From "Naked Capitalism's" Highly Viewed Wall St. Blog."...Post from Commenter ..worth a read....

[KoKo]

(this post was in reply to Cornell West's recent critique of Obama...but it stands alone for it's jugular prescience.

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Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

It is a shame to see West implicitly make a distinction between black and other victims of Obama’s betrayals, though it is entirely understandable given their backgrounds. But then, a non-unionised self-employed Tea Partyite’s vehement diatribe against greedy unionised public workers is understandable also, but that too is a shame. Both reactions are predictable and indeed relied upon.

The parable about the Tea Party type and the unionist sitting at a table with ten cookies on a plate alongside a banker who takes 11 and whispers to the Teabagger ‘watch out, that union guy is taking your cookie!’ applies here too. We’re all being robbed blind by a few but the authorities, the media, the whole culture in general encourages the belief that whatever groups you do not belong to are to blame, and that the fire of your ire be directed at them full bore. And vice versa.

The only hope may be that the carefully tended below-stairs conflagrations that result end up combining and destroying the top floor, so that the house can be rebuilt from what’s left of the foundations.

People like Obama and Clinton and Blair will not be invited to any housewarming. There will be Wanted posters up for them around the perimeter, alongside the Summerses and Greenspans, the Paulsons and Geithners. Probably they’ll be safe in some elite compound with like-minded grifters and grift-meisters, sipping champers uneasily as the massive and eternal security surrounding them silently eliminates threats to their well-being.

In a few years we will see the Obamas, having negotiated the tortuous steps that lead up to and through the Beltway, jet-setting around to ski and shop with those they have protected and enabled. Maybe a holiday with Silvio here, a stint on the Carlyle board there, you know the drill.

It just seems so quotidian, so inadequate, this social-climbing, dynasty-creating rationale for the betrayals our political hope-carriers visit upon us, but in our cherished political dreams we forget that even, perhaps especially those with power are driven by personal rather than political imperatives.

What suckers we are, but is it really asking too much, is it really too naive to actually hope that a genuinely selfless political power could arise and not be safely re-trained and co-opted?

‘Truly, the only individuals worth following today in Amerika are the super-economist, Michael Hudson, brilliant philospher thinker, Michael Parenti, Glen Ford (blackagendareport.com), Glenn Greenwald (brilliant talk he gave recently in Santa Fe (see site below, please), and Chris Hedges. There’s really not much left anymore in Amerika, sadly!’

Not true. There are literally millions of ‘individuals worth following’ in the US. The owner of this site and a healthy majority of her home-grown readers qualify, and this applies to thousands of bloggers and activists and just normal people right across the USA who have heir heads screwed on right. It’s just that none of them ever get within coo-ee of genuine power, and of they tried some method would be found to waylay or stymie them. Or worse.

Every decent human being, every non-fox even rumoured to be under consideration of a post in a goverment henhouse in the US, can expect the shaft at some point. Look at Chas Freeman, Brooksley Born back then and Elizabeth Warren now, Krugman and Goolsby and even Volcker for God’s sake. Most of the good ‘uns don’t even get that far. But the John Yoos and the Brownies and the Rahms and the Summerses and the countless minions manning imperial posts too lowly to see, all they have to do is not pose a threat.

Which makes Obama’s election the emblematic ne plus ultra, the epitome and final word in the rat-cunning of the US governing class. If you can agree that no-one who posed any potential threat to that class could ever hope for elevation to candidacy for President, it follows that while a critical mass of voters saw through tears of joy his nomination and then election as proof that America could still deliver on the promise of it’s founding, on the Dream of itself that it fervently even desperately nourishes through it’s culture, high and low, every day, that while that was occurring there was another, much smaller group of Americans who were also congratulating themselves, not without justification, on having once again ‘pulled it off’, managing to make the people feel good about themselves and their country by virtue of their free elections delivering the Presidency to one of ‘them’, when he was one of ‘us’ all along.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/04/cornel-west-obama-is-for-big-business-not-the-jobless.html#comments

[robinlynne]

1. Thank-you for posting this. really.

[scarletwoman]

2. Good piece. Rec'd. (nt)