Glen Ford tells it

Glen Ford, the executive editor of Black Agenda Report, offers what may be the most comprehensive brief analysis of the Obama administration available anywhere. I must offer a few long quotes:

As of this writing, the Progressives for Obama website still exists, a relic of Left delusion that should have died of embarrassment months ago. Barack Obama has, indeed, grown in the presidency – but not into the FDR-like figure of his leftish supporters’ imaginations. Nor has his presence in the Oval Office served to spur Blacks and progressives to dramatic action, creating the “push” that Left Obamites had predicted would allow their champion to act on his more “liberal” instincts. Quite the contrary. The “Obama Effect” has led to the near-total collapse of the Left– both its white and Black wings – and made the nation safe for rule by finance capital and militarists.

The military, finance capital and healthcare corporations (insurers are a branch of finance capital) are winning every important battle because, on fundamental issues, President Obama is on their side.

So let us give President Obama his due. He not only smashed the Left opposition, he humiliated them.

There is no longer an anti-war bloc in the U.S. Congress. It began to evaporate when Obama took office. The Out of Iraq Caucus has dissolved. The Progressive Congressional Caucus cannot find a mission. And the Congressional Black Caucus can claim only eight members worthy of the label, “progressive.”

Kudos, again, to the president, for such adroitness in killing a dream whose time appeared to have come: single-payer healthcare. Obama made non-persons of healthcare reform’s best friends in the Democratic Party, barring them from White House-sponsored healthcare events. The president erected a big tent that included everyone except single-payer advocates who, from Obama’s perspective, are the enemy. Instead, he wheels and deals and even invents nonexistent agreements with Big Pharma, Big Hospitals, and Big Insurance, all the while vowing to slice huge chunks out of Medicare and Medicaid.

Only 20 percent of respondents oppose a Medicare-for-all-type plan. It would require the awesome power of a still very popular president to hold back a mob that is composed of damn near everybody, but Obama is up to the task.

Obama’s sham banking regulations were unveiled to great fanfare – and bombed, colossally, on the front page of the New York Times. In language that an economics columnist for the “gray lady” of corporate media seldom deploys against sitting presidents, Joe Nocera wrote:

“Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul…. Firms will have to put up a little more capital, and deal with a little more oversight, but once the financial crisis is over, it will, in all likelihood, be back to business as usual.”

Based on his record as candidate and president to date, it is plain that Obama sees the world as the bankers see it. He accepts their advice because he agrees with it. He shares their core ethic, and is therefore always forgiving of their “excesses.” The fate of his presidency is entwined with theirs.

I don't think I've ever recapitulated so many points made by another author. My apologies to Mr. Ford. But the man is right, and therefore demands to be read and quoted.

I honestly did not think that Obama would be this bad. I honestly did not think it would be this easy to stay mad at the guy.