Barack Obama’s Faux Populism
In the meantime, the story informs us that if Obama is re-elected, Corzine is on line to be appointed Treasury Secretary. It also informs its readers that “Obama’s links to financial companies don’t end with MF Global. The president has raised $15.6 million from the financial industry for his reelection effort and the DNC, according to a Washington Post analysis. It continues:
The third-largest source of cash for Obama is Chicago-based Chopper Trading, which employs a controversial high-frequency trading technique. The firm’s chief executive, Raj Fernando, held a fundraiser at his home with Vice President Biden and has raised at least $200,000 for the campaign and the DNC.
A federal study of the 2010 “flash crash,” when the stock market briefly lost $1 trillion in value only to recover shortly thereafter, placed the blame squarely on high-frequency trading technologies like those employed by Chopper. Other studies have cited high-frequency trading, which now accounts for more than half of all trades, as contributing to stock market volatility. A company spokesman did not return a request for comment, but defenders of the industry dispute those studies.
And hence the truth of Mead’s conclusion:
Blue Wall Street is a major force in the Democratic Party; indeed, the Democrats couldn’t survive without it. This is not just because of the campaign contributions, pleasant as those are. It is also about ideas and policy: Blue Wall Street understands how Democratic aspirations (like mass home ownership) can be achieved through the financial markets — for a while at least. It will be Blue Wall Street that floats the bond issues that keep debt-bedraggled cities and states functioning. And in New York, it is Blue Wall Street that pays the taxes and provides the jobs that keep Gotham from Detroit style decay.
Smart voters know that the anti-Wall Street campaign is meaningless. It is meant only to placate the left-wing base of the Democratic Party. A friend of mine has spent some time recently at the Zucotti Park OWS, and spoken with many of the demonstrators. He asked some of them what they thought about the brewing Corzine scandal, and most did not know what he was talking about, although some remembered he had been Governor of New Jersey. People like these protestors don’t need facts or truth — only rhetoric, the type that the President is ready to exploit for the purposes of his re-election.
As for the President’s program, and his attempts to move the United States into a nation whose system represents a European type social-democracy, how ironic it is to find the Wall Street banks providing the funds for an administration whose favored economic and political changes will further erode the possibilities of our nation’s economic renewal, and that will likely dampen the chances for business revival even more than they are at present.
Barack Obama…our benevolent despot….He’s Andy Griffith and Father Divine all rolled into one…an activist, a communist and a family man….He wants to be Willy Wonka….giving candy to those he deems deserving…who follow his prescription and carry his flag. History will possibly regard him as an enigma…something so foreign to American tradition that it will be difficult to lump him with other unsuccessful presidents….because they, like Jimmy Carter….had a life resume’ from which to draw conclusions about. Obama has an autobiography about a life that hasn’t yet been lived….and began in parts still unknown….again, an enigma.
Ron Radosh makes the case that POTUS is a faux populist, demonstrating his thesis by enumerating Obama’s Wall Street support. Some of that 2008 support is fading. But for those who are diehard supporters, they see his redistributive policies as protective of their wealth in the long term, just as patrician FDR advised. I wrote about what I see as Obama’s barely-concealed Leninism here: http://clarespark.com/2011/10/10/populist-catharsis-on-wall-street/. Critical comments welcome.
What he is, is a race-baiter and a demagogue, a divider and the kind who spreads smears in hushed voices behind closed doors. An incompetent and a finger-pointer, a serial liar with delusions of greatness. Total sham, all illusion and no reality.
One only has to have asked onesself what, precisely, the function and methods are that are used by a “Community Organizer” from Chicago. That should have dismayed people to no end.
Good One, Allston….
May I sum up this extract: “Total sham, all illusion and no reality.” ?
I think a good word here would be “…charisma..”
May Obama be a lesson to our nation to never, ever again elect anyone to any position based upon mere shallow, ephemeral “charisma”.
He never had any charisma. I will never understand what people saw in him.
Obama is an anti-American. He always has been and he always will be. You idiots who elected him deserve your situation.
Those of us who did not vote for Obama are being punished for the sins of others.
I’ll admit, I voted for GWB twice, and he did indeed play his part in letting the economy go down the tubes. He didn’t know beans about the economy. I’m no Occubagger – I’m a Tea Partier – but I will agree that bailouts are always wrong, no matter which party does them and no matter who they purport to benefit. Neither the world, nor the financial system, will come to an end if the government refrains from doing yet another unconstitutional bailout.
The financial problems are coming home to roost at the local level too. The piggy banks are empty. There are no more coins in the sofa cushions. The last drop of blood has been wrung out of the turnip. What now?
The overly intense focus on presidential candidates causes local matters to be neglected in the news media. How many voters in local elections really know who their mayors are? I don’t mean just knowing the mayor’s name and party affiliation, or what color he or she is – I mean, do you know what your mayor really stands for, if anything?
