Obama's Ayn Rand Zeal Makes Government Our Enemy

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A plea to us all: an Occupy Tacoma activist rests with his picket sign after a long march in the rain, October 2011. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

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I WAS TRUDGING home in an unseasonably frigid surprise downpour, my mind awash in hot anger and cold fear provoked by President Barack Obama's smirking betrayal of Social Security and Medicare recipients, when I finally understood what is surely the most bitter truth of the post-American-Dream United States: that its governments now serve only the One Percent.

 

This epiphany was so startling I'd normally have stopped whatever I was doing and written of it the little pocket notebook I always carry, a gift from Adrienne that can often grow an initial realization into more detailed exposition. But the April weather made any writing impossible. The hard rain of this unpredicted terminal-climate-change storm was pouring off the broadly protective brim of my brown felt Akubra, the sudden cold north wind had already numbed my wet fingers beyond any ability to legibly use a pen, and in any case the proverbial light of comprehension had flared from my subconscious just as I was hobbling with my hickory cane across a busy street, watchful lest some sadistic Tacoma motorist use the gloomy afternoon as an excuse to play vehicular dodge-em with a crippled old man.

 

By the time I got home and was exchanging my drenched jeans and sweater and jacket for the sensual pleasure of a warm and dry sweat-suit, I had recognized that perhaps the most self-constraining intellectual error of my adult life was my chronic failure to recognize that government – all government (precisely because what used to be at least presumably our government has been captured and turned against us by the One Percent) – is now ironically the enemy the Right always claimed it to be.

The underlying truth of this new U.S. paradigm is that government whether federal, state or local no longer fulfills its original constitutional purpose. It no longer enables us to do collectively what we cannot do individually. Instead – exactly as it did to the Occupy Movement and is doing now to Social Security and Medicare recipients – it aggressively obstructs us. Thus what was once notable as government by, for and of ourselves (even given its socioeconomically limited definition of “we the people”), has become indistinguishable in purpose from the governments of pre-revolutionary France or pre-revolutionary Russia. Antoinette France, Tsarist Russia or the present-day United States, such government exists only to protect the Ruling Class, to perpetuate its wealth and power and to subjugate all the rest of us.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not coincidentally at all if you believe in Jungian synchronicity or telepathy – an old friend on the opposite side of the continent was having similar thoughts and emailed me a long but stunningly relevant quote by the 19th Century French revolutionary Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: 

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is it's justice; that is it's morality.”

Reduced to sound-bite simplicity and translated into modern terms, what Proudhon is telling us is that beyond the smokescreens of rhetoric, there's no real difference between the government of North Korea and the government of the United States.

The North Korean rulers claim to be Communists but are in fact an (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class that governs by old-fashioned despotism. Anyone who dares criticize the dominant Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il/Kim Jong U personality cult is denounced as an ultimate political criminal and liquidated in the traditional manner: killed by a bullet to the back of the head or worked to death in a slave-labor camp.

 

United States leaders are figureheads who enact the clandestine decrees of an (allegedly nonexistent) capitalist Ruling Class. These leaders whether Democratic or Republican claim to be defenders of constitutional liberty but are, like their Ruling Class masters, fanatical Ayn Rand fascists. The ultimate USian political criminal is therefore not one who has broken any written law but rather one who is no longer exploitable for capitalist profit and/or whose poverty embarrasses the Ruling Class by revealing the underlying savagery of its Ayn Rand dogmas.

Because death camps are still considered unfashionable in today's United States – “O what would the (international) neighbors think?” – capitalism's undesirables are eliminated by more subtle means than are used in North Korea. Our jobs are abolished, our unemployment compensation is terminated, we're evicted from our homes, our gardens are bulldozed, our schools are closed, our public transport is shut down, our pensions are looted, our medical insurance is canceled, our welfare is cut off, we're denied disaster relief and we're abandoned in every other way conceivable. Thus we're slain by whatever mechanism fate decrees: starvation, sickness, suicide. In the end we're just as dead as the victims of the North Korean secret police.

Even the reactions of the two (allegedly nonexistent) Ruling Class hierarchies are undoubtedly similar.

The North Korean commissars damn their victims as “enemies of the people,” shrug self-righteously Maoist shoulders and say “otso commen jo so wah,” which is in their native language Hangul and means approximately “what can you do?” Such dismissals are no doubt followed by the exclamation “hiyu” and a Hangul phrase that would translate into English as “these criminals brought their punishments on themselves.”

In the United States, which has the planet's largest numerical and per-capita prison population, the One Percenters who are the masters of the Democrats and Republicans damn their victims as “failures who chose the poverty lifestyle,” shrug their self-righteously Ayn Randite shoulders and say, “the poor will always be with us; better to let them all die.”

