That's the proverb that comes to mind when looking at Barack Obama's recent and not-as-recent flip-flops on everything from publicly financed elections to the recent FISA bill legalizing warantless wiretapping and email snooping by the government. The bill also gives companies like Verizon cooperated with the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping after 9/11 immunity from lawsuits.
In Obama's announcement that he would opt out of the system of public financing, he claimed that the system "is broken" because of loopholes that McCain has exploited to raise money from lobbyists and special interest groups. With public financing, Obama would have received $84 million in taxpayer money, gained from the $3 check-off on federal tax returns, which he could spend starting at the close of the Democratic Party's convention until election day.To deflect criticism of Obama's flip-flop on the issue, apologists for Obama and the candidate himself have made much of the fact that 45 percent of his money comes from small donors (defined as those who donate $200 or less). He claims that these small donors "will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful."
In reality, big contributors have far more influence in and access to the campaign than the voter who shells out $200 because he or she really believes in Obama's message of change. These small donors did not get advance copies of Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech addressing the Reverend Wright controversy. They do not participate in weekly and quarterly conference calls with the head honchos of the campaign and with Obama himself.
To sit on the "national finance committee" that gets advance copies of speeches and access to the campaign's decision-makers, donors must bundle contributions of $200,000 or more from friends, associates, co-workers, and employees. The top 79 bundlers for Obama's campaign, 5 of whom are billionaires, are responsible for 27,000 checks from individuals for the legal maximum of $2,300. Of those bundlers, 18 work at top law firms and 21 are Wall Street executives and power brokers from Fortune 500 companies. Others include hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley capitalists, Chicago-based developers, and black millionaires.
Of course, that's not counting the money Obama has raised by exploiting the very same loophole in campaign finance laws that he blasted McCain for. He got $28,500 donations recently by dining with rich couples in Hollywood for a grand total of $5 million in one event. (That money goes to the party, circumventing the $2,300 legal limit on individual donations to candidates, which is a joke since Obama now controls the Democratic Party).
Forget "change we can believe in." I've got a better slogan for the Obama campaign: "hypocrisy made flesh."
Here's the picture when individual donors are broken down by industry: Lawyers have donated about $18 million to Obama, the telecom industry has given about $10 million (thereby purchasing his flip-flop on FISA legislation), employees of securities and investment firms have given about $8 million, university administrators and employees have given roughly $7 million, real estate professionals have contributed $5 million, medical professionals have donated $7 million, bankers have given $1.6 million, and hedge fund and private equity managers have given about $1.6 million.
Broken down by individual companies, we find that Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama than any other group, followed by the University of California, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, National Amusements, Lehman Brothers, Harvard, and Google. These institutions would have to be stupid to give millions to a candidate that would deliver real, substantive change at their expense for the benefit of America's working-class majority. If they're that stupid, they can write some checks for a guy I know in Venezuela named Hugo Chávez.
Now that the primaries are over, we can see what Obama really stands for: more of the same. More of the same policies that have produced a gigantic disparities in income, growing pockets of poverty, more people without health insurance, the highest per-capita prison population in the world, crumbling infastructure, a failing education system, inner city decay, and an increasingly aggressive foreign policy.
If you think Obama's light-speed blitz to the right is bad now, wait until the election is over. Then he won't have to pretend to give a damn what the voters think and he can repay his top donors for the investment they made in him. Already the Wall Street Journal is salivating over the prospect of Obama presiding over Bush's third term.
Remember folks, he's Barack Obama, and Wall Street approved his message.
1 comments:
The Audicity of Hype
By now it should be quite clear to those of us on the left who still can think that the majority of the ruling rich are behind Obama rather than McCain. For one thing, just look at who has the edge in donations from corporate fat-cats. All the talk a while back of some kind of racist coup by super-delegates against Obama should be seen for what it was to begin with…yet another attempt to rally support for this fraud and to distract attention from his neo-liberal, new-Democrat agenda with even heavier doses of identity politics and white guilt-tripping by his liberal-left apologists.
Far from moving to the right, Obama has, in fact, moved even further to the right. If anyone has moved to the right, it is the fake-left “progressives” (who used to be “radicals” back in the 60s) who will stick with the Democrats through thick and thin, and who would have done the same if Hillary Clinton was the candidate instead of Obama. As for Obama, he was never any kind of “antiwar” candidate to begin with, despite the attempts of the media (and the fake left) to depict him as such. Except, of course, as being an opponent of “dumb” (ie, losing) wars, which would have made most of Hitler’s generals “antiwar” as well.
Like JFK, Obama will bring a fresh new face to imperialism’s aggression abroad and austerity and repression at home, that a Clinton or a McCain could never do. After all, if you are going to screw around with dark-skinned people around the world (and at home, for that matter), who better to do the job than someone who looks like them. And who better than Obama to keep the liberal-left led “social movements” off the streets and in the Democratic party?
Remember how few mass demonstrations (or mass movements behind them) there were when Clinton was president…until the Battle of Seattle and the anti-globalization movement that it spawned. Of course, the latter, whatever its myriad of failings may have been, was way more the work of newly radicalized youth rather than of the burned-out 60s generation, which has led any and every movement it gets control of back into the Democratic party. Well, that’s what’s in store for us if Obama wins.
As for some alleged "leftists" defending the wrong decisions of youth and Blacks who support Obama (what about workers, or don’t they count for the PC-left), doesn’t that sort of negate opposing Obama in the first place. What are they going to say to them? ”Even though Obama doesn’t stand for anything that is in your interest, we support your right to vote for him instead of voting for people like Nader or McKinney who do.” Of course for groups like Solidarity (or the ISO, for that matter) who place popularity in the petty-bourgeois “progressive” milleau ahead of principle such a position makes perfect sense. Hoping for change from that bunch is almost as fruitless as expecting it from Obama and his “progressive” hangers-on.
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