The Obama brand

Chris Hedges has emerged as the most articulate liberal critic of the Obama era. What can I do but quote?

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal.

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as “green” energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action “reform” bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.

While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks before Obama took office, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel,” according to Seymour Hersh.

The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state of childishness.

There's much more on the other side of the link. You'd think that after compiling this ghastly resume, Obama would have finally shocked his bots awake. No such luck.

On a recent Democratic Underground thread, Cynthia McKinney's piece on "Obama Buyer's Remorse" was excerpted. (Interesting that she too utilizes the terminology of consumerism.) Her words reflect those we heard from Hedges:

And now that the Obama Administration has used its Justice Department to argue in court in favor of those who ordered torture, and to defend Bush Administration policies of torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, and extra-legal treatment of so-called “enemy combatants,” most of whom have committed no crime (like six-year Guantanamo Prisoner number 345, Sami El-Hajj, who was on the Dignity with me as I tried to make it to Gaza). On these issues, the Obama Administration is consonant with the Bush Administration. No wonder Bush et al have more to worry about from the “small-d” democrats in Spain than from the “big-D” Democrats in Washington, DC.

The first sentence in that quote isn't really a sentence; it's an introductory clause. Still, the facts presented by McKinney are inarguable.

Which doesn't stop the DUmmies from arguing -- and from imitating the ostrich:

I have no remorse. I think my President is doing a good job.

why should I bother to read something that I will disagree with and will not convince me otherwise?

Just completed my quarterly remorse check. None was found. Ms. McKinney is mistaken, as national polling clearly indicates.

It's been a little over 100 days and it's amazing the shit that's starting to show up on DU more and more. Who fucking needs this? There's being critical, and then there's this BULLSHIT being splattered all over DU. Go lament with the freepers if you're so disgusted with Obama. They'd love to have you.

There's a whole sub-set of political-circuit people who made their living traveling the country getting paid to criticize Bush. Now that he's gone, they're critics without a target, i.e. without a paycheck...unless they find a new one.

Permanent critics, out of their niche but still milking the cow.

She's tossing a pebble at a battleship. No damage reported.

I'm happy with my vote and I'd happily vote for Obama again!

He seems to be conducting his White House pretty much as he conducted his campaign -- No Drama Obama, smartest man in the room. All those folks who hope he'll fail -- for them, the dynamite goes boom in their faces.

The dynamite will boom all right -- in all of our faces. Back to Hedges:

But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand.