One amusing thing to behold in Iowa as the first-in-the-nation presidential Caucus draws near is the significant extent to which Hillary Clinton is applying her taste for fake-progressive falsehood to the late-stage presidency of a man she privately loathes – Barack Obama, himself no slouch when it comes to deceptive progressive posing. The latest Hillary flyer to defile my mailbox shows a warmly lit White House against the backdrop of an early evening sky. Right below in light blue print atop ominous black paper one reads the following: “Over the last eight years, this house has been a beacon of hope where progressive values have been protected, struggles for equality have been championed, and the economy has been turned around.” The flyer’s language matches Hillary’s recent upbraiding of Bernie Sanders for having the chutzpah (the elementary decency) to observe over the years that many U.S. citizens have been “disappointed” by Obama’s friendliness to Wall Street.

The flyer’s claim is Orwellian nonsense. The Obama White House has been anything but a progressive beacon. In reality, Obama’s presidency, like Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s before it, it has functioned precisely as predicted by the left historian Laurence Shop in Z Magazine in February of 2008:

“Every four years many Americans put their hopes in an electoral process, hopes that a savior can be elected – someone who will make their daily lives more livable, someone who will raise wages, create well-paying jobs, enforce union rights, provide adequate health care, rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, and end war and militarism. In actuality, the leading ‘electable’ presidential candidates have all been well vetted by the hidden primary of the ruling class and are tied to corporate power in multiple ways. They will stay safely within the bounds set by those who rule America behind the scenes, making sure that members of the plutocracy continue to be the main beneficiaries of the system…It is clear that, at best, U.S. ‘democracy’ is a guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation, with the larger population objects of propaganda in a controlled and trivialized electoral process” (L.Shoup, “Election 2008,” Z Magazine, February 2008).

The  arch-neoliberal Mrs. Clinton is betting on lingering Obama fantasies among Iowa “progressives” (who did so much to launch Obama past Hillary and towards the presidency in January of 2008) to help boost her past the actually liberal-progressive Bernie Sanders in 2016. I’m not sure she can pull that off in a state where 43 percent of likely Democratic Caucus-goers identify as “socialists” (whatever they mean by that, exactly), compared to 38 percent who call themselves “capitalists” (same qualification).

Anyone who thinks that Obama has governed as a progressive should go back and take a look at the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind’s instructive volume Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (2011). Suskind told a remarkable story from March of 2009. Three months into Obama’s presidency, popular rage at Wall Street was intense and the leading financial institutions were weak and on the defensive. The nation’s financial “elite” had driven the nation and world’s economy into an epic meltdown and millions of Americans knew it. Having ridden into office partly on a wave of popular anger at the economic masters’ staggering malfeasance, Obama called a meeting of the nation’s top thirteen financial executives at the White House. The banking titans came into the meeting full of dread only to leave pleased to learn that the new president was in their camp. For instead of standing up for those who had been harmed most by the crisis – workers, minorities, and the poor – Obama sided unequivocally with those who had caused the meltdown. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obama said. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help…I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.”

For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was, as Suskind puts it, “Nothing to worry about. Whereas [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said ‘I welcome their hate,’ Obama was saying ‘How can I help?’” As one leading banker told Suskind, “The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.”

The massive taxpayer bailout of the super fat cats that began under Bush43 would continue and deepen under Obama44, along with numerous other forms of corporate welfare for the super-rich, powerful, and parasitic. This state-capitalist largesse was unaccompanied by any serious effort to regulate their conduct or by any remotely comparable bailout for the millions evicted from their homes and jobs by the not-so invisible hand of the marketplace.

It was a critical moment. With Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and an angry, “pitchfork”-wielding populace at the gates, an actually Franklin Rooseveltian-progressive. Non-neoliberal President Obama could have rallied the populace to push back against the nation’s concentrated wealth and power structures by moving ahead aggressively with a number of policies: a properly gigantic stimulus with major public works jobs programs; a real (single-payer) health insurance reform; the serious disciplining and even break-up or nationalization of the leading financial institutions; massive federal housing assistance and mortgage relief; and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have re-legalized union organizing in the U.S.