Perhaps if we were to see all this as clearly as I saw it that afternoon in the rain, we could purge ourselves of our traditional (and obsolete) belief in government as a servant of the people and replace it with recognition that today's USian government has become the goon squad of the One Percent and will never again be anything else. Then maybe Left and Right could together build a solidarity based on common grievances and open ourselves to evolving an ideology that might enable us to effectively resist what is being done to us.

But that's not likely. The directional momentum of the USian population, controlled as it is by the One Percent, is toward ever-deepening ignorance, which means ever-intensifying subjugation.

Never in human history has the creation of a dark-age mentality been so methodical, so sustained, so perpetuated by zero-tolerance methods and technologies of oppression. After a half century, our ignorance is already an inescapable prison. Note again the example of Occupy: how the toxins of induced ignorance – anti-intellectuality, selfishness, distrust, class hatred, bigotry – destroyed the movement from within even as government storm troopers were crushing it from without.

To understand what looms – to know why I am ever more thankful my one child did not survive outside his mother's womb – you need only look at the horrors of the post-Minoan and post-Roman dark ages, each of which lasted at least a thousand years and by some estimates continue into the present. But no matter your view of history, this darkness that approaches now is undeniably forever – that is, until the United States is torn asunder by the baronial feuds of the One Percent and the fallout whether literally or figuratively renders our species extinct.

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Real Obama (I): New Deal Rhetoric Hides Ayn Rand Economics

To strip away the Big Lies by which Barack the Betrayer disguised himself as Obama the Orator and twice scammed us into electing him president, it's necessary to apply only two principles. One is that deeds reveal what words conceal, or as the Bible puts it in the book of Saint Matthew, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” The other is Occam's Razor, which tells us the simplest, most straightforward explanation of a mystery is usually the closest to the truth.

In 2008, presented as the antidote to eight years of despotic misrule by George W. Bush, Obama ran as the personification of “change we can believe in.” A compelling orator, he promised restoration of the constitutional rights nullified by Bush, promised single-payer/public-option health care and promised to revitalize the union movement via the Employee Free Choice Act.

But Obama's key promises, like “change” itself, were soon proven to have been Big Lies. 

Once in office, Obama refused to reverse Bush's nullification of our constitutional rights. In fact he escalated it.  Now, given the resultant omnipotence of the U.S. surveillance-and-murder apparatus, we are far closer to serfdom than we were in pre-revolutionary 1774 as subjects of King George III. Our closest political and economic counterparts are the officially powerless proletarians and peasants that characterized Tsarist Russia.

Meanwhile, even before Obama took office in 2009, he had engineered health-care reform into what may be the greatest financial betrayal in U.S. history.  Making secret deals with top executives of the pharmaceutical and health insurance cartels, he deliberately eliminated the possibility of competition between for-profit insurance and any non-profit single-payer/public-option health-care system like Medicare for All.

Obama also used his (Republican) brand of health insurance to further abolish the remnants of our liberty. Via the so-called individual mandate – the requirement we all buy insurance – Obama reduced the entire U.S. population to chattel.  We are now – each and every one of us – de facto serfs required to labor for the trillion-dollar enrichment of our masters, the prescription drug lords and the for-profit insurance-industry's sultans of sickness.

By the beginning of the 2012 presidential election campaign season, Obama's serial betrayals raised grave questions as to whether he could win a second term. But the One Percent arranged for him to be opposed by George Romney and Paul Ryan – a terrifying ticket of avowed Ayn Rand fascists even the more rational Republicans found repugnant. Barack the Betrayer then obscured the ugly realities of his presidency by once more donning his Obama the Orator persona. And once again he deceived the forgetful, frightened and hopelessly ignorant electorate with a new set of promises, among which was the protection of Social Security and Medicare – the biggest of his 2012 Big Lies.

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Real Obama (II): the Most Effectively Anti-Labor President Ever

If we apply Saint Matthew's deeds test, we discover Obama is the U.S. One Percent's most effective class warrior ever. His signature triumph is his methodical destruction – almost entirely by stealth – of the nation's labor movement. He has thus arguably done more to imprison the 99 Percent in permanent poverty than any other politician in U.S. history.

In 2009, Obama killed the Employee Free Choice Act, thereby terminating any possibility of a union comeback. In 2011, despite his earlier promise to walk picket lines,  Obama ruinously back-stabbed all unionized workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. In 2012 – no doubt to ensure the labor movement will never arise from its grave – he neutralized the National Labor Relations Board by the most maliciously cunning political sleight-of-hand I have ever witnessed.  He filled NLRB vacancies by the legally questionable tactic of recess appointments, thereby ensuring the support of organized labor in the 2012 election even as he invited the post-election judicial challenge that not only overturned the appointments but shut down the NLRB. 

