[Peace-discuss] Paul Street, AWARE's speaker next Sunday

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...I went to some length to ... show in my 2008 book 'Barack Obama and the 
Future of American Politics' (endorsed by leading Left intellectuals and ignored 
by Democracy Now, The Nation, and other established left-liberal media) [that] 
Obama enlisted as an eager, energetic and eloquent agent and exponent of U.S. 
military imperialism within and beyond Iraq during his career as a U.S. Senator 
(2005-2009) and a presidential candidate (2006-2008).  His anti-war campaign 
imagery was deeply fraudulent and he acted powerfully on behalf of the 'machine 
set on kill' in his Senate votes and as an influential politician before his 
election to the imperial presidency."



	Remembering Obama
	Reflections on Race, Class, Empire, and the First Black President
	(and a Comment by Allan Nairn*)
	By Paul Street
	Tuesday, April 06, 2010



THE MACHINE STILL “SET ON KILL”

Sometimes you run across an eloquent statement that rings true and false at one 
and the same time.  Look, for example, at the following comment made by the 
courageous left journalist Allan Nairn in response to the left broadcaster Amy 
Goodman’s request that he provide a brief overview of the Obama administration’s 
first year last January:

“Well, I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he 
struck against white racism, the cultural blow. And he accomplished that on 
Election Day. That was huge. This is one of the most destructive forces in world 
history, and by simply—by virtue of becoming president, Obama did it major damage.”

“But once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US 
president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Obama became a 
murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, 
that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have 
flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose 
not to do so.”[1]



There is something very valuable and powerful in this remark, made on Goodman’s 
television show “Democracy Now!” I am referring to the richly ironic way in 
which Nairn simultaneously acknowledges (A) the historic nature of the fact that 
a black family now resides in the White House – in the top office of the 
historically arch-racist U.S., and (B) the first black president’s chilling 
commitment to that nation’s continuing murderous imperial militarism.



This is an important duality to grasp and Nairn puts it very well. Anyone who 
doubts that Obama has “kept [the machine] set on kill” should consult the 
impressive record of murder and mayhem that the winner of the latest Nobel Peace 
Prize has already built across South Asia and in the Middle East.[2]



EXCEEDING BUSH



Still, I think there are seven key problems with Nairn’s declaration [3], which 
I find insufficiently critical on numerous interrelated levels.



First, “kept the machine set on kill” is probably an understatement.  As the 
left U.S. foreign policy critic Edward S. Herman has noted, Obama has very 
possibly “exceed[ed George W.] Bush’s [global] bullying and power-projection.” 
As Herman explains:



“Obama's ... Iraq ‘withdrawal’ is a phony, just as his expansion of the 
Afghan-Pakistan war is real. His collapse in supposedly pushing for a just 
settlement in Palestine has been complete, ending up with a crude attack on the 
UN Goldstone Report on Gaza and no resistance whatever to escalated Israeli 
ethnic cleansing. Israel is once again threatening to attack Lebanon and Syria, 
with no constraining response from Washington. Obama and his secretary of state 
are once again threatening Iran with intensified sanctions, if not more...”



“...The U.S. collaboration in the overthrow of the elected, populist government 
of Honduras was a throwback to the era of U.S. sponsorship of National Security 
States in Latin America. Bush could hardly have surpassed Obama's atrocious 
performance in Haiti, where the U.S. response to their devastating earthquake 
was almost completely military — a lagged occupation, with minimal 
food-water-medical-shelter aid, and even obstruction to aid as airports were 
preempted for the U.S. military occupation forces and the landing of Hillary 
Clinton.”



“Elsewhere in Latin America, Obama's policies have been regressive, with more 
open hostility to left regimes in the region, collaboration in the Honduras 
coup, and acquisition of seven new military bases in Colombia that all send a 
message of ‘change’ for the worse.”



“Across the globe, U.S. military bases are expanding, not contracting. The 
encirclement of Russia and steady stream of war games in the Baltic, Caspian, 
Mediterranean, and Western Pacific areas continue, the closer engagement with 
Georgia and efforts to bring it into NATO moves ahead, as do plans for placing 
missiles along Russia's borders and beyond.” [4]



It’s not a pretty story. Obama ran on ending the Bush ‘war on terror’ police 
state and has persisted in conducting and defending against legal challenges 
many if not most of the same repressive and anti-civil libertarian policies he 
criticized as a candidate. During the campaign, he told his “progressive” 
supporters he was (basically) antiwar – even his very underlying promise (to the 
foreign policy establishment) of continued militarism was evident to trained 
observers – and then came into pass a record-setting Pentagon budget and to 
expanded U.S. militarism in South Asia and around the world.





BEFORE HE BECAME PRESIDENT



Second, we should not accept the “once he became president” line in Nairn’s 
comment.  As I went to some length to (irrelevantly) show in my 2008 book Barack 
Obama and the Future of American Politics (endorsed by leading Left 
intellectuals and ignored by “Democracy Now!,” The Nation, and other established 
“left-liberal” media), Obama enlisted as an eager, energetic and eloquent agent 
and exponent of U.S. military imperialism within and beyond Iraq during his 
career as a U.S. Senator (2005-2009) and a presidential candidate (2006-2008). 
His “anti-war” campaign imagery was deeply fraudulent and he acted powerfully on 
behalf of the “machine set to kill” in his Senate votes and as an influential 
politician before his election to the imperial presidency.[5]



