Obama’s Orwellian embrace of all things corporate and politically rightward has been deliberate, forceful and consistent throughout his career; not the product of cowardice, weakness, incompetence, naïve idealism, or bad timing. This is Barack Obama, as he has always been: a servile facilitator and protector of the political establishment; an insidious capitulator and “consensus man”; a sellout who piously sits back and lets others fight (while railing against their “bickering”), and then accepts whatever deal is politically expedient ---no matter what morals or principles he violates, no matter who or what he betrays. To the pious, sanctimonious and self-serving Obama, it is wrong to be a “purist”, but good to be “impure”; a muddler. A sellout.  

- Larry Chin, Global Research, December 11, 2010

Where do we stand now? As Black Americans, we stand on the cliff of an abyss. More American citizens are on this cliff, but we are (because we have been for so long) closer to the edge (and what is relatively new in our history), we are willfully leaning forward toward a fall.

Thank the leadership of our civic and political leaders for shifting the Black community’s attention from the struggle to educate and empower us with the spirit of resistance. More than 40 years after COINTELPRO’s annihilation of Malcolm, King, and other Black leaders, Black leadership has been groomed to facilitate the rapid death of the Black population in service to domestic and foreign aggressive U.S. pogroms to silence protest. In place of genuine Black protest, we have an optical illusion: Careerists, dressed in suits, founders of mega-organizations, masquerading as Black interests organizations. The suited careerists, in contrast to Martin L. King, mimic the corporate warmongers while their organizations operate massive voter registration drives on behalf of the U.S.’s corporate leadership.

As a whole, we have accepted a definition of leadership crafted by our opposition, an opposition that has grown stronger, increasingly corporate ruled, surrounded by a global security apparatus and criminal “justice” establishment not limited to federal, state, and local courts within the U.S. What power real controls the UN or Interpol?

Black leadership is not ignorant of the reality of the corporate coup—they are complicit with in the coup because, as a whole, Black leadership helped to emancipate the corporations and now corporate interests is, in part or in whole, the interests of Black leadership one the one hand and the local Black prison security guard, educator, politician, Black college student who wants to be the next Bill Gates, and even a 6th grader who knows more corporate-sponsored rappers than he or she knows anything about the history of Black resistance. Black leadership has unified to speak to the community about “responsibility,” “individual successful,” and “economic power”—we need to gain economic power—knowing good and well this is utter nonsense in this day and age of corporate control, but it serves to remind the Black population that in this new day the motto is—get rich or die trying!         

Starting with the Maynard Jacksons to the Willie Browns, the Jesse Jacksons (Senior and Junior) to the Al Sharptons, the John Lewises (Malcolm or me!) to the Charles Rangels, the Eddie Longs to the T.D. Jakes (God-wants-you-to-get-rich-pastors), to any number of Black academic enslaved clowns (silent as the colleges and universities shut down Black studies) and countless “urban policy” government gofers—the message has been the same: a fighter no, but a joiner—that’s where the money is!

Capitalist slaveholders learned to control the potential for massive resistance among the enslaved.  The Nazi leadership, in turn, learned from the slaveholders and Jewish leadership cooperated while a selected few among the captured led their own to the ovens and gas chambers. So, too, today, after Malcolm and King could not be co-opted and had to be killed, our leadership should be held responsible for supporting and facilitating, willing or through silence, the high Black incarceration rates and the hand over of Black children to camps (so-called educational institutions) where they have been mentally gutted and left to flounder in despair. 

And there is no rescue for this population anywhere in sight!

It is this Black leadership that made it possible for the emergence of a Barack Obama as the ultimate useful tool for the advancement of corporate capitalism. Make no mistake, the leadership these agents of capitalism offer is in direct contradiction to the legacy of a Martin L. King.  In fact, King did not see fit to commit suicide after J. Edgar Hoover’s threatened to reveal FBI tapes of King engaged in extra-marital sex as an example of King’s “hypocrisy.” But, if he lived today, he would wring his own neck rather than continue to be witness to the willful betrayal and very real hypocrisy on the part of Black leadership in the U.S.  And these leaders have the audacity to refer to King as the impetus for accepting capitalism rather than freedom.

Black leaders in 2010 are millionaires, corporate partners, and businessmen. What leadership this cabal offers has been as a mutant and therefore cooperating league of soldiers more patriotic than right wingers, nudging the faithful even closer to the edge of the cliff and encouraging them to jump! Collectively, their unified effort has killed the potential for a viable Black leadership in the spirit of resistance.

Recently, someone I know tried to inform me that not all capitalism was bad!  I told a friend who said, yes, like some cancer is good! Some capitalism is good, I guess, for white liberals. There is personal gain to consider, profits, at the expense of what? On the other end of this equation, are the dead, victims of cancer because usually cancer ultimately grows and kills its host!  

So it is no wonder our leadership surrounded Obama, corporate capitalism’s well-groomed specimen. At the top of this paradigm shift sits Brand Obama!

Take a look at PBS’s White House Photographers.  This is a program determined to assure the American public that the Obama White House is photographing history. We follow a very busy photographer (Obama’s photographer from his days as an Illinois senator) as he follows the president busy days. 