Given political reality – the near certainty Republican control of Congress will continue indefinitely – the closing of the NLRB is effectively permanent. This means there is no longer any federal mechanism for enforcing union contracts  or otherwise protecting workers from the ever-intensifying malevolence of capitalism.

Thus Obama again revealed himself as Barack the Betrayer. He stripped organized labor of its last remnants of power, giving lethal credence to the anti-labor stooges who now argue it's a waste of money to continue paying union dues when – thanks to Obama – unions are no longer defended by the government. And tragically, there is truth in the stooges' claims. Though unions were gravely diminished by the vicious realities of the post-American-Dream economy, they nevertheless retained their legal role as the (only remaining) defender of USian workers' rights. But now with the de facto death of the NLRB so cleverly arranged by the president, the entire concept of legally recognized workers' rights is in jeopardy.

Verily, it is as if Congress has repealed the Wagner Act,  as if our (African-American) president has (ironically) reversed the nation's departure from slavery and indentured servitude by signing the Wagner Act's repeal, and as if the Supreme Court has ruled this disempowerment of the entire 99 Percent to be precisely what the Founders intended.

What unites all of Obama's betrayals,  whether of our constitutional rights, of our pleas for adequate health care, of our right to Social Security or of our need for jobs and unions – what proves each betrayal to be no more than a separate outrage in a single unprecedented economic atrocity – is the manner in which the total package strengthens the paradigm of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

Obviously here is the real Obama: a man who has nothing but hatred for unions and contempt for the entire 99 Percent.

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Shaving Away Deception (I): Questions about Obama's Education

While the Right's “birther” arguments are beyond absurd, another of the Right's questions – how Obama was able to overcome the prohibitive barriers of racism, caste and economics to attend Columbia and Harvard and teach at the University of Chicago – is well worthy of investigation.

Because I was an exceptionally bright child whose academic ambitions were blocked by economic obstructions that by the late 1950s were again becoming as insurmountable as they had been before World War II, I know from painful experience that even when you're a male Caucasian of acknowledged talents, no combination of drive and intelligence is by itself sufficient to unlock the gates of academe. No matter I had my first daily newspaper reporting-and-writing job at age 16, no matter my verbal skills and reasoning ability tested in the topmost percentiles; where I dwelt with my father and stepmother in Tennessee, either your parents were rich enough to pay your tuition, or you somehow raised the money yourself. Otherwise you were locked out; you either enlisted in the military or waited to be seized by the draft.

By 1979, when Obama reached college age, the draft had ended, and the Ayn Rand, admission-only-by-ability-to-pay standard that defined higher education in the South had been imposed on the entire nation. But beyond the obvious economic segregation, the requirements for admission to such aristocratic realms as Columbia or Harvard were much the same as they had been in the 1950s or are now: you must either be to the manor born or you must somehow acquire influential sponsorship by a member of the One Percent. To achieve the latter, as Obama did, you must repeatedly prove yourself to be unquestionably politically reliable – never left of center if you seek a career in public service or journalism, avowedly apolitical if your aspirations are in the arts and/or literature.

The same system functions at the lower levels of the United States – that is, at the financial gateways to state universities and even community colleges. At this level, the unofficial guardians are the ministers, priests, rabbis and local business executives required as references or endorsements on applications for scholarships and most other forms of student aid. Given my political history – perhaps more importantly given my father's political history and my mother's psychological history of spectacular and therefore scandalous matrimonial dysfunction – no such testimonials or endorsements were ever forthcoming. Thus even when I was on a dean's list for academic excellence, I was never able to obtain more than the most minimal work-study supplements to the already miserly Vietnam Era G.I. Bill. Indeed, without the G.I. Bill, I would not have finished college at all, not even at the small, inexpensive, relatively obscure state school that (reluctantly) granted me a bachelor of arts degree in 1976.

At the higher levels, Columbia and its ilk, the required endorsers are far more exalted: Big Business chief executive officers, major newspaper publishers, senators, bishops, cardinals, distinguished alumni and the like, people so far above me I would scarcely be allowed to collect their garbage, much less set foot inside their clubs and mansions.

How a person of Barack Obama's socioeconomic status managed to pass such impregnable barriers thus remains a legitimate mystery even considering his mother's subsequent rise in academic and governmental circles. Where did the money for her education come from? Was her long employment by the U.S. Agency for International Development a cover for a clandestine Central Intelligence Agency career? Is this – and USAID's notorious association with far-Right politicians abroad – perhaps the back-story to Obama's own ascent?

The Obama example is all the more mysterious given the huge number of equally promising USian youth of all races and genders who are marginalized merely because of their socioeconomic status and thus cast forever into the cesspools of poverty, welfare and prison.

