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What I Learned From Professor Obama

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza – Public Domain

To be clear, I was never a classroom student of Barack Obama. This is about what I learned from things Obama professed, how his actions did not match his deceiving words, and how they were a part of a class war.

In 2004, as I watched the variety of better known democrat candidates for a U.S. Senate seat in the Illinois primary and felt it was a sort of embarrassingly corrupt version of the Keystone cops, I asked a local democrat insider what the Hell were they thinking. He advised me to look into this guy named Obama. The key selling point for Obama seemed to be that he was Constitutional scholar who had entered politics after being a community organizer in Chicago. As I was still foolish enough at that time to think that it might be possible for a democrat to not be so Clintonianly insulting, I figured Obama the unknown was probably a good message to send to the party.

As I watched the democrat’s convention in Boston that year, it quickly dawned on me that I had been played. With the awareness that the democrats kept all of the real progressive activists corralled outside of earshot, I listened to Obama’s loudly touted speech. The abundance of platitudes and the slick delivery in his performance immediately raised flags. I still thought that maybe, maybe, maybe he might surprise me and I was still gullible enough to think he and the imagined progressive democrats probably would be better than the openly sadistic republicans and their conservative democrat allies.

From 2004 to 2008, I was still so earnestly unaware that I would regularly contact his office (and other democrats) to try to convince them to work toward a greener, more just, progressive world. As the years passed, it became increasingly clear that the responses I received were laced with more and more corporatized double-speak and deflection. Senator Obama’s actions increasingly aligned with the Neocon perversities while he continued to spout platitudes which were blatantly at odds with his subsequent actions. I now wish that I had saved the letters I received from his office as a form of evidence of his devious nature, but at the time, I quickly shredded them in disgust.

So, by 2008 I had completely lost the ability to believe anything Obama said. In 4 short years, he had slithered out of one skin and he was clearly, proudly, determined to the blackface version of Bush and Cheney. His embrace of and desire to protect the illegal spying by the major telecoms, his rush to embrace the corrupt banks and their egregious “bailout” (bribe), and his smugly proud pandering for corporate funding for his campaign were more than enough to show his real agenda, but there was a toxic cherry which he HAD to put on top of his putrefying pastry of a campaign for president. The choice of the corporatized warmonger Joe Biden to be a heartbeat away from the office was the clearest example of how Obama and his party of fakers were never going to be anything beyond republicans who lie about their agenda. Where a tsunami of devout supporters seemed to see Obama as the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s “Dream,” it was unmistakably and inescapably obvious to me and a minority of others that we were being sold an illusion and that the reality of his nature was an alignment within the limited and limiting range of Clarence Thomas and Colin Powell.

Back then, I used to believe that media outlets like Common Dreams, Democracy Now!, the Nation, Mother Jones,…. were working against much of what Obama was enabling. As time went on, I watched as they and the majority of supposed “progressives” began turning a blind eye to the toxic nature of Obama and Company’s hucksterism. No matter how corporately and militaristically offensive his administration was to become, they continued to promote what they portrayed as its status as a lesser evil.

The key to understanding Obama’s (and the system which he serves) effectiveness in sabotaging the future of the majority of people for the benefit of the most ruthless and greedy is to understand that the interpretation of the Constitution of the United States of America which lies at the core of the democrats and the republicans system is desperately driven by a world view wherein variable social inequalities and agendas of private economic power are used to determine the degree of rights to which any beings on this planet are allowed access. In short, the system decides on a case by case basis and largely through private economic profitability the extent to which any being on this planet is deserving of the rights which are deceptively portrayed as being central to the Constitution of the USA. The loudly touted claims of rights, equal justice, and the supposed rule of law are little more than advertising gimmicks which are ignored and/or abandoned depending upon how economically advantageous it may be for the richest and most powerful people at any given moment.

The members of Obama’s administration made it unmistakably clear that his scholarly awareness of the Constitution was not a restraint on their ability to kill people around the planet – including several US citizens – without a trial before a jury. They and the other administrations’ devotees of the system were and apparently are fine with secret decisions to murder based upon accusations. Their court of law is above the need for evidentiary justification of their actions and the only sovereignty which matters to them is that of the Constitution-lacking state of Wall Street and its Pentagonally enforced impunity. It is a constantly-in-flux pseudo-nation of international investors whose self-serving constitutions insure a strong disregard for any boundaries which might interfere with their private profits. This is why they love to focus on “freedom.” They need to be as free as possible to undermine any and all competition for their sacred dollars. Free speech is tolerated only as long as it serves their desire for greater private profits.

Obama to Trump to Biden has been a continuity and escalation of impunity which depends upon the masquerade of oppositional parties in order to prevent the possible rise of what they need you to believe already exists. When the supposed government of the supposed USA became a blatantly unified agenda of greater private profits by whatever devious means necessary the imaginary “balance of power” became the measure of the swing of a capitalistic wrecking ball which only pivots from Washington D.C. to Wall Street in its highly manipulated and manipulating global trajectory.

Misrepresentations abound and I keep hearing the words of Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) from his autobiography, “How smooth must be the words of the whites, when they can make right look wrong and wrong look right.” I have little doubt Black Hawk might not have limited this assessment just to “whites” if he had met Obama. But then, I also have no doubt that the same misconception of color associations was central to the rise of Obama.

Obama was the smoothest and, it seems, Trump and Biden have had almost no choice but to enable their same surreptitiousness behind their klutzy disingenuousness as a way of honoring and continuing their shared predatory legacy.