What about your city or town council? Yes, it matters a great deal.
Of course, the problem was and continues to be that as bad as GWB was, the alternative was Al Gore and John Kerry. With those as alternatives, GWB wins by default. We really haven’t been getting any good choices through the primary system, which is a whole other discussion. And we’re seeing the same thing play out now; Romney has no grass-roots support, but he’s still the most likely candidate on the GOP side. When the primaries are run by the insiders, the elections are just for show.
I agree with you about the idiots, however and very unfortunately the rest of us have to live with the shapeshifter in the WH as well. Moreover, I believe he will get a second term, no matter how much we talk, complain, organize and what have you. Those who believe that the shapeshifter’s base is deserting him are themselves delusional. It will never happen because the left/progressives are vicious and never shy away from illegalities, voter fraud, and outright destruction of those who disagree with them.
Finally someone who is looking ahead instead of continuing to try and figure out who Zero and the progressives are. They are marxists. We don’t need to understand them anymore than that. And with the realities of what the left and Zero will do vis a vis the next election, we must start to think about our responses.
If one reads Stanley Kurtz’ book “Radical-In-Chief”, one will recognize immediately what OWS is.
It is the work of a “community organizer”, it has the same folks from most Cooper Union or Midwest Academy get togethers.
It is a fringe, radical, extreme, anti-capitalist astroturfed “show trial” against the free market.
And Dear Leader’s only real long term job in his life…before the present one…was to put these together and try to pour kerosene on the fire he tried to light.
It is ACORN and the SEIU and UNO and the Workers Party…marching on a bank and screaming racism or anti-Hispanic charges…in order to Cloward Piven another chip out of the bricks in our economic system they so desperately want to overthrow.
The far left is furious with Obama because he did not seize the moment when he had all three houses. Obama likes to slow cook his revolutions. They wanted to grab us by the throat, throw us through a plate glass window and finish us off. Obama wasn’t bold enough for their totalitarian tastes.
They are spoiling for a fight…a war. They saw Obama as McLellan…not Lincoln.
The mass media has turned traitor. They are covering up the overthrow.
There is a line in the sand. And we do ourselves no favor by letting the Tides Foundation wipe it away.
He’s not even that; McClellan was a lousy field commander, but brilliant at training and organization. If the Union armies had used the general staff concept, Lincoln would have been well-served to have appointed him G-4 for the Army of the Potomac.
Barky, OTOH, has never shown any ability other than to eat waffles in his shirtsleeves and play golf at expensive resort.
FAUX? Yea! That describes Obama to a tee. He is a faux President, Politician, and maybe even a faux American. Ya know, it is not him that bothers me but it is those that follow his lead. The solutions to our problems are obvious if you listen and take heed to the experienced financial experts (Job Creators) in the trenches. But no, lets spend our way out. It just ain’t gonna work. Wake up America. One other thing. The money that he keeps getting from Wall Street has in effect emboldened those OWS Morons.
Fauxbama?
“Obama has decided to take up on his own the program and calls of the Left in the hope that come election day they will rally to his side as they did in 2008 to provide the local cadre to get out the vote from blacks, minorities and the middle-class that has been hit hard by the White House’s own disastrous economic policies. What better way to get their support than to deflect attention from the programs of his own administration, and join the chorus calling for attacking the banks, blaming Wall Street, and demonizing wealth creators.”
What always, ALWAYS, amazes me is that the very people far-left liberals claim to be helping (blacks, minorities, and the middle-class) are usually the first people to be hurt whenever ultra-liberal policies are adopted by our government. The economy is far worse now than when Obama came into office and it has hit blacks, minorities, and the middle-class much harder than the very rich. What blacks, minorities, and the middle-class don’t really understand is that all the “wealth redistribution” in the world will not solve the problems of lousy financial policies being implemented by our government. So Obama is trying to be a populist even though his administration has done nothing but hurt the very people he says he’s trying to help. And I think that maybe, maybe, Americans are starting to get wise to this.
Maybe. Perhaps it’s time for blacks, minorities, and the middle class to start asking themselves, “Am I better off today than I was four years ago?”
Americans have become so accustomed to the United States always being successful, always expanding its economy, always increasing its standard of living, that they take that for granted. Then it becomes a matter of allocating the ever-growing pie–hence all that infatuation with wealth redistribution.
It’s only in really tough economic times (1930s, 1970s, currently) when the pie really shrinks, that it begins to dawn on many Americans that we are all in this together–and an economically weakened America is bad for everybody.
In the late 1970s, Roy Innis of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) woke up. This was a black civil rights organization that was more militant than Martin Luther King’s NAACP. But Innis became appalled by the way the Carter stagflation was hurting minorities’ chances of entering the middle class. And Innis ended up endorsing Reagan for President.