In this context it would be especially enlightening to know when – and by whom – the plebeian Barack Obama was first singled out for his future service to the One Percent. Clearly it was long before he matriculated at Harvard. Who paid his prohibitively expensive tuition at Punahou? Who arranged for his admission to what is authoritatively said to be the most selectively elitist private school in the state of Hawaii and amongst the top ten such institutions in the entire U.S.?

Clearly, the choice of the young Obama to eventually be the perfect facilitator of all Ruling Class intentions suggests a level of long-range psychoanalytical skill and human probabilities-analysis available only in the CIA.

Moreover, as his post-2008 conduct demonstrates beyond argument, a core part of the conditioning that elevated him first to Columbia, then to Harvard and finally to the White House reduced Obama to a moral imbecile – the perfect One Percent operative – a man unable to empathize with anyone other than the obscenely privileged aristocrats he now so obediently serves.

Which leads us to the pivotal question: is Obama the ultimate creation of the shadow government that has ruled the U.S. since the coup of 22 November 1963?

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Shaving Away Deception (II): Questions about Obama's Intentions

Whatever else Obama might be, there is no doubt that behind his Afro/Democrat camouflage, he serves the One Percent as the perfect restoration of Richard Nixon, the man who (before the still relatively free press exposed his tyrannies),  was probably 

slated by the One Percent to have been the nation's first true dictator.

But how was Obama, an African-American man of apparently modest background – a person one would assume would have great empathy for the 99 Percent – trained to become such a startlingly Machiavellian tyrant?

Was Obama's initial conditioning gradual and subtle? Was there then a point at which his lily-white proctors sat him down and described to him the devil's-bargain he (or more likely his mother) had made with those who now effectively owned him for life? Was he told the ugly truth that his color would forever bar him from the arrogantly white-supremacist Caucasian aristocracy? Was he then informed he could earn for himself, his family and their descendants the privilege to live as aristocrats, complete with limitless wealth and impenetrable defenses, if he faithfully served the One Percent's schemes?

Was he taught that as an African-American, his color was the perfect cover behind which to impose the One Percent's tyrannical agenda – that even after the most glaring betrayals he could still use race to silence or marginalize his opponents and discredit even his most legitimate critics as closet racists?

Was he made to understand how as a Democrat he is a symbol of all Democrats, and that his lies and betrayals will thus besmirch the Democratic Party for decades to come? Is this indeed one of his clandestine purposes?

Was he cautioned that as an African-American in a white-racist nation, he is a symbol of his own entire race? Was he warned the blame for his betrayals will thus unjustly fall on all African-Americans – that the resultant re-inflammation of racial antagonisms will set back the cause of black civil rights for as much as a century? Is this another of his clandestine purposes?

Was his childhood rejection by blacks and his parallel rejection by whites manipulated by his proctors into his adulthood's haughty disregard for the 99  Percent – the deftly concealed malice that so obviously defines his policies? Is this the emotional basis of his indifference to lower income peoples, of his obscene favoritism toward the One Percent?

Did his tenure at the University of Chicago – which because of its economics department should be renamed Ayn Rand Memorial University – include his training in the Ayn Rand ideology he falsely denies even as he imposes it on the nation and the world?

Did the aristocrats of the One Percent thus anoint Obama as their perfect tool, the man who behind his Afro/Democrat cover would at last complete their 80-year effort  to turn the United States into a one-party fascist state? Did they hire him as the one man who would at last build their USian empire into the global equivalent of a Fourth Reich, thereby fulfilling the dreams of countless Nazi war criminals? Do the caricatures of Obama as Hitler  thus ironically and unwittingly point to a terrible truth?

Occam's Razor suggests the answers to most if not all of these questions are an ominous yes, confirmed by Obama's betrayals, underscored again by his declaration of genocidal war against elderly and disabled Social Security and Medicare recipients like myself.

But why would Obama target us now, when our prepaid pensions have no part in the deficit he and his masters so loudly decry?

I think it is more than the money. I think it is because the One Percent regards us as dangerous, even subversive. We remember when this nation, in spite of its flaws, was truly the hope of the world, with a representative government and a healthy economy and all the promise and potential implicit in real constitutional democracy. We tell stories of better times; we inspire grandchildren and great-grandchildren with the possibility they could bring such good times back again. Because of what we remember, the Ruling Class wants us dead.

And when we are gone the true story of Obama's ascent and his eradication of the last vestiges of USian freedom will no doubt be suppressed. It will become the most terrible story never told – an unchanted lamentation, an unsung dirge, an unspoken epic of the brief flame of liberty that o-so-rarely brightens the endless centuries of patriarchal darkness and how methodically that flame was extinguished forever.

LB/6-11 April 2013

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