The Black Commentator: An independent weekly internet magazine dedicated to the movement for economic justice, social justice and peace - Providing commentary, analysis and investigations on issues affecting African Americans and the African world. www.BlackCommentator.com
 
Dec 8, 2011 - Issue 451
 
 

Barack Obama and the
Growing Fascist-Corporate State
Keeping it Real
By Larry Pinkney
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

 

 
“You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality.”
-Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz]

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.