. It is rank imperialism. It would take to long to explain but any of the articles here are a good place to start.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

Let me only add that they are sad products of their environment and there political stupidity is very much manufactured by the economic interests that control and dominate culture and mass media. The American heartland is fertile ground for fascism.

That only applies to the rank and file. The middling rich people who support the party just so they can get richer really are contemptible assholes. And of course the oligarchs who control both parties are soulless scumfucks who really would kill a million babies if meant more oil profits for them. Oh wait, they actually did that in Iraq in the 1990's under Clinton.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

Yes, the Healthcare thing is the perfect example of how much the democrats suck. They had both houses of Congress and the outcome was a fetid turd of bill.

A public option or medicare for everyone would have a had a much better outcome for public health and finances. Instead we got the dumbest shit imaginable that ends up giving billions to the evil, murderous, kleptocratic insurance parasites. What a fucking disgrace.

 

Re: Strange post by HF

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VzIowyaGpM