After the election and prior to his inauguration, moreover, Palestinians and 
their supporters watched in disgust as the normally wordy President-Elect stood 
nauseatingly mute while Israel and Washington massacred thousands of civilians 
in the open-air Israeli prison called the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and 
January 2009.  As Noam Chomsky noted:



“To these crimes Obama's response has been silence – unlike, say, the terrorist 
attack in Mumbai, which he was quick to denounce, along with the ‘hateful 
ideology’ that lies behind it. In the case of Gaza, his spokespersons hid behind 
the mantra that ‘there is one president at a time,’ and repeated his support for 
Israeli actions when he visited the Israeli town of Sderot in July: ‘If missiles 
were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to 
stop that.’ But he will do nothing, not even make a statement, when U.S. jets 
and helicopters with Israeli pilots are causing incomparably worse suffering to 
Palestinian children.” [6]





COULD OBAMA REALLY HAVE “FLIPPED THE SWITCH”?



Third, it is wishful fancy to think that Obama could have shut down the American 
global “killing machine.” The two reigning U.S. political parties, the nation’s 
dominant mass corporate media (a virtual fourth, reality-distorting branch of 
American government) and the nation’s educational system (K-Ph.D) are ally 
deeply ensnared in and in thrall to the Military Industrial Complex. Along with 
the Pentagon and the leading “defense” contractors and their public relations 
systems, these leading institutional forces would powerfully resist significant 
cuts in the “defense” (empire) budget and in military operations abroad (what 
the Pentagon innocuously terms “forward global force projection”). There is no 
evidence that Obama – who had “been advised and agree[d] that there is no peace 
dividend,” according the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one 
day after Obama’s election [7] – had any interest in shutting down the  “machine 
set to kill.” But it is questionable that he could have done that if he had 
wanted to and was prepared to face serious risks. The institutional and 
ideological barriers are simply too high. Superpower’s military regime is more 
deeply entrenched and powerful than any politician, even a president. [8]





THE STATE-CAPITALIST POLICY MACHINE STILL SET ON CHA-CHING



Fourth, Nairn could and probably should have made the same ironic point on 
Obama’s domestic record. Obama has kept the “corporate-managed democracy’s” [9] 
state-capitalist policy machine set on “cha-ching” for the rich, powerful, and 
parasitic Few. The first black president has of course acted in firm accord with 
what Herman and David Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money,” which 
exercises a deadly behind-the-scenes veto power over any who would seek “to 
change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime.”[10] From 
labor law non-reform to financial non-regulation to the climate issue and 
so-called “health reform,” Obama has repeatedly espoused and acted in accord 
with what the novelist and political essayist Kevin Baker has termed “a 
'pragmatism' that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual 
corporate interests.”[11] As the perceptive Marxist analyst David Harvey 
observed on Goodman’s “Democracy Now" one year ago,  "what [the Obama team is] 
trying to do is to reinvent the same system" - to "reconstitute the same sort of 
capitalism we have had over and over again over the last thirty years in a 
slightly more regulated, benevolent form" that doesn't "challenge the 
fundamentals."[12]



Nothing that has happened in the last year should lead an honest observer to 
question the wisdom of that judgment. The Obama administration has been a 
monument to what might be called “the audacity of deception” – to the 
manipulation of democracy by corporate state capitalism.  Obama ran on cleaning 
up Washington and has come to the nation’s capital to cut one deal after another 
with big corporations, with concentrated wealth.  His bailouts of financial 
parasites at elite Wall Street firms (whose veterans and representatives have 
been ubiquitously present in his administration) have gone beyond anything 
George W. Bush tried, earning him the moniker “King of Corporate Subsidies” from 
liberal political scientist Thomas B. Edsall last year. [13]



He campaigned on the reduction of carbon emissions and then did the bidding of 
the energy companies by crassly sabotaging the Copenhagen climate talks.[14]



He ran against offshore oil drilling and just called for and initiated steps 
towards (speaking in front of a fighter jet) offshore oil drilling along the 
Eastern U.S, coast and in northern Alaska.



The health “reform” he and his fellow corporate Democrats just passed just 
passed is a corporatist joke [15], a giveaway to the insurance and drug 
companies with a few bones thrown to his so-called “progressive base.” As has 
been known by people who care for some time, Obama cut corrupt backroom deals 
last summer with the drug and for-profit hospital industries. Under the terms of 
the corrupt bargains, recently described by New York Times reporter David 
Kirkpatrick as “quid pro quo handshake deals on both sides,” Obama agreed NOT to 
honor his election pledges to pursue a public insurance option, to let Medicare 
negotiate for lower drug prices and to allow Americans to buy cheaper drugs from 
Canada. “Even while President Obama was saying that he thought a public option 
was a good idea and encouraging supporters to believe his healthcare plan would 
include one,” the liberal attorney Miles Mogulesco recently noted on Huffington 
Post, the White House “had promised for-profit hospital lobbyists that there 
would be no public option in the final bill.” By Mogulesco’s account, “there are 
serious questions about the extent to which Obama, with the help of Rahm 
Emanuel, used a K Street strategy [relying on inside corporate connections and 
lobbyists – P.S.] to pursue health care reform.”  The outcome, Mogulesco added, 
“is a health care bill that is generally unpopular with voters,” who “viscerally 
sense that the White House and Congressional Democrats may be as concerned with 
protecting special interests – whether it's drug companies, private hospitals, 
or Wall Street banks – as they are with protecting the people.”[16]



There’s no “may be” about it.