Try as he might to capture honest, spontaneous, un-staged” photos, the cameraman’s subject is seems always aware of the camera. Similar to Bill Clinton, Obama is a star, an American celebrity—all smiles and hand shakes, a good all-around guy. In this PBS presentation, Obama “at-work” is the Yuppie graduate student you might meet at a social event at Harvard University, let us say.

Surprised? Looking for someone presidential?

Well, who would expect to see graduate students, at their social events, contemplating the fall of drones that usually manages to miss the “No. 1” terrorist plotter but absolutely wipes out families with children?  So there are no photos like the ones we have seen of Lyndon Johnson in the Oval room with his hand on forehead, weary, regretting war, bloody and brutal war, war that returns young soldiers home with psychological and devastating physical wounds. In this hour-long presentation, we see only a photo of Obama greeting the caskets of dead soldiers, and we are told the president was “overwhelmed.” Otherwise, he is worried in a photo or two about the passing of insurance and pharmaceutical health care bill. Obama has to win for his constituency!

Then we are back, witnessing America’s example of a winner! A charming, calm, and composed Obama works a room and fills it with his smile and his jokes. But then there is the calm and composed Obama, working a room with smiles and jokes. He laughs. Everyone laughs. The people surrounding president love him!  But is there a photo of this winner surrounded by citizens opposed to the money give away to Wall Street? I cannot image such a photo these days. 

But history is being recorded, we are reminded. And not one photo of Obama signing into law another opportunity to secure an effective police state within the U.S. and globally! Who will remember those dark moments?

The rapid presentation of John F. Kennedy and Johnson photos taken by their White House photographers seemed real, less staged.  Perhaps these men, contemplating the war of their day and the young in the streets or fearless men and women of the civil rights—perhaps these presidents knew a King was out there, an A. Philip Randolph, an Adam Clayton Powell—some serious troublemakers—were out there?

But at the White House in 2010, there are no pictures of Obama seated next to an equivalent of Martin L. King!  

In the hunter’s history books on the rise (and silent fall) of Barack Obama will comment on how he looked good, stayed cool, and got the job done for a corporate rebound. It is the only narrative that matters to Wall Street now! I believe Obama knows this and that he has always known his task was to save capitalism and remove as much of that civil liberties nonsense as possible.

Obama never betrayed those he made the real promises to!

We the hunted, however, will have to struggle to remember that Barack Obama did not betray Black Americans!  Our Black leadership in the post-racial era did betray the Black struggle but not Barack Obama!

Black Americans betrayed themselves!

Black Americans should have recognized a “Black” man—who said his war would be better—would send their sons and daughter (not Arnie Duncan’s or Rahm Emmanuel’s or Larry Sumner’s children or grandchildren) to die for lies—his lies—and that that man represented the same old contempt for Black Americans!

They should have known it was a slave ship disguised as the good ship Hope. And even that ship, the one that sailed in the 90s with the Captain from Hope playing a saxophone, was shipwrecked and stranded millions of Blacks on these isolated rural complexes. 

No. Black people should have recognized the person Obama told them he was. For he was forthcoming with Black Americans! He may have told white liberals he was not to be feared. Counting on deep-seated racism in the U.S.—I ain’t really Black!—Obama won the white liberals over!

But Obama frowned down on Black people! He hurled a fiery tongue and denounced (with anything but coolness and calm) Black Americans as a racial group.  He denounced Black culture.  He denounced the Black heritage. He did so at every opportunity.  He did so in his memoirs. For a man made of images, he needed only one image to bring out the handkerchiefs of the predominantly Civil Right era generation: Pettus Bridge! Oh, remember Pettus Bridge! And it had to be Selma only—for Selma and Pettus Bridge lead to the Black vote! 

Oh, no! His handlers were not stupid—Black leadership fell for it! Great opportunity for historical photos!  Maybe, cabinet position, too? 

Obama won and snubbed them as he had snubbed Blacks in Chicago. Firmly aligned with the Daley Machine and the financiers on La Salle Street in Chicago, a fiercely determined Obama proved his worth to the corporate capitalist when he clicked the delete button in an office in Chicago and disappeared the poor Black community along the Lake on the Southside. A new map of his new constituency—the wealthy along Miracle Mile along the lakefront! He did not even need Black votes, but the Blacks, so faithful to the Democrats, voted for him anyway. A Black man!  He could even publicly denounce the astute pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Black people still voted for the “Black” man.

You think our Black leadership did not know that Barack Obama was always (even in Chicago where he was groomed) “a servile facilitator and protector of the political establishment; an insidious capitulator”? 

Surrounded by Tony Rezko, Mayor Daley and his men, Rahm and Axelrod, the financiers on La Salle, and Goldman Sachs, who needs a now deceased population?  Besides, Chicago could not allow the dead to vote anymore! The U.S. government called a halt to that tradition!  

When the corporate capitalists finally throw Obama overboard (and not because he is “Black”), the government’s “street cleaners” may pull out the bulldozers and the big trash cans to pick up the deceased—because this collective is Black! Watch we do not mistake the trash cans for Noah’s Ark! 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.