The Great Capitulator

(Updated on Wednesday in third, fourth and final paragraph)


Maybe it's because he's been so successful at being The Unthreatening Black Man to white people for his whole life, but it doesn't really matter why. Monday's sellout on tax cuts for the rich defintively proves Barack Obama will not fight for working people and we shouldn't fight for The Great Capitultor in 2012.

My only encounter with Obama was in 2008. He was a presidential candidate who ducked my questions about donations to him from Big Oil executives http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=e01 as I shouted to him while he walked by me during a rally I was covering while a reporter for the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind . I wasn't surprised. Politicians ducking tough questions from reporters is unfortunately the status quo, but successful presidents cannot always duck a fight.

Barack Obama isn't one of them. He's proven as effective at fighting for the American people as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.

Forget all the tough talk at his self-serving talk at his Tuesday press conference in which he denounced liberals like me for being "purists" because we and the majority of Americans don't believe people earning $250,000 or more per year deserve a tax cut with nearly double digit unemployment, some 40 million people living below the poverty line and the nation on the brink of another Great Depression.

Obama portrayed himself as the defending the middle class who would've seen their taxes rise slightly if a deal wasn't cut and the unemployed whose benefits the Republicans were refusing to extend. But the truth is Obama didn't want to have to defend being labeled by his opponents as the guy who raised everybodies taxes when he runs for re-election.

Obama's latest cave in which he allowed Republicans, who are the minority in the House of Representatives and Senate, to roll him by continuing tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, should be the final straw for anyone considering supporting Obama in 2012. Defenders of Obama have taken on the tone of a domestic violence victim. He hurts me but he doesn't really mean to and I change him.

Sure, I'll hold my nose and vote for Obama as the lesser evil to a Republican alternative, if I have no choice. So will most flaming liberals like me. But I'm willing to spend money and time on a Democratic or third party alternative candidate and so should you.

Maybe it's outgoing Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold or Sherrod Brown, one of my senators here in Ohio where I moved to on Dec. 2. Or ousted Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, a fighter with deep pockets. Anybody who understands that you don't make friends with bullies, you fight them or you get beaten unmercifully, something that will probably happen to Obama if he runs in 2012, given the economy's freefall.

There are some things a president has to be willing to draw a line in the sand on and another giveaway to the superrich is one of them. The tax rate for the richest Americans was about 90 percent in 1933 and about 70 percent when in 1981 when Ronald Reagan AKA St. Reagan, took office in 1981. Tax revenue helped build a middle-class and an infrastructure that were the envies of the world. And now both are crumbling and America is beginning to resemble a Third World nation with Obama's sellout the latest example of America's bananna republic politics.

Unlike many liberals, I had few illusions about Obama. A tipoff was his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention in which he first made his mark on the national stage. His allusions to the Vietnam War and the battle of Fallujah in Iraq smacked of the kind of cheerleading for American militarism and war crimes which have caused millions of deaths and financially and morally bankrupted this country.

Candiate Obama criticized the Iraq War as a "strategic blunder" but never said it was illegal and immoral and as a senator voted to continue funding it. Candiate Obama criticized the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, but voted to renew the Patriot Act further depriving Americans' already deeply eroded civil rights.

Candidate Obama worried that single-payer healthcare - Medicare for all which would end this nation amoral for-profit medical care system and save $350 billion annually http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources - would lead to job losses in the healthcare industry. It would: the people denying healthcare to the needy because of "pre-existing conditions" and looking for loopholes to avoid payments for care.

Obama likes to brag about Obamacare being historic, but this "reform" resulted in windfall profits for the insurance industry by ensuring guaranteed customers, the healthiest of whom will be cherry-picked by companies with the sick being "lemon-dropped." The healthcare law doesn''t include universal coverage, a public option and Obama took single-payer off the table before negotiations even started.

Obama's other signature "reform" was financial regulation which is completely toothless and allows for the same kind of Wall Street betting with other people's money that caused  the economic meltdown. This was partially due backroom dealings by some of the Bill Clinton cronies Obama got appointed who also advised him to seek a far too small $800 billion stimulus that didn't reduce unemployment significantly and led to the Republican midterm landslide.

After collecting an embarassingly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize and shamefully invoking the name of Martin Luther King while defending the right of America to continue to act as the world's rogue cop, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/12/barack-obama-nobel-peace-prize-speech-text.html Obama escalated the Afghanistan War which anybody with a remote commonsense or a sense of history can see is a fool's errand.

Obama escalated the secret and notoriously inaccurate drone strikes in Pakistan which have created far more enemies than those killed and made Americans more vulnerable to homegrown terrorists like failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad who was radicalized by the drone strikes http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2970442/faisal_shahzad_states_nyc_car_bomb.html

Obama called for more offshore oil drilling before the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by BP, which contributed more to him than any other politician in 2008. The kind of contribution he didn't want to talk to me about as a candidate. Obama cut backroom deals at the Copenhagen climate conference that will hasten rather than prevent an environmental catastrophe and somehow maintained a straight face while invoking "clean coal" as a way to reduce carbon emissions which are killing the planet http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/obama-defends-clean-coal.php

Sure, Obama was handed a financial mess by President George W. Bush, but he has adopted the same rhetoric as the hypocritical  Republican and Blue Dog Democrats deficit hawks who have no problem adding to $700 trillion to the deficit for tax cuts for the superrich, but balk at extending benefits to unemployed people like me. And the Deficit Commission Obama established is a strawman to give him cover to cut Social Security.

Obama is articulate and intelligent and basically came from nothing to be elected president. Much of it was due to hard work, unlike Bush, an arrogant child of privilege who basically had everything handed to him. But for all his failings, Bush was at least able to articulate and fight for what he believed in no matter how reprehensible and damaging it was to this nation.

Obama is a centrist appeaser and those in the middle of road get crushed. If your goal is only to get half a loaf you'll always end up with crumbs. Americans deserve a fighter who understands that if you go down, you at least go down fighting, something Obama doesn't understand. If he won't fight for us, why should we fight for him?