Along the way, the Obama administration has insisted that such extreme 
corporatist and imperial policy is “reasonable,” “sound,” “centrist,” 
“practical, and ”pragmatic’ and has made to sure to paint out anyone who opposes 
its vile and authoritarian policies as carping crackpots, “extremists” and 
“ideologues.”



It’s not for nothing that candidate Obama set new corporate fundraising record 
and was backed by the biggest Wall Street firms. Plus ca “change,” plus c’est la 
meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same) – at home as 
well as abroad.



Again, not a pretty story.





“THE CLASS ONE SERVES”



Fifth, Nairn’s comment creates too simple a dichotomy between Obama’s racial 
identity and Obama’s service to concentrated power (on behalf of U.S. 
militarism, in Nairn’s powerful statement to Amy Goodman last January). The 
relationship between Obama’s race and that service more complex and sinister. As 
the brilliant Left author, filmmaker, and columnist John Pilger noted last July 
4th in San Francisco:



“The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine 
hypnotist, partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at 
the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery.  However, this is the 21st 
century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive 
tools of propaganda.  For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I 
believe, above all, is the class one serves. George W. Bush’s inner circle from 
the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multiracial in 
presidential history.  It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin 
Powell.  It was also the most reactionary”. [17]



Pilger anticipated this important insight with a powerful and all-too accurate 
prediction at the end of May 2008: "What is Obama’s attraction to big business? 
  Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s [in 1968].  By offering a ‘new,’ young 
and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party – with the bonus of 
being a member of the black elite – he can blunt and divert real opposition. 
That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush’s secretary of state. An Obama victory will 
bring intense pressure on the US antiwar and social justice movements to accept 
a Democratic administration for all its faults.  If that happens, domestic 
resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.” [18]



Nearly two years later and more than fourteen months into the not-so antiwar 
Obama presidency, the “peace movement” inside Superpower’s “homeland” is a 
feeble joke.  Some of its leading organizations (most notably the laughable 
co-opted group MoveOn.org) have subordinated themselves almost beyond belief to 
the first black president [19] and through him to the U.S. foreign policy 
establishment. There is little if any meaningful opposition to Obama’s 
corporatist record and agenda. The often pathetic so-called radical Left feels 
compelled to accept the supposedly “progressive” administration (“for all its 
faults”) and to defend it against vicious and preposterous attacks from the 
significantly racist, “socialism”-charging Right. MoveOn even enlisted in the 
cause of Obama and the corporate Democrats’ health “reform” by picketing the 
occasionally progressive Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s office to pressure him to 
go against his initial promise to reject a bill that did not contain a public 
insurance option. [20]



  Unpleasant thought it may be to acknowledge, Obama’s race is part of the story 
behind this sorry surrender. As Aurora Levins Morales noted in Z Magazine in 
April of 2008:



“This election is about finding a CEO capable of holding domestic constituencies 
in check as they are furthered disenfranchised and [to] make them feel that they 
have a stake in the military aggressiveness that the ruling class believes is 
necessary.  Having a black man and a white woman run helps to obscure the fact 
that ... decline of empire is driving the political elite to the right. Both 
[Obama and Hillary Clinton] represent very reactionary politics ... Part of the 
cleverness of having such candidates is the fact that they will be attacked in 
ways that make oppressed people feel compelled to protect them.”[21]



As liberal Obama supporters have battled the dodgy Glen-Beckian right over 
(often indirectly) presidential skin color during the last fourteen months, the 
predominantly white business elite that Obama (like all presidents) serves has 
seen its wealth and power concentrate yet further upward.  The American empire 
has been re-branded and redeployed in South Asia and around the world. 
Meanwhile, few dare to recall or consider that Obama was attractive to the 
establishment (which vetted him quite carefully in late 2002 and early 2003) in 
part because elites sensed that the in-fact “deeply conservative” and 
corporate-imperial Obama’s color and ethno-cultural nomenclature made him seem 
(to angry, Bush-alienated masses both at home and abroad) much more socially 
democratic, more antiwar, and more generally and progressive than he really 
was.[22] Some of these elites likely also calculated that popular racial 
divisions would be exacerbated by Obama’s candidacy and election.  They also 
surely knew that white American fears of the “angry black man” would make it 
difficult for a black president to conduct the “epic fight” with the wealthy Few 
that “angry” John Edwards correctly said would be required to attain any 
meaningful, genuinely progressive reform.[23]





A POST-CIVIL RIGHTS PRESIDENT



“As if Rev. Wright is Stuck in a Time Warp”



Sixth, it is questionable just how much “damage” Barack Obama has really done 
(Nairn says “huge” and “major”) to U.S. racism. We should not underestimate the 
remarkable symbolic racial and related generational relevance of a black 
American president. Still, the “black but not like Jesse” candidate Obama, it 
should be recalled, did everything he could to walk and stay on the safe white 
side of the “post-racial” (really post-Civil Rights) tightrope by fiercely 
distancing his campaign from the notion that racism is still a powerful and 
relevant barrier to black advancement and racial equality in American life. 
Repeatedly praising the right-wing backlash president Ronald Reagan [24] (a 
fierce enemy of black Civil Rights), he smartly channeled dominant neoliberal 
and subtly white-supremacist “personal responsibility” narratives about how poor 
blacks have created their own misery through bad behavior and inadequate 
culture.[25]



Obama’s famous and instantly lauded “race speech” in Philadelphia – where he 
saved his candidacy by distancing himself from his former “angry black” preacher 
Jeremiah Wright – was quite conservative. As Black Commentator’s Bill Fletcher 
noted, Obama “attributed much of the anger of Rev. Wright to the past, as if 
Rev. Wright is stuck in a time warp, rather than the fact that Rev. Wright's 
anger about the domestic and foreign policies of the USA are well rooted – and 
documented – in the current reality of the USA.”[26]



Despite such efforts to appease white sentiment and notwithstanding the sorry 
record of the Republicans under Bush and Cheney amidst the onset of an epic 
financial meltdown and Great Recession, the hideously bad Republican 
presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin still won a good majority of 
the white vote (particular in the South) on Election Day – hardly a sign of 
racism’s defeat.