But no such policy initiatives issued from the White House, which opted instead to give the U.S. populace what William Greider memorably called “a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t.” Americans “watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe,” Greider noted. “They learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. ‘Where’s my bailout,’ became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide. Then to deepen the insult, people watched as establishment forces re-launched their campaign for ‘entitlement reform’ – a euphemism for whacking Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Americans also watched as Obama moved on to pass a health insurance reform – the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA) – that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, kicking the popular alternative (single payer “Medicare for All”) to the curb while rushing to pass a program drafted by the Republican Heritage Foundation and first carried out in Massachusetts by the arch 1-percenter Mitt Romney. The big for-super-profit insurance and drug companies continue to rule over the American health care system while millions go without coverage and many more struggle with exorbitant premiums and prices.

As Obama later explained to some of his rich friends at an event called The Wall Street Journal CEO Council a month after trouncing Romney’s bid to unseat him: “When you go to other countries, the political divisions are so much more stark and wider. Here in America, the difference between Democrats and Republicans – we’re fighting inside the 40-yard lines…People call me a socialist sometimes. But no, you’ve got to meet real socialists. (Laughter.) You’ll have a sense of what a socialist is. (Laughter.) I’m talking about lowering the corporate tax rate. My health care reform is based on the private marketplace.” Obama could have added that his “health care reform” was dreamed up by Republicans, consistent with some of his “elite” supporters’ likening of Obama’s administration to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. (In reality, the ACA isn’t based on “the marketplace” so much as on corporate power, master of “free market” for at least a century now.)

A year and a half before Obama’s tender ruling class moment with the WSJ CEO Council, the American people watched Obama offer the Republicans bigger cuts in Social Security and Medicare than the right asked for as part of his “Grand Bargain” offered during the elite-manufactured “debt-ceiling crisis.” It was then that hundreds of thousands of mostly younger Americans had received enough of Obama’s “blunt lesson about power” to join the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which sought progressive change through direct action and social movement-building rather than corporate-captive electoral politics. We will never know how far Occupy might have gone since it was shut down by a federally coordinated campaign of repression that joined the Obama administration and hundreds of mostly Democratic city governments in the infiltration, surveillance, smearing, takedown and eviction of the short lived movement – this even as the Eisenhower Democrat Obama and his party stole some of Occupy’s populist rhetoric for manipulative use against Romney and the Republicans in 2012.

Flash forward four years and five months to behold a dark global-corporatist denouement unfolding behind the scenes as the national media keeps the mass political mind glued to the seemingly endless quadrennial presidential election extravaganza. Next February 4th (mark the day) – three days after the Iowa presidential Caucus (which Hillary Clinton may well lose to the more genuinely progressive Bernie Sanders) and seven days before the New Hampshire primary (the same eventuality is distinctly possible) – Obama will assemble with ten other heads-of-state to sign the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a classically neoliberal so-called free trade agreement that has been under backstage, deep-state construction by multinational corporate lawyers and corporatist government officials for at least a decade. The measure has taken on what New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker called last spring “special meaning for a president eager to change the world. It [is] a way to leave behind a positive legacy abroad, one that could be measured, [Obama] hope[s], by the number of lives improved rather than [as with his military actions in the Middle East] by the number of bodies left behind.”

That’s a pathetic statement. Beneath deeply deceptive rhetoric about creating “a level playing field” and “American jobs,” the TPP is dedicated to strengthening corporations’ ability to protect and extend their intellectual property rights (drug patents, movie rights, and the like) and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) standards, something certain to discourage the enactment and enforce of such standards. It’s about “investor protection” (the New York Times) and the global race to the bottom.

Of critical significance, the TPP constructs a new legal structure that transcends the existing, nation-based legal system. Big global corporations who don’t think that American, Australian, Japanese, or Malaysian (etc.) courts can be trusted to give them a “fair deal” (translation: decisions consistent with their desired rate of profit) will be able to turn to “investor-state dispute settlement [ISDS] tribunals”: three-personal corporate lawyer-staffed panels that will effectively make their own law on behalf of big business. They will be kangaroo courts of and for global capital. Corporations will get to sue governments in these secret corporate-globalist courts if national, state-provincial, or local laws are passed that challenge any provision of the TPP, such as the one that prohibits privatization. How’s that for “progressive values” and “a positive legacy”?

