Dollar Obomber, President of Plutocrats
Harris seems to think that Obama rose straight to the White House out of the inner dynamism of black politics and the perverse machinations of race-neutral candidate-marketing, aided by the president’s “bi-racial heritage and light skin-color” (Harris, 153). There’s no reference in The Price of the Ticket to the plutocratic political cash and the many sided corporate-imperial establishment – to the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire – that pre-select “viable” presidential candidates for popular “choice” in the first place.
Anyone who thinks that Obama pursues policies that “help everyone” should research the president’s behind-the-scenes advance of the Transpacific Partnership agreement – a militantly corporatist “free trade” accord that would further insulate multinational corporations from basic popular control and regulation.vii
“Obama has kept the U.S. global military ‘machine set on kill.’”
This great omission and the related absence of any serious discussion of the neoliberal ideology that Obama internalized at the outset of his political career is part of why Harris too easily links the president to a “universalism” that seeks to “help everyone” and makes Obama try to be “the president for ‘all people,’ not just black Americans” (p.xiii). Like the great majority of U.S. presidents from the nation’s blood-soaked chattel-slave origins, Obama has been first and foremost a representative of the American white ruling class. As beneficiaries of his record-setting “too-big-to-fail bank bailouts, of a “health reform” that only the big insurance and drug companies could really love, and of much more that has been documented by myself and other chroniclers of Barack “I love the free market” Obama’s “pragmatic” presidential corporatism, the elite “1%” (more like the .01 percent in reality) has found the nation’s first half-white president (aptly described by the muckraking filmmaker Charles Ferguson as “just another oligarch’s president”viii) very much to their bought-and-paid-for liking, however much some of them like to preposterously complain about his “socialism.” Along the way, Obama has kept the U.S. global military “machine set on kill” (as journalist Alan Nairn put itix), announcing early on that “there is no such thing as a peace dividend,”x much to the bottom-line glee of the nation’s opulent high-tech “defense” contractors– including the early Obama sponsor and General Dynamics mogul Lester Crown.xi