Obamacare Betrayals Prove Barack's Treachery

A slightly better picture than the one I published in 2009. (For my additional photos of the event, see “Faces of the Fight” (left-hand column near bottom). Don't know why I chose that frame over this one, particularly since the determined-looking the woman holding the near end of the “Health Care is a Human Right” banner is more visible in this image. Pentax K1000, 70mm-210mm f/4 Tokina zoom, Kodak 800 color negative film, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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NOW AS WE DISCOVER yet another dimension of how Obamacare victimizes everybody but the very rich,  we are beginning to fully understand what Barack the Betrayer, the most brazen liar in U.S. political history, promised the prescription drug lords, the insurance aristocrats and the Wall Street barons during all those secret meetings  at the White House. Again we get schooled in the first law of understanding U.S. politics: anything a politician says in public is a lie – especially when the “change we can believe in” promises to make things better for us 99 Percenters. Thus we see once more how the bottom line of our everyday lives is the bottomless despotism of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and ever-worsening poverty for all the rest of us. In other words, if we're not part of the One Percent, we're fucked. 

While Chris Hedges says the bloodshed that now characterizes everyday life in Egypt “offers a window into the coming dystopia,” so indeed does the Judas-like transformation of Obama the Orator into Barack the Betrayer. Just as the Egyptian crisis shows us the methodology of ruling the Third World, so does political treachery demonstrate how the Ruling Class imposes tyranny on more allegedly civilized nations, especially the United States.

In this context, the Obama phenomenon is a case-study in mass deception. Obama and his Madison Avenue hucksters shamelessly used his race to project an “I-knew-hard-times-and-I'll-govern-accordingly” Big Lie of empathy with everyday people, particularly our struggle for survival against a capitalist system completing its inevitable transition into Ayn Rand fascism. But his presidency has shown us that in truth he is just another obedient servant of the Ruling Class, differing from other USian politicians only in the magnitude of his lies and the totality of his obedience. Thus because of the nasty peculiarities of USian race-relations – the fact all African-Americans are unjustly blamed for the misbehavior of one – Obama's exploitation of his racial identity cannot but hurt his own fellow blacks. Thus too he betrays the cause of racial and ethnic equality and drives yet another wedge into any rational hope of 99 Percent solidarity. And given Obama's political savvy, I cannot doubt these outcomes are part of a far more diabolical agenda. The president, it seems, is not just a typical politician scheming to fulfill his own self-obsessed, morally imbecilic greed. He has also emerged as the most effective facilitator of the capitalist dictatorship the USian One Percent has sought at least since the failed Bankers Plot of 1934.

But Obama's unprecedented use of racial camouflage – his concealment of tyrannical intent behind the facade of the one people who most powerfully symbolize the USian struggle for freedom – is not the only treachery of which he is guilty. He also carefully hid his Wall Street heart and his Machiavellian mind behind the false flag of the Democrat Party. True, the party was terminally corrupted by the events of 22 November 1963, and now differs from the Republican Party only in the false rhetoric required to hide its embrace of the neo-fascist principles that unite both parties into One Party of Two Names. But Obama has thrust the Democrats' deceptiveness to never-before-known extremes. And by so doing, he has probably inflicted the coup-de-grace on the already fatally wounded USian experiment in constitutional democracy. He has taught us politics is a waste of time, that it is never anything more than a rigged game, one in which the house – in this instance the Ruling Class – is the only possible winner. Our vote is thereby proven meaningless; regardless of for whom we cast our ballots, we get a Republican – that is, an unapologetic fascist. We ourselves are thus reduced to the abject powerlessness of medieval serfs; our hopelessness is ever-more-clearly that of slaves for whom the Jubilee will never come. Hedges again: we live in “...the final stage of human habitation of the planet.”

I should point out that while I have enormous admiration for Mr. Hedges and his courageous outspokenness, I vehemently disagree with his notion religious extremism is nothing more than a reaction to oppression. I have experienced firsthand the often-violent religious fanaticism that defines the USian South as a de facto theocracy, where the Ku Klux Klan was known colloquially as “the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class,” an acknowledgement of its broader function as the local equivalent of the Islamic Morality Police. Hence I take the more conventionally Marxian view of religion – especially Abrahamic religion – as not just a key mechanism of oppression but most often its chief perpetrator. Indeed it is the seductive Jewish, Christian and Islamic notion of ego-survival in an eternal afterlife that so effectively obstructs revolution everywhere on this dying planet. That's why U.S. policy in the the Muslim world, despite claims to the contrary, always favors the imposition of theocracy.  It's also why the One Percent seeks to impose Christian theocracy on the entire United States – the better to brain-police its United Estates, the One Big Plantation on which we are all herded ever more relentlessly toward the corporate slave pens.

Speculate as we might on these matters, the vindictiveness of the Obamacare scam – and it is now obvious it was a scam from the very beginning – is undeniable. Not only is Obama setting aside the out-of-pocket limits that were to protect patients from runaway profiteering by the health-insurance and prescription-drug cartels; the rule requiring employers to provide insurance for their workers has also been discarded  – each betrayal a huge windfall for the obscenely wealthy One Percenters to whom Obama now gives his only loyalty. Predictably, organized labor – the only representation for USian 99 Percenters that still effectively resists capitalism's new paradigm of zero-tolerance authority – has meanwhile been excluded from any of the associated discussions. Moreover, just as any other Republican would surely do, the allegedly “Democratic” president has designed Obamacare to methodically further the wretchedness of the USian 99 Percent. He has given the capitalists tacit encouragement to shrink full-time employment by forcibly expanding the ranks of part-time workers.  And via Medicaid expansion, he has granted the states unlimited authority to fatten their treasuries by post-mortem seizure of all the possessions of anyone  whose income is at or below the new eligibility limit, which after 1 January 2014 is 133 percent of poverty. Based on this year's definitions of poverty,  this is an annual income of $15,282 for a one-person household; $20, 628 for a couple; and $31,322 for a family of four.

Thus our poignantly desperate yearnings for affordable, adequate health care – that which the civilized nations regard as a basic human right – have been perverted by political deception, presidential sleight-of-hand and outright Big Lies into yet another mechanism by which we Working Class USians, already the most oppressed people in the industrial world, are further victimized by those who see us as nothing more than beasts of burden.

LB/18 August 2013

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