No wonder the Obama administration has worked to keep the specifics of the TPP under wraps. A select small number of U.S. Congresspersons and some of their staff have been permitted to see the TPP’s text only if they agree not to take notes or discuss the details in public. (Meanwhile, hundreds of U.S. corporate lobbyists have full knowledge of the TPP’s text, of course; many of them have helped write the measure.) And no wonder Obama wanted Congress to give him “fast-track authority” to force a yay or nay Congressional vote on the TPP, with no time for careful consideration and no chance for revisions. Under fast-track rules, there’s no chance for delays or alterations. The pact must be voted up or down in a very short time-frame.

Big capital hopes to get this regressive, arch-authoritarian measure through Congress before Obama leaves office. It knows that a Republican president will have a much harder time than a Democratic one getting it past Congress. The longstanding arch-corporatist Hillary has had no choice but to technically oppose the TPP during the election season, when the Democratic Party’s “progressive base” has to be heeded to some extent. As president, it would take her at least two years to perform a Trans-Pacific turnaround and that’s way too long as far as corporate/financial America is concerned.

How, exactly, has “equality” been “championed” by Obama? During his first term, 95 percent of the nation’s income growth went to the top 1 percent. The American middle class (defined as households living at 67 to 200 percent of overall median household income) has fallen below less than half the nation’s population under Obama, according to the Pew Research Center. Half the U.S population or close to it is either officially poor or near-poor. The upward concentration of wealth characteristic of the neoliberal era – and of capitalism more broadly – has continued apace, to the point where we now inhabit a New Gilded Age in which the top 1 US percent owns more wealth than the bottom US 90 percent and (as Bernie Sanders likes to note on the campaign trail), 7 Wal-Mart heirs possess between themselves as much wealth as the bottom US 42 percent.

Meanwhile, Obama has overseen astonishing drops in Black net worth and home-ownership. Black mass incarceration and criminal supervision remain deeply entrenched. What has the president brought Black America in the way of a response to its deepening crisis but repeated bourgeois lectures on poor Blacks’ supposed personal and cultural responsibility for their own worsening plight and the potent symbolism of a Black family entering the White House in the land of slavery?  (Sadly but predictably, the bourgeois-representational victory – a first  technically Black president – has reinforced white America’s false majority belief that racism no longer poses a significant barrier to black advancement and equality.) Imagine, the contempt Malcolm X would have for the nation’s first technically Black president.

Who has “the economy has been turned around” for under Obama? Consistent with Greider’s early observation, it’s been the rich and powerful, those for whom government has plenty of money, not the rabble multitude, for whom government has little to give. It’s a curious turnaround indeed, one in which financial sector profits (which now account for half or more of US corporate/capitalist profits) have been gloriously restored as stock and bond prices fly through the ceiling while the real economy barely grows and wages and incomes languish. It’s no accident.  It’s about Federal Reserve and federal government policy in the Age of Obama, whose administration was loaded with Wall Street operatives and allies from the start. Seven years of zero interest rates and easy money pump priming (“quantitative easing”) has restored big bank balance sheets and boosted stock prices to stave off the threat of nationalization and inflate corporate “earnings” (takings). Meanwhile, Obama and the Congress have collaborated in the maintenance of slow growth by failing to undertake large scale Keynesian stimulus and indeed by (among other things) throwing half a million federal employees out of work.  This has all happened at the behest of the nation’s unelected financial dictatorship, whose reckoning was recently explained on Counterpunch by the left business analyst and political commentator Mike Whitney: “if the economy was allowed to rebound, then higher employment would push up wages and raw material costs which in turn would boost inflation. Higher inflation would force the Fed to raise short-term interest rates which would put the kibosh on the cheap money Wall Street needed to buy-back its own shares or engage in other risky speculation. So the real economy had to be sacrificed for Wall Street. Hence, ‘austerity’” As Whitney elaborates, the perverse finance-capitalist logic meant keeping progressive Keynesianism shut out of policy:

“Obama’s economics team, led by Lawrence Summers, [was determined] to lift the economy out of recession without creating conditions for a strong recovery… from the very beginning.…Basic economic theory suggests that when private sector can’t spend, then the government must spend to offset deflationary pressures and prevent a major slump. Cutting the deficit removes vital fiscal stimulus from the economy. It’s like applying leeches to a patient with flu symptoms thinking that the blood-loss will hasten his recovery. It’s madness, and yet this is what Obama and the Congress have been doing for the last six years. They’ve kept their hands wrapped firmly around the economy’s neck trying to make sure the patient stays in a permanent state of narcosis….That’s the goal, to suffocate the economy in order to reward the thieving vipers on Wall Street.” (M.Whitney, “The Chart That Explains Everything,” Counterpunch, January 15, 2016).