“If Racists Can Ostensibly Lose an Election…”



Since his election, Obama has done nothing to address specific black and other 
“minority” needs even as the recession has hit nonwhite communities with 
disproportionate force. [27] As Naomi Klein noted in a September 2009 interview 
with Goodman, the real behavior of the Obama White House has had nothing to do 
with the preposterous right-wing charge that Obama was a reparations-activist 
preoccupied with making white people pay for past racism. “In fact,” Klein 
observed, “what most reparations activists are talking about, overwhelmingly, 
are group solutions, investments in communities, in education, in healthcare, 
precisely the programs that are missing from the Obama administration in its 
response to the current economic crisis...”[28]



The administration offered no defense of the largely black, minority-based urban 
activist organization ACORN (recently disbanded under right and liberal 
pressure) when right-wing media and leading Republicans launched a 
neo-McCarthyite smear campaign against that group in the spring of 2009. The 
White House required and received the resignation of the highly qualified 
black-America “green jobs czar” Van Jones, preposterously smeared as a 
“communist” and “black nationalist” reparations advocate by the racist, 
far-right FOX News television host Glenn Beck. As Mumia Abu-Jamal noted, “Jones 
resigned, to protect a President who wouldn't protect him.” (Abu-Jamal was 
“reminded ... of Lani Guinier, another brilliant Yale-trained Black lawyer, who 
got left hanging when racists dubbed her ‘quota queen’ when she was nominated 
for a post in the Clinton administrations Justice Department” – an apt analogy.) 
“If racists can ostensibly lose an election, and still dictate policy,” 
Abu-Jamal added, “then, have they really lost?” [29]



“President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles”



In early December 2009, the nation’s first black president received some 
interesting criticism from the normally supine Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). 
  Accusing the White House of ignoring the economic plight of minorities, ten 
members of the caucus boycotted a key House committee vote on financial 
regulations.  The group expressed frustration at the White House and Congress’ 
failure to tackle minority-specific economic problems including an official 
black unemployment rate of 16 percent (the real rate is much higher), higher 
than the national rate of 10 percent. “We can no longer afford for our public 
policy to be defined by the world view of Wall Street,” the CBC pronounced, 
adding that “policy for the least of these must be integrated into everything we 
do.”



Obama flatly rejected this criticism in a special interview with USA TODAY and 
the Detroit Free Press prior to a White House “jobs summit” last December. “It’s 
a mistake,” Obama told the newspapers, “to start thinking in terms of particular 
ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in 
this together and we are all going to get out of this together.”



Just because he happened to be black, Obama was announcing, black Americans 
should not think that he would be any more willing than George W. Bush or Bill 
Clinton to acknowledge and act upon the distinctive oppression and inequality 
experienced by many in the United States’ still highly segregated and relatively 
impoverished black population. The title of the USA TODAY article reporting 
Obama’s response to the CBC’s momentary criticism was on point: “President Says 
He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles.”[30]



The president kept the focus off blacks’ troubles in the highly color-segregated 
and racially unequal metropolis of Chicago [31] when he tried (without success) 
to sell his “home city” to the International Olympic Committee as a place “with 
the warmth of a small town” where “we celebrate what we have in common” – 
interesting reflections after a black teenager named Derrion Albert was killed 
in a videotaped beating in a deeply impoverished ghetto neighborhood on the 
city’s South Side.[32] As social justice and civil rights activists and 
community organizers across the city had been pointing out for some time, the 
Chicago 2016 Olympics that the Obamas were working for (along with Oprah 
Winfrey, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and some of the city’s leading real 
estate developers) would have benefited the city’s downtown business elite at 
the expense of city taxpayers and a good portion of black Chicago.  The city’s 
Olympic building plans targeted black South Side residents for clearance and 
removal, threatening to escalate an ongoing gentrification project that has 
pushed nom-affluent blacks to the margins of the global metropolis and its 
ever-expanding corporate downtown.[33]



“They All Said No”



Here is an interesting message I received from a teacher of black students in 
the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) in February of 2009:



“Today, I asked a class for which I was subbing (high-school English students, 
about a dozen, all-black, at one of CPS's actually nice high-school facilities) 
what they thought of Obama.  Their initial reaction was one of, for lack of a 
better way to say it, pride and joy.”



“But upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a rather shallow sentiment. 
For when I asked them if they expected any real changes under Obama, they all 
said no.”



“So while they are (currently) happy he is in the White House, they know full 
well that he will be no different from any other president -- and it's not 
something they only know ’deep down.’  They know it pretty close to the surface.”



These students were expressing their solid  sense of the difference between (i) 
symbolic black representation and (ii) substantive engagement with the 
interrelated and underlying forces of economic inequality and institutional 
racism in daily American life beneath and beyond the quadrennial, 
corporate-crafted, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky’s 
excellent term) that pass for the only politics that matter in the U.S.





