Obama’s “Big Deal”: Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right
Coalition
Wed, 07/13/2011 - 11:23 — Glen Ford
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Barack Obama is
salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the
Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even
transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The
debt-limit deadline is Obama’s big chance to panic a significant part of
the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security,
Medicare and Medicaid. “When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for
gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to
Republican extortion.”
Obama’s “Big Deal”: Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand
Center-Right Coalition
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“Obama’s Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.”
President Obama says he’s
determined to make the “big deal” with the Republicans – not like the
little, piddling deals he has been cutting all along to benefit the
corporate classes, but the BIG deal, the grand consensus he believes he
was born to forge with the GOP. Although it’s true that it will take a
whopper of a deal to outclass the bipartisan joint venture that
transferred $14 trillion to Wall Street, the vast bulk of it on Obama’s
watch, the First Black President is nothing if not ambitious. Obama’s
Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society – relics, like Black activism,
standing in the way of a post-everything world.
Obama
has been savoring the big moment since last November, when the
Republicans seized control of the House and sidelined the president’s
main opposition: the left wing of his own party. Delusional Obamites,
especially Blacks, are fond of saying their guy really wants Democrats
and activists to force him to take a more progressive path – to “make
him do it.” It’s actually the other way around. Obama depends
strategically on Republicans to “make him do it” – to push him
inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of
gridlock. It
is an intricate and intimate dance, with Obama and the GOP moving and
grooving to the same music. Obama often gets so caught up, he mouths the
Republicans’ lyrics.
“The
reason to do Social Security” – by “do,” Obama means “cut” – “is to
strengthen Social Security to make sure that those benefits are there
for seniors in the out-years,” says Obama,
an exact echo of the apocalypse-soon Social Security scare propaganda
perfected over the years by the GOP. Obama has been promising to “do”
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since just before he was sworn
into office in January, 2009, when he announced that these entitlements
would be “on the table” in his administration. His deficit reduction
commission last year did indeed put the programs on the operating table,
with Obama’s corporate surgeons tracing dotted lines around the organs
to be excised under the irresistible imperatives of austerity – the
Republicans’ copyrighted anthem.
“Obama
depends strategically on Republicans to push him inexorably rightward
with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock.”
Last November 3, I wrote: “The
best outcome that could result from Tuesday’s Democratic debacle is
that the Republicans overreach and, in their white nationalist
triumphalism, make it impossible for President Obama and congressional
Democrats to reach an accommodation with rampaging reaction and racism.”
In other words, when the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for
gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to
Republican extortion.
The
showdown is nigh, although Obama is squeezing every Democratic arm and
groin in reach to ensure that he and the Republicans are able to walk
down the dusty street arm-in-arm at high noon, so that the outcome can
be billed as a grand consensus, a Big Deal for Obama. This requires that
he gather Democratic accomplices in the gang rape of entitlements. “So
we might as well do it now,” says Obama,
while people are panicked by the prospect of a technical U.S.
“default.” “Pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas,” he commands, as if the
death blow to the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Great Society
is just a short, sharp pain, after which the boo-boo will heal just
fine.
The
real Obama is a cold, cynical bastard. He is not a wimp, but rather, has
plenty of spine to face down and brow-beat the remaining defenders of
the social safety net in his own Democratic Party, who have always been
the most immediate dangers to his grand center-right coalition. But it
must be done quickly, quickly, quickly, to capture the debt-limit panic
opportunity.
“He harms poor people because he is contemptuous of them, just like his
Wall Street friends and patrons.”
Half or more of the
Congressional Black Caucus will do whatever the White House asks of it,
will sacrifice anything and everything dear to African American
interests in order to preserve this particular Black family in the
executive mansion for as long as possible. But many of Obama’s white
groupies are facing the fact that they backed a corporate Trojan Horse.
Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times, should not have needed a
Nobel Prize in economics to realize that Obama “basically shares the GOP’s
diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it,” or that
the president’s eagerness to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is
something Mr. Obama and those he listens to apparently want for its own sake.”
In other words, this guy works for the other side because that’s where
his soul
is – if he has one. He advocates policies that serve corporate pigs
because he’s one of them. He harms poor people because he is
contemptuous of them, just like his Wall Street friends and patrons. His
administration is negligent or hostile to Black aspirations for the
same reasons as his white business buddies, with whom he shares a
worldview. He is every bit as much a war criminal as Bush, and as
morally debased.
The last thing we need is
to allow this guy to conclude his long-sought Big Deal with the GOP
under cover of a debt-limit crisis.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
glen.f...@blackagendareport.com.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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