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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=marshall.arnold@gmail.com href="mailto:marshall.arnold@gmail.com">Marshall
Arnold</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=dlj725@hughes.net href="mailto:dlj725@hughes.net">David
Johnson</A> ; <A title=1999wildcat@gmail.com
href="mailto:1999wildcat@gmail.com">John Reimann</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Friday, August 27, 2010 12:09 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Glen Ford's Excellent Rant</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12px; MARGIN: 15px 0pt 0pt; FONT-STYLE: italic">Published
on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 by Black Agenda Report</DIV>
<DIV class=print-title>We Are Cornered: There's No Way Out Without a Fight</DIV>
<DIV id=node-header>
<P class=author>by Glen Ford</P></DIV>
<P>There is no cavalry coming over the ridge to save the people from massed
capital. Certainly not the Democrats, whose self-caged left wing now finds its
marginalized encampments under lockdown by their own president's hostile
patrols, while the GOP and its Tea Party irregulars howl from the circling
darkness. That's what happens when progressives maneuver themselves onto the
same side of the battlefield as Goldman Sachs, as they did with abandon in
2007-08, deliriously fighting their way into a cul-de-sac in which they are now
surrounded.</P>
<P>The leftish brigades rallied to a commander who styled himself an incarnation
of Abraham Lincoln, but turned out to be a General George McClellan, the Union's
first commander of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan was great at rousing the
troops and putting his army on parade, but constantly overestimated his
Confederate adversaries and, in Lincoln's final estimation, refused to fight.
The political roots of his reluctance to crush the Confederacy became clear
after his dismissal when, in 1864, he challenged Lincoln on the Democratic
"peace" party's ticket. McClellan never really wanted to win the war, or, at the
very least, saw victory in a very different way than Lincoln and Ulysses S.
Grant.</P>
<P>It has long been clear that Barack Obama's idea of victory required
decisively defeating the Left of his own party. Everyone to his left is to be
neutralized, while those to his right rate an open hand and endless concessions,
the scenario from the very start of his health care "negotiations" with the drug
and insurance industries. Victory in the racial arena means an end to race
agitation, a Black stand-down, which remains largely in place. Success in war,
not pursuit of peace, is his goal, one that will surely elude him, but not for
lack of trying.</P>
<P>Obama and finance capital began an early, thoroughly vetted, and white hot
love affair that was anchored in mutual contempt for those who would challenge
the rule of money. He has delivered the highest return on corporate campaign
investment in the history of bourgeois democracy, allowing Wall Street to pocket
at least $12 <I>trillion</I> in return for contributions of less than $1 million
per investment house. (Goldman Sachs was top giver, at <U><A class=external
href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=n00009638"
target=_blank>$994,795</A> <SPAN class=print-footnote>[1]</SPAN></U>.) Obama was
BP's biggest political campaign recipient: <U><A class=external
href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/05/05/bp.lobbying/index.html"
target=_blank>$71,000</A> <SPAN class=print-footnote>[2]</SPAN></U>, an
investment that boosted the corporation's value by billions -- albeit
temporarily -- when the president opened up offshore drilling in the Gulf of
Mexico.</P>
<P>Obviously, Goldman Sachs and BP considered Obama a "greater good," in terms
of their interests, than John McCain. And they made out like bandits, confirming
their assessment of Obama's immense value to their side in the class war. The
question is, how in the hell did lefties conclude that Big Capital's and Big
Oil's "greater good" candidate was also the progressive side's fountain of Hope
-- or even a "lesser evil" -- in 2008? Both camps placed their bets on Obama,
but only one side could possibly win. </P>
<P>It is the Left that wound up trapped in the cul-de-sac, with every major item
on its 2008 political wish list betrayed, sidetracked, mangled or spat upon by
Obama and his friends -- although, to be fair to the Devil, the Left had often
simply imagined they had Obama's ear or support when such was not even remotely
true. On war, for example.</P>
<P>Most devastatingly, Obama and his <I>Democratic</I> legislative allies have
successfully shielded their Wall Street masters from anything worthy of the name
financial reform. This means finance capital and its "shadow," derivatives-based
economy (nominally, ten times bigger than the "real" global economy) remain
beyond the reach of meaningful public intervention by conventional methods. With
the air knocked out of mainstream reformers' bony chests, Wall Street is poised
for a Great Offensive against the political and social infrastructure of the
United States. </P>
<P>Producing nothing of real value, fatally hooked on ever-mounting rates of
return, simultaneously divorced from and a parasite on the "real" economy, and
with the executive and legislative branches in their pockets, the Lords of
Capital are set to devour the entirety of the public sector -- while forcing the
public to finance the feast. The rallying cry is "austerity," but the motivation
is not, as <I>New York Times</I> columnist Paul Krugman maintains, ideological.
Rather, it is hunger.</P>
<P>Finance capital is, at this stage of the system's decline, incapable of
reproducing itself through productive investment, and so must feed on existing
producers or on the State. Since Wall Street over the decades has already broken
up, consumed and exported much of the U.S. productive economy, that leaves the
State and all of its parts. Far from acting as a brake on his vampire friends,
Obama leads the charge on corporate hijacking of public education, and signaled
in January 2009 that all elements of the safety net, including Social Security,
should be "on the table" -- which can only mean some form of privatization. </P>
<P>The pace of finance capital deterioration quickens, accelerating the
timetable of the Right's offensive. As the hunger grows, Wall Street's servants
become more aggressive and demanding, and there is nothing in the Democratic
Party, as presently constituted, to stop them.</P>
<P>One truth remains: only a massed people can defeat massed capital. If the
American Left is capable of bearing that in mind in the critical times ahead, it
might just escape the cul-de-sac and make some modest contribution to the
world.</P>
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