PAUL STREET ON OBAMA

Barack Obama
a tool and agent of concentrated wealth, business class rule, and militarism,
campaign pledges translate into corrupt, corporate and imperial nothingness in the real world of power.
"war [is] war, whether the battle standard is being waved by a white moron from Midland, Texas or an eloquent black man from Chicago."[5]
criticism of the weak, corporate-captive climate "deal" (with no binding restrictions on carbon emissions from the industrialized states that have created the climate crisis)
leading climate activist and intellectual George Monbiot notes,
"The immediate reason for the failure of the [Copenhagen] talks can be summarized in two words: Barack Obama.
Obama went behind the backs of the UN and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal which outraged the rest of the world. This was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation;

either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown."[9]
Robert Kuttner, the leading left-liberal public intellectual and editor of the weekly liberal policy and politics journal The American Prospect. Kuttner's
Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. [13]
He boldly blew through a rich historical record indicating that the future president was a "deeply conservative" agent of empire and inequality, incorporated - a willing tool of corporate-managed fake democracy and military, state-capitalist re-branding whose main challenge was to capture, contain, and tamp down (certainly not encourage) progressive sentiments amongst the restive citizenry.[14]
As one totals up the president's cumulatively reactionary record of policies (and non-policies) on numerous specific issues - energy, health, war, labor rights, war, militarism -

it becomes rather difficult to sustain the image of Obama as anything but a business and war president, certainly not a people's reformer.
so easily hooked by the deceptive marketing that left author Chris Hedges has written about in connection with the president:
"Barack Obama is a brand. And the brand designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest."

"... President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising." [16]
Carl Davidson, a former Sixties Maoist turned "Marxist" Web-master of "Progressives for Obama,"
Badly misusing the terminology of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, Davidson claimed that the Obama administration represented the rise of "an emerging historic counter-hegemonic bloc" containing elements of Marxian/proletarian "class struggle."
a decisive break with both neoliberalism and corporate liberalism
a major tension between forces representing the capitalist class's "old hydrocarbon sector" and forces representing a progressive new left-leaning "green sector."[
$1 trillion a year on the Pentagon but just a "few billion on green jobs, mainly as subsidies to big corporations like the big three [automakers]."

to Obama's critical support for the initial Bush-Paulsen bailout or the depth and degree of the Obama administration's continuation and indeed expansion of massive state-capitalist welfare for the privileged financial few
The first version of the Bush administration's proposed bailout of Goldman Sachs and other leading Wall Street firms in September of 2008 sparked a major populist rebellion throughout the country.
to frighten the populace into handing over $700 billion to cover the toxic assets created by financial perpetrators and at the remarkable attempt to place the bailout and Bush's Treasury Secretary literally above the rule of law, codified in Section 8 of the original bailout package, which read as follows:
"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."