“The Final Piece of Evidence” That Racism is Over



Actually, however, Obama’s racial meaning and impact could well be worse than 
“no real change.” Obama’s presidency has brought some changes for the worse when 
it comes to racial inequality.  The election of a technically black president 
has reinforced the longstanding conventional white illusion that racism has 
disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and 
equality are internal to the black community – the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s 
words, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the 
socioeconomic gaps separating the races.” [34]



The white-run political culture’s regular rituals of self-congratulation over 
the defeat of overt and de-jure racism have long reinforced the dominant 
post-Civil Rights white sentiment that the United States no longer has much of 
anything to answer for in regard to its treatment of black America and the 
ubiquitous white notion that racism is something only from the relatively 
irrelevant and distant “past.”  But nothing can trump the ascendancy of a black 
man to the nation’s highest office when it comes to selling that belief. The 
black Urban Studies professor Marc Lamont Hill said it well in an important 
CounterPunch critique (titled “Not My Brand of Hope”) in early February of 2008:



“After Obama's recent success with white voters, particularly his win in Iowa, 
many have announced America's transition into a post-racial moment ... an Obama 
presidency is already being treated as a racial talisman that would instantly 
heal the scars of a nation wounded by racism.”



“For whites, an Obama victory would serve as the final piece of evidence that 
America has reached full racial equality. Such a belief allows them to sidestep 
mounds of evidence that shows that, despite Obama's claims that ‘we are 90 
percent of the way to equality,’ black people remain consistently assaulted by 
the forces by white supremacy. For many black people, Obama's success would 
provide symbolic value by showing that the black man (not woman!) can make it to 
the top. Although black faces in high places may provide psychological comfort, 
they are often incorporated into a Cosbyesque gospel of personal responsibility 
(‘Obama did it, so can you!’) that allows dangerous public policies to go 
unchallenged.”[35]



As one white Obama supporter told The Washington Post at a campaign event, he 
hoped that an Obama presidency would help America “erase all this nonsense about 
race.”[36]





Division, Diversion, and Delirium



How nice to imagine that racial oppression is something so nonsensical and 
superficial that it could be expunged by the mere act of putting into the White 
House a technically half-black politician who went out of his way not to 
threaten majority white cultural and ideological sensibilities surrounding race 
and other and related matters.



But that’s not all. It gets worse. To the detriment of racial justice, Obama’s 
racial identity has helped provide fake-progressive cloaking for his service to 
the unelected, interrelated, and significantly white-supremacist dictatorships 
of money and empire. It has helped inhibit progressive “activists”– reluctant to 
be seen as attacking the nation’s first black president and eager to defend him 
(for all his administration’s considerable corporate and imperial faults) 
against the significantly racist Right – from, well, acting against that service.



At the same time, the first black president’s alliance with concentrated wealth 
has reinforced some working class whites’ tendency (richly encouraged as usual 
by right wing activists and media) to associate black equality and Civil Rights 
(however imperfectly and deceptively identified with Obama) with white 
upper-class elitism and privilege, not with the cause of popular solidarity of 
the Many against the Few.



And if all that isn’t bad enough, we have what the black left writer Glen Ford 
calls “the Obama Delirium Effect” on part of black America.  The Obama 
presidency has convinced a significant number of black Americans – long the 
leftmost ethno-cultural segment of the U.S. citizenry and electorate (for some 
very good reasons) – to turn a blind eye to persistent harsh race disparities. 
Citing PewCenter findings showing that the Obama phenomenon and presidency 
create a powerful illusion of black advancement even as black economic 
circumstances deteriorate, Ford warns that “ObamaL'aid is a mind-altering 
substance, a hallucinogen. It makes Black people see progress when they are 
actually facing disaster. Obama-on-the-brain also behaves like an opiate, 
blocking out pain. African Americans’ ability to apprehend political and 
economic danger is compromised by Obama-induced delusion, while the opiate 
effect prevents Blacks from knowing where and how badly they have been hurt. 
That’s a fatal combination.”[37] It is deadly, among other things, to the 
continued viability of a progressive and independent black politics that is 
willing to meaningfully resist the corporate, imperial and still objectively 
white-supremacist policies of the federal government.



“A GREAT MAN?”



Seventh, I cannot support Nairn’s statement that “Obama should be remembered as 
a great man.” That’s certainly not how the survivors of the president’s deadly, 
immoral and illegal attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen feel about the 
not-so new U.S. president.  As one young Pashtun man told Al Jazeera on the day 
the Nobel Peace Prize was handed to the head of the re-branded American Empire: 
"Obama has only brought war to our country.  Peace prize? He's a killer."  The 
man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the 
bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home.  The 12 were killed, 
witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late night raid.



"Why are they giving Obama a peace medal?" another village resident asked. "He 
claims to want to bring security to us but he brings only death.”



Al Jazeera went to the Afghan village of Bola Boluk, where Obama’s bombs 
butchered dozens of civilians last spring.  "He doesn't deserve the award," a 
young woman said. "He bombed us and left us with nothing, not even a home." [38]



“Content of Character” vs. Color of Skin



In 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr. said that 
he dreamed of a day when Americans would judge each other on the basis of “the 
content of their character,” not “the color of their skin.”  We would do well to 
remember King’s admonition when we examine the historical meaning and role of 
“killer” Obama.



