In 2012, Wall Street will once again be putting its money on Obama – and he is counting on them. How else can he possibly raise a billion campaign dollars? Multinational capital turned to Obama to resurrect America’s plummeting reputation in the world in the wake of George Bush’s blustering debacle in Iraq. His mandate from Wall Street was not to make peace, but to refurbish the face of imperialism for future, better managed adventures to secure the planet’s wealth for corporate plunder. Obama had promised as much, back in 2002, when he stipulated that he did not oppose war, but only “dumb” wars. His “smart” drones now menace the globe from the skies. An American-led offensive is in full swing, with the same objective as Bush: to militarily contain the growth of China, Russia and any other combination of counter-weights to U.S. hegemony. U.S. “humanitarian” intervention, a theme initiated under Bush, has been polished to a full-fledged doctrine of NATO that will bear Obama’s name in the history books.The “peace candidate” has rebranded war.
Obama will campaign as the man who saved capitalism – “the greatest force for economic progress in human history,” as he said in Kansas, last week – doubtless with references to the other Roosevelt, Franklin, whose New Deal Obama has methodically wrestled onto “the table” for dismemberment. Obama certainly saved the insurance industry from the real threat of Medicare-for-All, in 2009, later maneuvering Medicare to the edge of the privatized dustbin. Public education is now ripe to become a “public-private” consortium, in which the public pays the overhead while private corporations reap the profits and shape the curriculum, as teachers are de-unionized and de-professionalized.
