Obama and the Corporatocracy

Copyright, 2010 by John Omaha

Liberals and Progressives are rightfully angry that the Obama
administration has failed to deliver on promises to reform health care,
provide jobs, rein in Wall Street banksters, and end our wars of
aggression in the Middle East. For a more complete list of reasons to be
enraged with Obama, see David Michael Green's article, "Now I'm really
getting pissed off," at CounterPunch.org, 12/21/09.

What troubles me is the difficulty American Liberals and Progressives
have understanding Obama's actions.

Today's American Left appears to believe that we live in a democracy in
which there should be a tight correspondence between government action
and the will and needs of the people as mediated by the Congress,
Executive, and Judiciary and laid out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Within this world-view, Obama is apotheosized as the elected President of
an authentic democracy. Accepting this world-view, Obama's maddening
failures to address firmly the issues he campaigned to resolve (war, civil
rights, health reform, equality, etc.) are believed to result from his personal
defects.

The belief that we live in an authentic democracy is delusional.

When we accept that America has become a corporatocracy, then
Obama's passive, whiney, ineffectuality becomes completely
comprehensible. He is doing the job he was "hired" to do. His job was to
sell the nation on a new product line that turned out to be no different than
the old product line of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama is no
different than the auto manufacturers whining that they can't improve fuel
efficiency or the military whining that it can't do without landmines, all the
while making profits selling gas-guzzlers and Claymores.

American is no longer a democracy. America is a corporatocracy. the date
of the emergence of corporatocracy from its antecedents is 1886, the year
that a clerk for the Supreme Court, acting on his own, inserted language
into a decision that gave personhood to corporations. No law was ever
passed by the Congress and tested in the Judiciary giving personhood to
corporations. This event constitutes the mutation of America's political
genome that loosed the corporate cancer on the nation and now the
planet.

Once loosed, the corporate cancer raced through American society,
invading every organ of the national body. The corporate mestastasis
invaded the bureaucracies of federal, state, county, and local government,
so that today it is impossible to differentiate between corporate suppliers
and bureaucratic consumers. As the cancer spread, the needs of the
people quickly disappeared from the social equation. The apparatus of
democratic government created by the Founding Fathers that had been
designed to serve the People, was co-opted to serve the needs of the
Corporation.

The People became the crop, the product, the raw material necessary for
the functioning of the corporate system. No longer individual laborers, they
became the "work force." Under the corporatocracy, citizens became mere
numbers. The compassion and empathy for the plight of human beings
that illuminated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were eaten away as
the cancer spread, replaced by the robotic calculations of corporate and
bureaucratic bottom lines.

The corporate metastasis invaded the military. As Eisenhower warned, the
corporate disorder took over defense, becoming the military-industrial
complex. The M-I complex is the central business of the United States and
has been since it consolidated its position during Vietnam. The U.S.
invades defenseless, innocent countries for business purposes. Working
together the elements of the corporatocracy create false justifications for
these invasions. Assuring the flow of dollars to the M-I complex absolutely
requires of succession of defenseless, innocent countries to invade. It also
requires covert operations to demonize the countries (e.g., Bush's Axis of
Evil) through false flag operations (e.g., Gulf of Tonkin incident or Iraq's
non-existent weapons of mass destruction.)

The corporation has consumed every vital organ of American life: real
estate, religion, health, banking, insurance, entertainment, recreation,
communication, agriculture. Corporate control became complete when it
finally metastasized into the political system, replacing the healthy political
biochemistry of the democracy with the putrid, diseased corporate
metabolism. Every organ of society was finally corrupted. With the
invasion of the political system, American became a fully realized
corporatocracy.

Under corporatocracy, America does not exist "of, by, and for the People."
America now exists of, by, and for the Corporations. The current challenge
of health care reform illustrates perfectly how corporate needs have
supplanted people's needs in the political cancerous corporate physiology.
The People would be served best by universal, single-payer health care.
The will of the People for universal, single-payer health care has been
expressed in polls.

However, the People will not get what they want and deserve. Because
America is a corporatocracy, the insurance and health industry
corporations were able to buy the legislative outcome most favorable to
their profit margins. Universal, single-payer health care would have
amounted to legislative chemotherapy for the American body politic, and it
would have sent at least a portion of the corporate metastasis into
remission. But, because universal, single-payer health care would deny
maximum profits to the insurance and health industries, the corporatocrats
determined that American citizens will get what's good for the
Corporations, not what's good for the People.

Now for Obama. Obama is acting on behalf of his true constituency, the
corporations and bureaucracies. Obama lied to get elected. Just like an
auto industry campaign touting the fuel efficiency and low emissions for
the same huge, gas-guzzling SUVs that have polluted America, Obama
promised true health care (the "public option"), an end to war, reform of
Wall Street, closing Guantanamo, government transparency, etc. These
were all lies, an ad campaign to get him elected so that the corporations
could continue in business unimpeded. Obama is the President of the
greatest Corporatocracy on earth. Obama is not, and never was a liberal
or a reformer or a progressive. He's the CEO. The ad campaign worked.
The nation bought the product, and the corporatocracy consolidated its
power while the Republicans and Democrats, corporatocrats all, put on a
sham, the illusion of democratic government.

The argument that America has become a corporatocracy is important,
because it tells us we will never have meaningful climate change or health
care reform or an end to our terrorist attacks on defenseless, innocent
nations until we expose the root cause of the problems: The corporate
cancer that has metastasized throughout the body of America. Voting
Republican or Democrat is a vote for the corporatocracy. We need a
politics that articulates a vision of America freed from the corporate cancer
that is destroying her.