It
is time for everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow
everyday people to be critical thinkers, and in so doing,
view Barack Obama for what he actually is, not
for what some had hoped he would be.
As
this year of 2011 winds to a close, the corporate-backed
U.S. President Barack Obama has repeatedly and adroitly
demonstrated his ability to mesmerize many people with
an endless litany of rhetoric, even as he simultaneously
turns the terrible pain of everyday people against them.
Barack
Obama and his Democrat and Republican party [i.e. Republicrat]
cohorts have taken the scandalous tactics of ‘bait
and switch’ to an all time new low. Obama,
the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, continues in the
footsteps of his deceitful war mongering, corporate-backed
political predecessors. Adorning himself lavishly behind
the political smoke screen of rhetoric and so-called plausible-deniability,
Obama is overseeing, ushering in and facilitating an era
of corporate-government subterfuge, perpetual wars abroad,
corporate hegemony [i.e. de facto corporate fascism],
excruciating economic austerity against everyday people,
and police-state brutality at home.
As
the late, great people’s historian Howard Zinn so correctly
put it, “I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric,
and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama
is going to be a mediocre president - which means, in
our time, a dangerous president...” Indeed, in
all probability, the extent of Obama’s deceit, guile,
and subterfuge in this year of 2011, has no doubt
surpassed even what Zinn might have expected. The
nationally coordinated physically brutal police
attacks against demonstrators in the OCCUPY Movement throughout
this nation, combined with an overwhelmingly indifferent
and deceitful corporate-stream ‘news’ media, is part and
parcel of just how very “dangerous” to the legitimate
needs and aspirations of everyday people (nationally and
internationally) Barack Obama and his corporate Democrat
and Republican colleagues actually are.
Barack
Obama, ever the opportunist and quintessential politician,
often says what he knows that ordinary people want
to hear but then proceeds to underhandedly do virtually
the exact opposite of his already obfuscated rhetoric.
Thus, it is no coincidence, for example that Obama himself
removed the universal/single payer health care option
from the political table of discussion on behalf of corporate
pharmaceutical and insurance company elites. Moreover,
it is no mere coincidence that Obama began his presidency
by, among other nefarious actions, supporting the criminal
Wall Street ‘bail out’ rip-off of everyday people
by corporate robber barons and other assorted banksters.
Notwithstanding
Obama’s ongoing U.S. outrage and debacle of Guantanamo,
his extension of international U.S. kidnappings and torture
known as ‘rendition,’ and his support for and extension
of the unconstitutional and undemocratic ‘Patriot Act,’
Barack Obama has continued and increased the U.S. military
carnage in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere on this
planet of Mother Earth. Meanwhile, corporate-government
legislative efforts on Obama’s watch are afoot
to allow for the arrest and indefinite detention of U.S.
citizens in this nation without the right to trial, etc.
Obama, as Chief Executive of the U.S. Government is well
aware of all of these horrors, and has chosen and chooses
repeatedly to cynically play ‘both ends against
the middle’ with the masses of everyday people
being caught in the unfortunate and manipulated ‘middle.’
Irrespective
of its constant fake rhetoric, the actions
of the corporate Democratic Party demonstrate that there
is in fact no substantive difference between it
and the corporate Republicans; and Barack Obama is the
very epitome of this. Malcolm X quite correctly referred
to them as the “foxes and wolves” - the Democrats and
the Republicans. The sham warfare between the Democrats
and Republicans is precisely that - a sham. It
is a sham meant to keep everyday Black, White, Brown,
Red, and Yellow people as the eternal political ping-pong
balls in the cynically avaricious clutches of the Republicrats
[i.e. the Democratic and Republican parties].
Barack
Obama’s bloody war mongering military actions in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and throughout Africa, etc. make a
total mockery of the legacy of struggle for human
rights of the so-called Civil Rights Movement and the
Black Liberation Movement in the United States. Indeed,
Obama’s dazzling rhetoric is constantly belied by his
subterfuge and horrific actions as they affect all
people, irrespective of their color, etc.
There
remains the necessity and urgency to break free
of and from the political and economic systemic death-grip
of Barack Obama and his web of corporate Democrat and
Republican Party minions whose only real goal is to utilize
manipulated ignorance and fear as they pimp the pain of
everyday people in this nation and abroad.
We
must keep up and intensify in our actions to build
a collective consciousness as we educate, agitate, and
organize for genuine systemic change and a better more
equal and just nation and world. This is a long and
protracted struggle and nothing, absolutely nothing
less will do!
Onward,
then, my sisters and brothers! Onward!
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney,
is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister
of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political
prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored
his civil / political rights case to the United Nations
under the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. In
connection with his political organizing activities in
opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed
in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour,
formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News
Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and
Thinker,
by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click
here
to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.