From Chapter 1, titled “Business Rule as Usual”:
Two and a half weeks after Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 presidential election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official, commented on the President elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical metaphor. Obama, Rothkopf told The New York Times, was following “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.” In other words, “you” gain and hold the presidency with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but you govern, you make policy, in service to existing dominant corporate, state, and military institutions and ideologies.
The Obama’ administration’s record over its first year has been…“the violin model” with a vengeance. Obama has lectured Wall Street on the immorality of their bonuses and visited hard recession-hit towns like Elkhart, Indiana and Pomona, California to show solidarity with downtrodden working people. And then you give yet more of the public treasury and commons away to the Privileged Few, justifying the handouts as a noble expression of your “sensible,” “realistic,” and “pragmatic” commitment to rising above ideological divisions to “get things done” for the American people. Funny how the nation’s “pragmatist”-in chief has kept getting things done for the rich and powerful above all. My mind and soul have recurrently gone numb as yet one more populist-, progressive-, and peaceful- sounding Obama campaign promise after another got drowned in the icy waters of business and imperial rule during the first year of Obama’s presidency….
From Chapter 2, titled “The Empire’s New Clothes;”
Dead civilians – the topic Afghan President Karzai so impolitely raised with his new boss in Washington – have been a real problem for Obama. The new president’s escalation of deadly attacks on insurgents who live intermingled with civilians has brought a predictable increase in “collateral damage” in South Asia. An especially graphic and politically difficult episode came in the first week of May 2009. That’s when U.S. air-strikes killed more 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As the New York Times reported:
In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. Afghan lawmakers immediately called for an agreement regulating foreign military operations in the country.
“The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,” Mr. Farahi said.
“Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”
Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.
The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident – one among many such mass U.S. aerial killings in Afghanistan since October 2001 – was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed deep “regret” about the loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilian bodies in Farah Province. …By sharp contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any apology. Nobody had to be fired. And the Pentagon was permitted to advance preposterous claims about how the civilians died – stories that taken seriously by “mainstream” (corporate-imperial war and entertainment) media. Orwell, Vonnegut, and Kafka would have been impressed. The U.S. subsequently conducted a dubious “investigation” of the Bola Boluk slaughter that reduced the civilian body count drastically and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way of U.S. bombs.
From Chapter 4, titled “Barack Obama, the Myth of the Post-Racial Presidency, and the Politics of Identity”:
In early December 2009, as I completed this chapter, the nation’s first black president received some interesting criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus. Accusing the White House of ignoring the economic plight of minorities, 10 members of the caucus boycotted a key House committee vote on financial regulations. The group expressed frustration at the White House and Congress’ failure to tackle minority-specific economic problems including an official black unemployment rate of 16 percent, higher than the national rate of 10 percent. “We can no long afford for our public policy to be defined by the world view of Wall Street,” the black caucus announced, adding that “policy for the least of these must be integrated into everything we do.”
Obama flatly rejected the criticism in a special interview with USA TODAY and the Detroit Free Press prior to a White House “jobs summit” in early December. “It’s a mistake,” Obama told the newspapers, “to start thinking in terms of particular ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in this together and we are all going to get out of this together.” Just because he happened to be black, Obama was announcing, black Americans should have no reason to think that he would any more willing than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton to acknowledge and act upon the distinctive oppression and inequality still experienced by many in the nation’s still highly segregated and relatively impoverished population. The title of the USA TODAY article reporting Obama’s response to the Congressional Black Caucus’ criticism was on point: “President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles.”
From Chapter 5, titled “Big Brother Lives”:
Obama the supposed liberal, pro-civil liberties president who taught constitutional law for years has maintained and defended in court the Bush electronic surveillance (wiretapping) program. He has made no effort to act on his campaign pledge to strengthen the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board that is supposed to oversee and protects civil liberties in intelligence gathering. According to Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer in the Bush II administration, last June, “The Obama surveillance program appears to be identical to the late Bush era program” – something that induced McClatchy News reporter Michael Doyle to pen the following headline: “Obama Now Resembles Bush.”
Obama has invoked the “state secrets” (akin to the divine right of kings) doctrine to prevent disclosure of evidence in response to lawsuits emerging from Bush era rendition and surveillance policies. He has invoked “presidential communications privilege” to block the release of notes from an interview the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted in 2008 with then-Vice President Dick Cheney as part of an investigation into the Bush administration’s punitive leaking of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plume. He has revived military commissions, continuing the practice of renditions, and maintaining secret prisons for persons held on a short-term, transitory basis. He has also continued the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay and advanced the “indefinite detention” (potentially permanent incarceration) of Guantanamo prisoners for whom no legally compelling evidence can be marshaled. And under Obama, torture has continued at the Bagram Air Force in the Afghan “war zone”…
…Speaking of re-branding, we might consider the judgment of former Bush administration attorney Jack Goldsmith. On the eve of a heavily covered battle of dueling same day torture-policy speeches between President Obama (“anti-torture”) and former Vice President Dick Cheney (“pro-torture”) last May, Goldsmith, no radical, criticized what he called “The Cheney Fallacy.” “The Cheney fallacy,” Goldsmith argued in the centrist journal The New Republic, was the inaccurate belief that (in Goldsmith’s words) “the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies.” According to Goldsmith, a Republican, “The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric…. The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging” [emphasis added].