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ofthisandthat Commentary |
Copyright © 2010 ofthisandthat.org.
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.
May 16, 2011
The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic
by Chris Hedges
Source: TruthDig
The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a
morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical
product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the
first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money
before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by
its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to
defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against
the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be
sacrificed on the altar of power. [ President Obama shakes hands with
Princeton University professor Cornel West, center, after delivering remarks
at the National Urban League 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington.
(AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais) ] President Obama shakes hands with
Princeton University professor Cornel West, center, after delivering remarks
at the National Urban League 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington.
(AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West
only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always
the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends.
West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral
mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—
think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We
lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in
exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.
No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign
events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged
by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many
others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived,
manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of
Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he
has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of
these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first,
not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the
Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion
at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in
deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken,
where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive
memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent
life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching
hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive
forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever
conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.”
“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as
we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than
was there."
"I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts
that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a
senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But
it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first
announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I
have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for
Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been
thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the
impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and
brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the
capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at
least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing
with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of
democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats
who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”
West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.
“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother
[Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially
before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the
state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him
he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad.
I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me
so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re
busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the
campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of
strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m
glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other
people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the
inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this
is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags
from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s
something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one,
honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We
had to watch the thing in the hotel.”
“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother
Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of
even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind
of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was
on a personal level.”
But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.
“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he
says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton,
who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt
comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was
using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a
centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It
was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic
Leadership Council].”
Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering
of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after
his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter
schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.
"He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West
says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,
saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think
you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You
can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you
are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch
yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.”
“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already
been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel
because we had critiques of the president.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him
to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed,
West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm
X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not
complimentary to the first lady.
“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker
is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his
desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama that’s a
compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it
offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law
graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military
families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the
hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.”
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,”
West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white
context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man
with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I
am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black
brother it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a
white brother who meets a free, independent black man they got to be
mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a
tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas
influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia,
when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery,
Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain
rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”
“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men
who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in
getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family
and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers
blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections.
He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that
titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is
very sad for me.”
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the
Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious
discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any
democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the
democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor
and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten
down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning
on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than
confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic
and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way
out. But he lacks backbone.”
“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately
educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial
catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had
told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if
he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts
and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the
right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when
they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks
have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.
“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says.
“It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that
truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the
Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it
was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the
American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to
vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist
movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack
Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think
seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties. Our last
hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This
means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually
and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil
disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to
galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor
white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be
eliminated or suffocated.”
The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic
by Chris Hedges
Source: TruthDig
The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a
morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical
product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the
first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money
before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by
its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to
defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against
the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be
sacrificed on the altar of power. [ President Obama shakes hands with
Princeton University professor Cornel West, center, after delivering remarks
at the National Urban League 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington.
(AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais) ] President Obama shakes hands with
Princeton University professor Cornel West, center, after delivering remarks
at the National Urban League 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington.
(AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West
only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always
the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends.
West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral
mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—
think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We
lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in
exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.
No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign
events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged
by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many
others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived,
manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of
Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he
has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of
these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first,
not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the
Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion
at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in
deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken,
where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive
memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent
life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching
hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive
forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever
conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.”
“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as
we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than
was there."
"I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts
that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a
senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But
it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first
announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I
have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for
Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been
thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the
impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and
brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the
capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at
least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing
with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of
democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats
who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”
West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.
“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother
[Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially
before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the
state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him
he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad.
I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me
so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re
busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the
campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of
strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m
glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other
people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the
inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this
is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags
from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s
something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one,
honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We
had to watch the thing in the hotel.”
“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother
Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of
even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind
of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was
on a personal level.”
But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.
“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he
says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton,
who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt
comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was
using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a
centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It
was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic
Leadership Council].”
Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering
of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after
his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter
schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.
"He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West
says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,
saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think
you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You
can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you
are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch
yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.”
“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already
been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel
because we had critiques of the president.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him
to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed,
West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm
X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not
complimentary to the first lady.
“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker
is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his
desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama that’s a
compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it
offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law
graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military
families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the
hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.”
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,”
West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white
context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man
with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I
am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black
brother it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a
white brother who meets a free, independent black man they got to be
mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a
tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas
influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia,
when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery,
Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain
rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”
“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men
who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in
getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family
and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers
blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections.
He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that
titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is
very sad for me.”
“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the
Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious
discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any
democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the
democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor
and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten
down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning
on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than
confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic
and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way
out. But he lacks backbone.”
“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately
educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial
catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had
told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if
he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts
and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the
right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when
they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks
have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.
“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says.
“It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that
truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the
Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it
was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the
American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to
vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist
movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack
Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think
seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties. Our last
hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This
means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually
and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil
disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to
galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor
white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be
eliminated or suffocated.”