Second standing applause as Obama denounces the banking industry for its bonuses while people are out of work. (A bit ridiculously after the fact, since he himself reappointed high-rolling entrenched ringleaders of criminally irresponsible greedy investment banking, steadfast resisters of change, and previous government hands, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson et all, who openly conspired to foster the trillion plus bailout to protect and enrich their CEO pals.)
Crying foul against Wall Street stuck out as ingenuous, coming right after the rebuke by the Massachusetts electorate, while Geithner is under Congressional investigation, and opposition having arisen to the reappointment of Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke, who in 2008, inappropriately endorsed presidential candidate Obama.
(All the above dramatizes possible misuse of office by a President Obama increasingly seen as returning favors to those who financially supported his election campaign. From The Wall Street Journal, 10/ 21/08, "Perhaps Mr. Bernanke's blunderbuss political intrusion will win him more Democrat friends, and maybe even Mr. Obama's goodwill. To the rest of the world, he has harmed the Fed and made himself less credible." There had a even been talk Barack Obama might circumvent Senate obstruction and recess appoint Ben Bernanke to a another term as Fed Chairman.
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Is Obama a captive of America's most powerful banks and corporations? OEN, 7/1/09, explores a moot point.)
Speaking of science and technological investment, Obama proclaimed in bravado, "I do not accept second place for the United States of America" to patriotic applause, but surely also some uneasy feeling that America might soon be in second place or worse.
German and other Northern European audiences must have had cause to be ponder Obama's high flown "no one should go broke because they chose to go to college." (Germany has free education up through doctorate, as does Cuba and as did pre-invasion Saddam Hussein's Iraq.)
Community minded citizens the world over must have blanched at Obama's crass estimation of his fellow countrymen as having a desperate selfish antisocial attitude, "Americans want to know what's in it for me?," which didn't quite jibe with, "I know that all of us love this country."
More and more Americans realize that Obama is another president of a country that doesn't belong to them. A world wide American Empire has replaced a nation of people. An empire, which at best awakens pride not love.
Since the the world knows of the pathetically slow response of Obama's administration to the earthquake in Haiti and of the U.S. military even impeding the landing of medical aid from other nations, his praising the humanitarian efforts of individual Americans acting on their own was an obvious and dissimulating distraction.
Within the usual politically expected platitudes on the exceptional goodness and righteousness of Americans and America was thrust a chillingly menacing word for North Korea, already once flattened to rubble by U.S. bombers and threatened with America's A bombs, and Iran, already punished with war and invasion by a United States backed and aided Saddam Hussein not long after the CIA had overthrown Iran's democratic but oil nationalizing government: "They face consequences!", followed by a grim faced firm set jawed, "I promise!"
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It has often been pointed out that Obama's youthful nonwhite handsome countenance has sanitized the cruel face of a predatory U.S. empire. Besides providing relief from the deadpan inexpressive gaze of "Secretary of War', former CIA, Robert Gates, Obama's ready reassuring disarming self-confident smile takes the edge off our suffering the uncomfortable guilty look of Geithner and Paulson. This would have had to have been the intention of key powerful figures who originally saw to Obama candidacy and realized that most Americans, as well, would welcome the experience of having a black president as refreshing.
But someday, America will have a president who is not a captive of the military complex that Eisenhower, served in all brutality in Laos, Guatemala and Congo, and sought to warn us against only at the moment he was leaving office.
Obama is to be pitied for adhering to a tradition of imperial bombing, occupations, covert interventions, economic dissabilzation, promoting civil war and opposing socialism, nationalism, democracy and independence in the Third World.
However, this is what is expected of any U.S. president by wealthy and powerful imperialists who single him or her out for a run for office against one of other candidates similarly selected.
But anyone whose heart is in the right place should be sorry for all the victims of Obama's wars and not just pity a beleaguered Obama.
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