For what its worth, I worked for civil rights and racial justice in black 
Chicago as best I could atop the research department of the corporate- and Mayor 
Daley-captive Chicago Urban League from 2000 to 2005.  In that capacity I (who 
once during the late 1990s had to listen to professor Obama’s give a tedious 
state-level lecture for the vicious neoliberal policy called “welfare reform” 
[39]) was in a position to closely observe (and had some incidental contact 
with) Obama in his Chicago and Springfield years. He did not strike many in 
black Chicago as a particularly noble or reliably progressive character.  He was 
widely seen there as something of an abject narcissist and opportunist – a 
bourgeois, corner-cutting resume-builder with his real eyes on the prize of 
national office, very possibly the presidency. Prior to his overnight national 
celebrity status (solidified in the summer of 2004 at the Democratic National 
Convention), he met considerable disapproval in the city’s black community, 
where he was considered too “bourgeois,” too “close to [the] downtown [corporate 
elite],” “too Hyde Park" (home of the reactionary University of Chicago, where 
Obama taught Constitutional Law part-time) and “too close to [the city’s 
arch-authoritarian corporate mayor Richard (“Kim Il”)] Daley.





“A Smooth Harvard lawyer with Vacuous-to-Repressive Neoliberal Politics”



Few if any of Obama’s original “progressive” cheerleaders at white, 
upper-middle-class “left-liberal” venues like The Nation and Huffington Post 
seemed to have read or taken seriously the brilliant black and left academician 
Adolph Reed Jr.’s telling description of the future president just as Obama’s 
political career began on the South Side of Chicago. By Reed’s account, young 
Obama came to the game with a highly cultivated bourgeois taste for compromise 
and accommodation with power. The freshman state senator’s finely honed centrism 
flowed naturally from his elite socialization in a corporate-neoliberal 
post-Civil Rights era at privileged private institutions like Columbia, Harvard, 
and the metropolitan foundations on whose boards he sat and in whose circles he 
moved (a rarely noted aspect of Obama’s biography) while he worked as a Chicago 
lawyer. This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly 
after the latter won his first election to the Illinois legislature and more 
than eight years before the world beyond Springfield and Chicago and the 
Washington elite (which started closely vetting and cultivating Obama in late 
2003) were introduced to the “Obama phenomenon”:



“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of 
foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard 
lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal 
politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation 
and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a 
patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, 
small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of 
process over program – the point where identity politics converges with 
old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances.  I suspect 
that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti 
and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway.” [40]



Obama’s presidency (like his U.S. Senate career) has been richly consistent with 
black Chicago and Dr. Reed’s first impressions. The deception and betrayal that 
he and his presidency have consistently exhibited in defense of dominant 
domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines certainly suggests something other 
than “greatness” on the part of Barack Obama.  The fact that his technical 
blackness did not doom his candidacy is surely emblematic of significant 
cultural progress in the U.S.,  but Obama has been more a beneficiary than agent 
of that progress and he does not seem particularly interested in pushing the 
envelope of racial advancement beyond the simple fact of his election.



Paul Street’s next book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World 
of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), will be released next summer. Street 
(paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the 
World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO : Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global 
Metropolis (New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Segregated School: 
Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era ( New York : Routledge, 
2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics ( Boulder ,  CO : 
Paradigm, 2008). Street can be reached at paulstreet99 at yahoo.com







* Please see notes 1 and three below



1. “‘Obama Has Kept the Machine Set on Kill’ –Journalist and Activist Allan 
Nairn Reviews Obama’s First Year in Office,” Democracy Now! (January 6, 2010), 
read at http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/6/obama_has_kept_the_machine_set



2. For my own dark summaries, see (three weeks before Nairn’s interview) Paul 
Street, “Blood on the Nobel: On Words, Deeds, and Imperial Re-Branding,” ZNet 
(December 14, 2009), read at 
http://www.zcommunications.org/blood-on-the-nobel-by-paul-street and “The Enemy 
At Home,” Z Magazine (April 2010): 34-36.   For a more extensive record and 
commentary, see chapter 2, titled “The Empire’s New Clothes,” in Paul Street, 
The Empire’s New Clothes:: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: 
Paradigm, forthcoming in July or August, 2010). If you read the entirety of 
Nairn’s interview with Goodman (which I highly recommend), you learn a great 
deal about numerous and interrelated ways in which Obama has embraced  the 
bloody military project he inherited from George W. Bush and other previous 
U.S. presidents



3. I am aware that this essay’s critique of Allan Nairn’s single and brief 
comment four months ago is quite belated. In my defense, this article isn’t 
really about Nairn but about race, class, empire, and the Obama phenomenon and 
presidency.  My exercise here of somewhat over-comprehensively assessing and 
criticizing Nairn’s short comment (from yes, nearly four months ago) is useful 
in terms of drawing out the meaning of Obama in relation to the relevant 
reigning power structures.  In this essay, for better or worse, I will refer to 
Nairn’s comment in the present, not the past tense (as in “Nairn fails to grasp” 
instead of “Nairn failed to grasp.”  I mean no disrespect whatsoever to Nairn, 
an excellent Left journalist and activist who has courageously exposed U.S. 
imperial crimes.



4. Edward S. Herman, “Obama and the Steady Drift to the Right,” Z Magazine 
(March 2010), p. 9.



5. Please see Chapter 4, titled “How ‘Antiwar’? Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of 
Empire,” pp. 123-163 in Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American 
Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).



