Millionaire radio pundits on the corporate state payroll like Rush Limbaugh and other pseudo-conservative GOP mouthpieces often cry on air about the “class war.”
They mean, of course, the theoretical war that the working class wages against the 1% a la Occupy Wall Street-style protests – not the real war the elites have waged on the middle class for four relentless decades.
Even on the honest-to-God, Main Street populist right that still exists outside of the D.C. suburbs, the 2009-era Tea Party protests were initially largely focused on Wall Street’s brazen financial crimes. They sensed correctly that their falling quality of life was directly tied to the bankers’ green lust.
Of course, the foregone conclusion of the ruling class was that such upstart movements with real backing from everyday Americans had to be crushed. Eventually, Occupy died out due to lack of leadership while the Tea Party was co-opted and astroturfed into the ground by think-tank GOP swamp creatures.
Since 2008, the media has moved onto bigger fish to fry. The countless circus acts of the 24-hour pop-culture infotainment establishment have ground American’s political memories into sawdust. Many people might not even recall the 2008 financial collapse.
Average Americans on the modern-day breadline, though, should never let the swamp creatures in charge gloss over the 2008 meltdown. It marked a sea change in American politics – a public service announcement on behalf of the ruling class that the internationalist Manhattan bankers that really run this country are above legal remedy.
There is no dispute that, through their treacherous schemes, the cocaine-addled psychopaths in the revolving door of various multinational financial firms extracted trillions of dollars from the American economy. They stole future generations’ birthright. They bribed the right politicians on both sides of the establishment tree. Then they slipped out the back door with all the cash while the foundation crumbled.
Millions of hardworking, decent people lost their livelihoods.
When no populist response reinstated the guillotine French Revolution-style – which is exactly what was called for in 2008 – the oligarchs rightly took the lack of pushback as carte blanche permission to rape and plunder without fear of repercussion.
Barack Obama, despite the adoring media’s assurances that he was a moral hero, is more responsible than any single individual for the culture of crime rampant in the halls of power that has festered in the last decade.
Like the shameless chameleon that he is, perched atop his gilded throne as he condescends to his subjects, Obama acquired the love and respect of so many followers by pretending to care about “justice.”
On the advice of impotent consultants, run-of-the-mill politicians believe that the pointy thumb conveys an “important point.”
Obama, with his annoying focus-grouped pointy thumb to emphasize his fortitude or whatever, promised reform. He spoke soaringly in glorious prose about the restored promise of America to the working class. His speech writers were world-class.
Corporate news actors practically had orgasms on air about the triumph of an amazing black messiah come to right all the wrongs of the oligarch’s excesses. Chris Matthews, MSNBC’s barely intelligible geriatric, literally said on primetime television that he had felt a “thrill up his leg” when Obama spoke.
The candidate’s campaign slogan was “Hope and Change.”
Then, once he had wooed the voters with his song and dance, Obama betrayed them. He refused to prosecute the bankers that perpetrated the ’08 collapse over decades-long fraud.
Green-eyed executives escaped with golden parachutes while the once-envied American middle class crumbled around them. Then they retreated to their fortified bunkers until the populace could be distracted by the next scandal and their rage redirected.
Their robbery worked like a charm, and in 2020 they’re back at it, hollowing out the carcass of the American economy at the expense of everyday teachers and landscapers.
As it turns out, hindsight tells us that Obama was just another scumbag politician in the long line of scumbag politicians to occupy the Oval Office. He was only remarkable for his skin color and his charm.
Since leaving office in 2017, Obama has spent his time golfing. Between rounds, he gives $400,000 speeches to Wall Street as compensation for his subservience to their interests.
The lesson that more of his disillusioned followers – the ones who supported him because he promised to turn the tables on the Manhattan cabal — should have taken away from the 44th American presidency wasn’t properly absorbed.
The oligarchs will never, as long as their grip on power remains iron, allow an election in which a genuinely populist leader emerges. While maintaining the façade of a decent human being is important for a politician to assure the rabble that a better tomorrow is achievable via electioneering, there is no substance.
National-level politicians will not save you. They were greenlit by the gatekeepers precisely because they have no moral compass. Their job is to act as the top agent of American Empire in the service of generating more wealth for the gargoyles at the top of the pyramid. They vacuum-suck what remains of the peasantry’s dwindling wealth to achieve their ends.
Their ethos, which they repeat as a mantra, is: privatize the gains and socialize the losses. They scam and cheat their way to billions in ill-gotten gains, collapse the economy under the weight of their dishonesty, then show up to the nation’s treasury with a gas can in one hand and a box of matches in the other.
“Give us the cash or we’ll burn it to the ground,” they say.
And each time, being the compliant subjects that American Empire trained us to be in public school, we acquiesce. Our spineless “representatives” give away the farm in absurd emergency legislation, and we’re left out in the cold.
Ben Bartee a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via his portfolio or on LinkedIn.
