Goodbye and Good Riddance

when Obama finally leaves for that fat payday the day he finally leaves the White House on January 20, 2017. I know I won't miss him one bit.

He's been a disaster in so many ways, I have lost count:

Lately I’ve been referring to the president as “Under the Bus Obama.” The list of those Obama has thrown under the runaway buses of neoliberal capitalism, military empire, and white supremacy is daunting. His resume of betrayal includes his maternal grandmother, his preacher, the labor movement (betrayed and abandoned on global trade, labor law reform, the Wisconsin rebellion, the wage- and job-slashing terms of the much-ballyhooed auto bailout and more); environmentalists (abandoned and betrayed on offshore drilling, hydraulic fracturing, global trade, global carbon emission reduction-efforts, nuclear power, clean coal and more), senior citizens (betrayed by the president’s ongoing effort to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits), immigrants (betrayed by a president who has actually increased the number of deportations) civil libertarians (abandoned and betrayed on Guantanamo, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, secret kills lists, whistleblower protection, domestic drones, the infiltration of protest organizations, and more), the mainstream press (recently betrayed by the president’s arch-authoritarian seizure of Associate Press phone records), nuclear disarmament advocates (recently betrayed by Obama’s $547 million request for the B61 nuclear gravity bomb in Europe), and the antiwar community (betrayed by Obama’s sick global drone war, the undeclared war on Libya, the escalating U.S. invasion of Africa, U.S. saber-rattling in relation to Iran, Syria, and East Asia and much more). Last but not least and of special interest to this panel, we have Black America, betrayed by a first technically black president who has said and done less about racial inequality than any American chief executive in recent memory.

Don't forget his education policies, which may be the very worst of all of his bad policies.

It took a real genius to peddle a black "Democrat" who would undo every single gain that party has made in the past century and trash the Democratic Party brand in doing so.

As Always, Paul Street Nails Down Obama

as a neoliberal sellout who couldn't care less about traditional Democratic Party values:

When Obama’s center-right corporate-imperial presidency yielded the predictable consequence of demobilizing the Democratic Party’s “progressive base” in the mid-term elections and thereby enabling an “historic” right wing sweep in Congress, the president quickly moved yet further to the business-friendly right like a hungry shark to a bleeding seal. Claiming (falsely) that “the American people had spoken” in the Republicans’ Tea Party-fueled electoral triumph of November 2010, Obama agreed to sustain George W. Bush’s deficit-fueling tax cuts for the rich beyond their sunset date of 2010. Accepting the false business and Republican claim that “overpaid” public sector workers were a leading force behind rising government deficits and economic stagnation, Obama froze federal worker salaries and benefits. He published an Op-Ed in the plutocratic editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal – an essay that praised “free market capitalism” as “the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known” and said that government places “unreasonable burdens on business” that have a “chilling effect on growth and jobs.” (The tone of his editorial suggested that it wasn’t neoliberal deregulation that sparked the financial collapse, but all those pesky government rules that crush growth).Obama signed an executive order calling for a government-wide review of regulations to remove or revise those that supposedly inhibited business. He appointed JPMorgan Chase’s William Daley – a leading agent of the corporate-globalist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) under Bill Clinton – as his chief of staff. He put Goldman Sachs’ Gene Sperling (another legendary neoliberal) at the head of the National Economic Council. He tapped General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to head his new “President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness” – an ironic selection since fewer than half of GE’s workers are employed in the United States and less than half its profits come from U.S. activities.

Obama’s January 2011 State of the Union Address falsely claimed that American business was plagued by the highest corporate tax rate in the world and promised to slash that rate “without adding to our deficit.” He offered no bold, large-scale economic stimulus, antipoverty or public works programs to address the mass unemployment and economic destitution still stalking the land. In February, he quickly signed a “deal” that stripped $40 billion from the federal government’s 2011 outlay (the biggest losers were the Environmental Protection Agency and high-speed rail).Unbowed by a terrible summer jobs report suggesting a likely return to technical recession and the urgent necessity of major counter-cyclical government jobs and social assistance programs, Obama has responded to Republican threats to block the raising of the debt ceiling by advancing a hideously regressive long-term austerity program to the right of what even the average Republican voter wants. He hit the fairways with Republican Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to offer a “grand bargain” to reduce federal spending by $4 trillion over ten years,

Paul Street Scooped the Poop on Obama,

just as I saw through this neoliberal sack of shit, and he writes about the "record" of Obama's "accomplishments," which are no more liberal than his idol Ronald Reagan's.

Thanks to “the Tea Party’s” role in energizing the pseudo-conservative ultra-Republican base, the dominant media’s partnership in selling the Grand Old Party’s latest (Tea Party) makeover, and (last but not all least) the critical role of the state-capitalist Democratic Party and its corporatist standard bearer Obama in demobilizing the nation’s progressive majority and working and lower-class voters, right wing Republicans swept into majority power in the House of Representatives, came close to achieving a majority in the U.S. Senate and took over a large number of governor’s mansions and state legislatures in the south, Midwest, and across the country.

To the delight of many in the elite business class, no doubt, much “mainstream” media commentary responded to the historic elections by advancing the preposterous line that the center-right Obama had governed “too far to the left” in his first two years in power. Also warming the heart of capital, Obama himself undertook yet one more of his much-ballyhooed “shifts to the right” in response to the rightist triumph. Claiming falsely that the American “people ha[d] spoken” in November 2010, President Obama made a number of moves calculated to win the more heartfelt allegiance of top business players. He continued his pattern of disregarding and irritating his liberal and progressive “base” by agreeing to sustain George W. Bush’s deficit-fueling tax cuts for the rich beyond their original sunset date of 2010.[37] Accepting the false business and Republican Tea Party claim that “overpaid” public sector workers are a leading force behind rising government deficits and economic stagnation, Obama ordered a two-year freeze on federal worker salaries and benefits.[38] He published an Op-Ed in the plutocratic editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal – an essay that praised “free market capitalism” as “the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known” – and said that government often places “unreasonable burdens on business” that have a “chilling effect on growth and jobs.” The tone of his editorial suggested that it wasn’t neoliberal deregulation that sparked the financial collapse of 2008, but all those nasty little government rules and guidelines that stifle innovation and growth.39

And on it goes. This president just makes me sick.

Paul Street Gives Obama's Political Obituary

which can be summed up as "I told you so."

And he did, as did many of us who bothered to look at his writings, listen to his speeches, and cut through the media hype.

Obama hasn't been president two years, and he's already a lame duck.

His only achievement will be the destruction of the Democratic Party--provided traditional constituencies sit on their collective asses. And, as Street notes, the so-called "left" has allowed him to do it.

It takes a "Democrat" to destroy Democratic Party principals.

A Book to Get About Obama

Thanks to Joseph Cannon over at Cannonfire for mentioning a book I will have to get written by Paul Street called Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. In fact, I am going to pick up the phone right now and call Barnes & Noble to order it if they don't have it in stock.

I just got on the phone and ordered the title. They didn't have it in stock, but I should get it in a matter of days.

Cannon also linked to this Street piece about Obama and his appeal to whites. The guy isn't a threat.

Street appears to reinforce all of the doubts I had about Obama since the day he announced for president. This man is no liberal at all and no Democrat. Only a complete corruption of the two-party system would allow such a faker to be the standardbearer of the party supposedly for all Americans who are not in the economic elite.