Today, blacks would have similarly woken up–except for the fact that we’ve got a black President. And black Americans aren’t going to turn their backs on The First Black President ™. They’re proud of having a black President–even a subpar black President.
It was much easier for blacks to turn their backs on Carter, a white Southern Baptist from Georgia.
Obama’s dark skin is an asset that keeps the left and the blacks in line. They’re not going to abandon The First Black President ™. No white politician can pull significant numbers of black votes away from Obama.
Radosh: “The far left is furious with Obama because….Obama wasn’t bold enough for their totalitarian tastes.”
They’re even more furious with Obama because they had *thought* that Obama was as totalitarian as they.
I’ve seen numerous comments on left-wing blogs where the lefty posters moaned, “I thought that all that stuff about working with Congress and being President of all the states was just rhetoric thrown in to win votes in 2008.”
These lefties are revealing a cynicism about the 2008 campaign and election that contrasts sharply with all that “hope and change” rhetoric. They’re now admitting that they had actually hoped that Obama was just lying about being a mainstream Democrat: “Why hasn’t Obama jailed Cheney for war crimes? Where is single-payer health care? Why didn’t Obama end all U.S. wars immediately upon taking office?”
One of the biggest debates on left-wing blogs about the Obama Administration is whether Obama really thinks of himself as a mainstream Democrat, or whether he really is a closet socialist who was unable to put socialism across because he’s just a weakling.
But the Obama Administration ends up a failure either way. In both their eyes and our eyes.
The Whine is as totalitarian as they are. Fortunately we have had some very foresighted men who designed a system to frustrate such despots.
Barry The Wonderful suffers from the malady that all narcissists do; He is unaware of his own ignorance. He also lacks any level of creativity and thus, he thinks his own ideas, which are really just things he’s been told or something he may have read somewhere, are truly inspired. This is due to his own shallowness.
From his own youth, learning how to effectively manipulate those around him, he would naturally seek out those who were gullible enough to be his friends, for even kids who have been taken advantage of generally grow distance between themselves and the one(s)who snookered them.
But like all dictators, or dictators-in-waiting, they have an image of themselves that they rationalize is “for the people” and “the people”, lacking any ability to choose for themselves, are relying on him to choose for them. This absurd notion is reinforced by his sycophantic media, those among his “inner-circle” and the publications they stick in front of him to reinforce the notion that he’s flawless.
There are numerous examples throughout history.
The reason this doesn’t work so well in the US is that there are still enough people with the right level of cynicism and suspicion who will categorically dismiss anything he says as a lie. I have the right to do so and it doesn’t just apply to Captain Zero. I have flamed many a republican when I know I’m being lied to. It’s just that Obama does it so regularly, so carelessly and with such lubricated ease that it makes me instantly dislike him on many levels.
I further submit that he will be his own undoing. In perhaps the not-too-distant future, the more salient statists will distance themselves from this clown citing from a cornucopia of idiocy from his own mouth, which is all recorded for posterity, any or all of the things he’s done/said/didn’t do and his own arrogance.
One of the left’s own failings though is that they love to complicate that which is simple. In other words, they try to sum up Mr Petulance by drawing on his “complex” personality or his “deep” intellect. How deep? It’s so deep that you can go fishing in it with a pair of sneakers and not get your feet wet.
But by constantly claiming his intellectual prowess and by complicating everything to some higher plain of understanding, they literally miss the forest for the trees. He’s an arrogant, petulant, ignorant asshole. He’s the guy who walks into your convenience store and you wish he would just go away. He’s the guy in the room that provides commentary on the movie everyone’s trying to watch and you can’t wait for him to get up and leave. But he never does. And, worst of all, he’s completely unaware of his own annoyance.
Deep down inside Obama, there is nothing like what one would call a core value, or an organizing principle.
On any day of the week he is likely to be selling somebody out: on Monday it might be the poor, on Tuesday the bankers, on Wednesday the Israelis, and on Friday the motley crew of freaks that nestle under the wing of the Democratic party.
And every day he sells somebody out, I put another tally on my board, laugh, and shake my head. Anybody believes in this poor excuse for a man should be taken in for psychiatric treatment.
They’ve much in common, Obama, the #OWS and Wall Street. They all insist upon a materialistic interpretation of history. They all want more material possessions. Most on Wall Street are willing to work for it, some, like Corizine, steal it, the Obamas of the world use “community action” to extort it, and the the #OWS are going the Veruca Salt route of demanding it be provided and they want it now.