6 Noam Chomsky, “Elections 2008 and Obama’s Vision,” Z Magazine (February 2008).



7. Source: Morgan Stanley Research, Aerospace & Defense, Heidi Wood et al., 
“Early Thoughts on Obama and Defense” (November 5, 2008), read at 
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/governmentinc/documents/ObamaDefense.pdf



8. Compare Nairn’s comment with the following trenchant analysis from Herman: 
“Couldn't Obama have changed course, betrayed the establishment instead of the 
public interest, and altered the structure of national priorities? Couldn't he 
have used his powerful platform to make the case for real change, mobilizing the 
masses, and, with their support, moved us in a new direction? Of course, there 
is no evidence that he really wanted to do this, but I don't believe he could 
have done it even if he had wanted to and was prepared to take heavy risks in 
the process.”



“The institutional obstacles are too great. Not only the Republicans, but a 
large fraction of the elected Democrats are in thrall to the financial and 
business community, MIC, and pro-Israel lobby. They would have refused to go 
along with severe cutbacks in the Pentagon budget, massive outlays for public 
works and subsidies-bailouts for ordinary citizens, or a single payer 
health-care system. The business community would have gone on strike, with 
probably serious capital flight and layoffs. Cutbacks in military operations 
abroad would have resulted in hysteria in the media about Democratic weakness 
and betrayal, possible disorder, and maybe a military coup to restore order. 
Even slow and careful moves along these lines would be furiously opposed and 
would likely precipitate a political crisis.”



“The institutional constraints on even moderate liberal change are, I believe, 
very great at this point in U.S. history.” See Herman, “Obama and the Steady Drift.”



Herman here is talking about more than just stopping the killing. He’s 
discussing the chances for a related and many-sided progressive transformation 
in American politics and society under Obama. Still, I think the point applies 
also just to the more narrow objective of stopping the killing.  On coup-chances 
in the U.S., see the interesting discussion in Andrew Bacevich et al., “American 
Coup d’Etat: Military Thinkers Discuss the Unthinkable,” Harpers’ (April 2006) 
at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/04/0080995



9. This useful term belongs to Sheldon Wolin, appearing in his book Democracy 
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Alex Carey, Taking the 
Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana, 
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 139.  As Wolin predicted with haunting 
prescience before the election in his book Democracy Incorporated: Managed 
Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, “Should Democrats somehow 
be elected, corporate sponsors [will] make it politically impossible for the new 
officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society.” In the United 
States’ election-focused political culture, Wolin elaborated: “the parties set 
out to mobilize the citizen-as-voter, to define political obligation as 
fulfilled by the casting of a vote.  Afterwards, post-election politics of 
lobbying, repaying donors, and promoting corporate interests – the real players 
– takes over  The effect is to demobilize the citizenry, to teach them not to be 
involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their 
efficacy….The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts 
points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working-class, 
anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no 
opposition party working actively on their behalf.”





10. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Riding the ‘Green Wave’ at the 
Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond,” Electric Politics, July 22, 2009.



11. Kevin Baker, “Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow it 
Again,” Harper’s Magazine (July 2009).



12. Marxist Geographer David Harvey on the G20, the Financial Crisis, and 
Neoliberalism," Democracy Now (April 2, 2009).  See also John Burns and Landon 
Thomas, "English-Speaking Capitalism on Trial," New York Times, March 29, 2009, 
section 4, p.4.



13. Thomas B. Edsall, “Barack Obama: King of Corporate Welfare,” Huffington 
Post, April 24, 2009. “No matter what else he achieves or where he falls short,” 
Edsall noted, “Barack Obama can lay claim to the title of King of Corporate 
Subsidies...Using any variety of measures, the Obama administration has broken 
all records in the distribution of tax dollars to American businesses, primarily 
banks, automobile manufacturers and insurance companies...The tidal wave of 
dollar bills has stunned folks on all sides of the political spectrum.” See also 
Chomsky, “Elections 2008 and Obama’s ‘Vision.’”



14. According to the leading British climate activist and intellectual George 
Monbiot, “The immediate reason for the failure of the [Copenhagen] talks can be 
summarized in two words: Barack Obama. The man elected to put aside childish 
things proved to be as susceptible to immediate self-interest as any other 
politician. Just as George Bush did in the approach to the Iraq war, Obama went 
behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a 
coalition of the willing to strike a deal which outraged the rest of the world. 
This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation; either they 
signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the 
first few decades of climate breakdown.” See George Monbiot, “Requiem for a 
Crowded Planet,” The Guardian (UK), December 21, 2009.



15. For my own detailed analysis, see Paul Street, “Health Reform: Theirs and 
Ours,” ZNet (March 24,  2010), read at 
http://www.zcommunications.org/health-reform-theirs-and-ours-by-paul-street; 
“Corporatist Health Reform as an ‘Attack on Economic Inequality’: Harsh 
Plutocratic Realities Beneath Progressive Fantasy at and Beyond The New York 
Times, ZNet (March 31, 2010), read at 
http://www.zcommunications.org/corporatist-health-reform-as-an-attack-on-wealth-inequality-by-paul-street.



16. M. Mogulesco, “New York Times Reporter Confirms Obama Made Deal to Kill 
Public Option,” Huffington Post, March 16, 2010; David Kirkpatrick, “Obama is 
Taking an Active Role in Talks on Health Care Plan,” New York Times, August 12, 
2009.



