Paul Street on Obama

Obama’s Good Republican Week →

And all I could think was “liberal fools. You have no idea what this thoroughly neoliberal and imperial politician is about!” Obama rose to power in Washington with remarkable, record-setting financial backing from Wall Street and K Street election investors who were not in the business of promoting politicians who seek to challenge the nation’s dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies.

Beneath progressive pretentions, Barack Obama the national political phenomenon has never been anything other than a tool of the United States’ corporate and financial ruling class. This is something that I (and a sturdy cadre of other researchers and commentators) have argued and documented at painstaking length from the beginning. But surely the TPP takes the cake when it comes to solidifying his legacy once and for all as a died-in-the-wool global corporatist. How any serious liberal or progressive could still cling to the notion of a “progressive” President Obama after his work with big capital, the Republicans, and fellow corporate Democrats to pass the arch-authoritarian, super-corporatist, anti-labor, and eco-cidal Fast Track bill over and against technically irrelevant public opinion and the opposition even of most of his party’s Congresspersons is a chilling kind of mystery. Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: the 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

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