Talk about “The Mendacity of Hope” (the clever title of Roger Hodge’s book on the early Obama administration)! Meanwhile, stock prices have been so egregiously over-inflated that another one of capitalism’s recurrent financial crises [1] looms.

Yes, Madame Secretary, that’s some recovery and some progressive equality-champion down there in that White House. That hopey-changey stuff really is working out for the working and middle classes, isn’t it? We sure do want to keep that great egalitarian flame glowing in the White House. You betchya!

After making its disingenuous, cynical, and false statement about the Obama White House “over the last eight years” (actually seven years), the aforementioned Hillary Iowa flyer goes into how “Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or one of the other leading Republican” candidates becomes president, then all this great supposed democratic “progress” will be undone. And “There’s only one candidate who will stop them,” the flyer proclaims in boldface: Hillary Clinton. Wrong again. The single-payer health insurance-/financial regulation-/green jobs- advocate Bernie Sanders crushes Trump, Cruz, and the rest of the GOP field in match-up polls. Sanders (or whom I no great fan) might even do better than Hillary against Trump.

Knowing that to be true and looking nervously at polls suggesting that Sanders could beat her in both Iowa and New Hampshire (Obama himself did not get the second state in 2008), the Clinton campaign has recently taken to pink-baiting Bernie. That’s interesting since Sanders is at most a progressively inclined New Deal-Great Society liberal on domestic policy and is only slightly less imperialist than Obama, Hillary, and the Republicans on foreign policy. But it’s also sort of appropriate. Hillary started her political life as (in her own words) “a Goldwater Girl,” something that provides some interesting background for her little neo-McCarthyite ploy. As she explained to an audience assembled at her high school alma mater in Park Ridge, Illinois, in 1992: “I was a Goldwater girl…really….After leaving Main South I went to Wellesley, still a Republican, but [with] a different kind of attitude….and then gradually over time in college and law school I evolved my own political beliefs, which frankly are in some ways neither easily defined, they’re not dogmatically Republican, dogmatically Democrat, [not] easily defined as liberal or conservative…” [2]

There is a useful translation for this statement: “I became a neoliberal ‘third-way’ corporatist in the mold of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).” And that makes her newfound Obama Love fitting too.  Beneath his expertly crafted liberal-progressive imagery, richly assisted by his skin color, Obama (whose 2007-08 campaign slogans and focus on “the economy” were taken straight out of Bill Clinton’s 1992 play-book) always walked in narrow, neoliberal-capitalist, and Wall Street-captive DLC/Hamilton Project/Council of Foreign Relations grooves. Just like the Clintons and other leading neoliberals, Obama has always sold his authoritarian and regressive state-capitalist and imperialist agenda as the “pragmatic” policy platform of “a progressive who knows how to get things done.” The fact Hillary and Bill privately detest Barack and Michelle is really beside the standard populism-manipulating point of “elite” Democratic presidential campaigning.

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

1. As the fictional NYC financial titan Jonathan Tuld tells one of his top managerial subordinates in the 2011 movie Margin Call: “So you think we might have put a few people out of business today. That it’s all for naught. You’ve been doing that every day for almost forty years Sam. And if this is all for naught then so is everything out there [points to the skyline of New York City]. It’s just money; it’s made up…And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 37, 57, 84, 1901, 07, 29, 1937, 1974, 1987 – Jesus, didn’t that fucker fuck me up good – 92, 97, 2000 and whatever we want to call this [2008]  It’s all just the same thing over and over; we can’t help ourselves. …And we make a lot money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers, happy fuckers and sad suckers, fat cats and starving dogs in this world.”

2. See Hillary Clinton, “I was a Goldwater Girl” (1992), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WycwDYlOCDw

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