17. John Pilger, “Obama and Empire,” speech to International Socialist 
Organization, San Francisco, CA (July 4, 2009). View and hear the segment quoted 
at 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/john-pilger-obama-is-a-corporate-marketing-creation/ 




18. John Pilger, “After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama),” Common Dreams 
(May 31, 2008), read at www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/31/9327/



19. For poignant critiques of MoveOn’s pathetically co-opted  foreign policy 
positioning  from last year, see Anthony Arnove, “Moved on From the Struggle,” 
Socialist Worker (March 13, 2009), read at 
http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/13/moved-on-from-the-struggle; Glen Ford, 
“First Black President Defeats U.S. Antiwar Movement,” Black Agenda Report 
(April 15, 2009), read at 
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/first-black-president-defeats-us-antiwar-movement; 
John Pilger, “Power, Illusion, and America’s Last Taboo” (July 4, 2009), read at 
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=545. “The tragedy,” Pilger noted, “is 
that Brand Obama appears to have crippled or absorbed the anti war movement, the 
peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress, thirty are willing to stand 
against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June 16, they voted for $106 
billion for more war…In Washington, the Out of Iraq Caucus is out of action. Its 
members can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March 
21, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and 
Justice drew only a few thousand. The outgoing president of UPJ, Leslie Cagan, 
says her people aren’t turning up because, ‘it’s enough for many of them that 
Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right 
direction.’ And where is the mighty MoveOn these days? Where is its campaign 
against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what exactly was said when, in 
February, MoveOn’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met President Obama?”



20. See Sabrina Eaton, “Re. Dennis Kucinich Draws Fire from the Left Over Health 
Care Reform,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 12, 2010, read at 
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/03/rep_dennis_kucinich_draws_fire.html. 
Thanks to Jane Hamsher of FiredogLake for alerting me to this pathetic episode.



21. Aurora Levins Morales, “Thinking Outside the Ballot Box,” Z Magazine (April 
2008).



22. Please see Street, Barack Obama, xix-xxviii. 169-176.



23. Paul Krugman, "Big Table Fantasies," New York Times, December 17, 2007; Paul 
Street, "'Angry John' Edwards v. KumbayObama," SleptOn Magazine (December 28, 
2007), read at http://www.slepton.com/slepton/viewcontent.pl?id=1234; Mike 
Davis, "Obama at Manassas," New Left Review (March-April 2009).



24. For some fascinating “liberal” praise of Reagan, see Barack Obama, The 
Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 
2006]), 31-32, where Obama reflects on how “[Reagan’s] critics” dysfunctionally 
“carped” about the policies of the man who “changed the trajectory of America” 
away from the radical tendencies of the frightening Sixties. For more disturbing 
information on Obama’s attachment to Reagan, see Street, Barack Obama and the 
Future, 96-98.



25. Among many possible citations, see Chapter 3, titled “How ‘Black’ is Obama? 
Color, Class, Generation, and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil 
Rights Era,” pp, 73-121 in Street, Barack Obama and the Future.



26. Paul Street, “Obama’s Latest ‘Beautiful Speech,’” ZNet Magazine (March 20, 
2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16947; Bill 
Fletcher, “Obama Race Speech Analysis,” Black Commentator (March 20, 2008), read 
at 
http://www.blackcommentator.com/269/269_cover_obama_race_speech_analysis_ed_bd.html



27. Celine-Marie Pascale and Katie Beran, “Nowhere to Fall,” Z Magazine (October 
2009).



28. See “Democracy Now!” show transcript for September 14, 2009 at 
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/14/naomi_klein_on_minority_death_match



29 Mumia Abu-Jamal, “Imagine Being Van Jones,” ZNet Magazine (September 22, 
2009), read at http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_57003.shtml



30. Justin Hyde and Richard Wolf, “President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on 
Blacks’ Troubles,” USA TODAY (December 4, 2009), 4A.



31. Please see my widely ignored book Racial Oppression in the Global 
Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman&Littlefield, 2007).



32. “Remarks by the President and First Lady to the International Olympic 
Committee” (Copenhagen, Denmark, October 2, 2009), read at 
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-the-President-And-the-First-Lady-to-the-International-Olympic-Committee; 
Rubin Navarette, Jr., ”Obama’s Silence on Chicago Crime,” October 2, 2009 
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/02/navarrette.chicago.obama.olympics/index.html#cnnSTCText.



33. David Zirin, “Olympics in Chicago: ‘Obama’s Folly”?” The Nation (September 
22,2009); No Games Chicago, Press Release. April 2, 2009, read at 
http://nogames.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/rally_press_release.pdf; ABC 7 News, 
“Michelle, Oprah Arrive in Copenhagen” (September 30, 2009), 
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=7040148;Street, Racial 
Oppression in the Global Metropolis. pp. 51, 107. 164, 172, 260, 293, 296



34. Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the 
Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York, NY: OxfordUniversity Press, 
2004), 77-78.



35. Marc Lamont Hill, Hill, “Not My Brand of Hope: Obama’s Politics of Cunning, 
Compromise, and Concession,” CounterPunch (February 11, 2008).



36. Quoted in John B. Judis, “American Adam: Obama and the Cult of the New,” The 
New Republic (March 12, 2008), 24.



37. See Glen Ford’s disturbing reflections (and accompanying black opinion data) 
in his commentary “Living a Black Fantasy: The Obama Delirium Effect,” Black 
Agenda Report (January 20, 2010), read at 
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/living-black-fantasy-obama-delirium-effect.



38. Aljazeera English, "Afghans Anger at Obama's Nobel Peace Prize," YouTube 
(December 10, 2009) qt www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBHrnQTinGY&feature=related



39. Which ended the guarantee of public family cash assistance for deeply poor 
and disproportionately black women and children.



40. Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice (January 16, 
1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on 
the American Scene (New York, 2000).


http://www.zcommunications.org/remembering-obama-by-paul-street

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