What I find disturbing is that Obama is spewing this “populist” rhetoric even as evidence of its falsehoods is rampant. Obama is the biggest recipient of Wall Street, PCA does cut Medicare and seeks to limit access to medical care, Dodd-Frank was written by Wall Street lobbyists and it just goes on and on. And, the evidence of his lies and hypocrisies are not hidden– widely and easily available from multiple sources. Yet, obama is secure that his rhetoric is music to the ears of enough majority to get re-elected– along, of course, with his Acorn and subversive organizations counting, “overseeing” and reporting vote tabs. He knows a very small percentage of voters actually follow the facts and fallacies of the issues so he can be a blatant liar confident a sycophantic media’s got his back.
Obama is pulling a Chavez who employed the same tactics in Venezuela and as Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao before him— incite the masses. It’s all a numbers game. The numbers in lower classes will always outnumber the upper classes with the added benefit that Pavlov’s law characterizes the lower classes –appeal to base instincts and you are in like Flynn and you create a merry band of revelers in the process. Throw in a hopelessly biased mainstream media and it becomes no contest.
#3 CFBLEACHERS
Yes, the role of the mass media is decisive in this phase.
But they didn’t turn traitor now, they did it many years ago with the Vietnam war.
They turned a victory into a defeat.
Now they want to turn a defeated president into a winning president.
Each single Patriot must do the job of informing the American People.
Talk, speak, storm the country with info about facts, facts, facts.
The true commies, who know what they are doing, are very very few, the rest is intellectually lazy, deformed by school and propaganda, ignorant. Shower them with info info info.
Use the same tactics of the subversives, have a global goal but work on it locally, expand around from family and friends.
This is the true line in the sand. We stop the brainwashing, now.
Yes we can.
Somebody should make an ad of Obama with him wearing his various masks and then taking them off to wreck his mayhem: healer, divider; fiscal conservative, profligate spender; middle-of-the-road mainstream American, hard-core fascist and marxist, etc etc etc etc etc etc.
This is a great concept: Before v. After. Hope the RNC gets right on that.
How can you call this ‘faux’ populism?
It is what Obama has been all along. There was ample evidence of it before he was even nominated. He had the most far left voting record of all senators. Obama was number one and his running mate was number three. Who expected “moderation” from an Obama administration with the likes of Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton in his cabinet?
As for his support on Wall Street, that can be accounted for with three letters: CYA. The people on Wall Street read the political tea leaves and chose to side with Democrats. They wanted to be on record supporting a winner. Maybe they thought they could keep Obama in check. (Funny!) They got what they asked for.
The warning signs were there but people decided they would punish George Bush (who wasn’t even on the ballot) by voting for Obama. We have the government we deserve. What scares me is the thought that we have to endure five more years of it. Obama’s defeat is not guaranteed, at least not yet.
Not so funny: “the last capitalist will sell the rope with which he will be hanged”.
It’s Vladimir Ilich (Lenin).
It’s also called “riding the tiger”. And it ends always in the same way (a fatter tiger.)
We’re been here before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNMVMNmrqJE
I think that we can take it as read that inside every “benevolent” leftist a totalitarian absolutist just clawing to get out. It can’t be any other way. “Progressives” have long convinced themselves of their own infallible moral superiority. When you are one with the angels then any sort of opposition or even disagreement must of necessity be “evil.” Therefore the progressive mindset feels justified in seeking absolute power over otheres because it “is for their own good.”
If Mr. Obama is a populist then he is in a Democratic Party tradition that goes back more than 100 years to the presidential nomination William Jennings Bryan. In 1896 the Democrats “fused” with the Populist Party which was led by such colorful, disparate and often racist figures as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, Thomas Watson, Marion Butler and Ignatius Donelly. The Populists had run a third-party presidential candidacy in 1892 and captured several states. They represented a radical crusading form of agrarianism and hostility to banks, railroads, and elites generally. Although based in the south and west the Populists shared many of the utopian assumptions of the Progressive Movement particularly a suspicion of bankers and largr accumulations of capital.
Bryan’s nomination put the Populists in a quandry because he endorsed many of their views and seemed “one of them.” After Bryan’s successive defeats a great many Populists were absorbed into the Democrats. Huey Long came out of this tradition. Interestingly this set up a situaiton where Democratic presidential candidates would, for years, run as “progressives” in the North and as “populists” in the South and West. We see that dichotomy today embodied by Mr. Obama who is literally calling for a war on “fat-cat bankers” and “the rich” while raking in campaign contributions and support from those same bankers and wealthy individuals. This inconsistency is however only made possible by the complicity of the MSM which plays up Obama’s “poplism” while prohibiting any mention of his numerous ties to Wall Street.
Aah, Huey Long. Theme song for the Occupy movement? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcngqXmLVPA
Barack Obama, the new Huey Long, the new Kingfish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEUHEX4g4Cc
A chicken in every pot. Pot in every pocket.