This guy hasn’t even taken office yet but he has wasted no time in showing anyone whose eyes are open that he’ll be taking his marching orders from the millionaires who own him rather than the millions who voted for him. In doing so, Obama is following in the footsteps of the current Democratic Congress, the same one that the liberal left helped to “take back” in 2006. Elected on the basis of widespread opposition to the war, they immediately proceeded to take any kind of “withdrawal” from Iraq off the table even before assuming office...and gave Bush even more money then he asked for to keep the war going. Obama, who was portrayed as “antiwar” by a sycophantic media, even though he voted for every cent that Bush asked for to keep the war going, clearly won the nomination over Hillary Clinton by constantly reminding voters of her support to the war, has not only appointed her to steer the ship of the State Department but is also keeping Bush’s war minister on board as a show of continuity. So much for change.

Listening to the likes of Carl Davidson, Tom Hayden and the other “Progressives for Obama” during the election and you would have thought that this time the reformists were going to hold Obama’s “feet to the fire” so that people like Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton, let alone Paul Volker and Robert Gates, wouldn’t be getting his ear, let alone, top posts in the new regime. As laughable as it sounds, that’s what they said. Whether or not they took themselves seriously is another story. After all, they’ll go all out for any and every Democrat at the drop of a hat. Only what do they have to hold Obama, or any other bourgeois politician for that matter, with? Or as Davidson’s mentor in craven class collaboration, one Josef Stalin once said, “how many divisions do they have?” Uncle Joe had the Soviet Army. Even Earl Browder and his CP at one point had the support of almost 40% of the unions in the CIO. “Progressives for Obama?” UFPJ? Give me a break.

They gave the man a blank check and took all of their followers off the streets in order to put them into the voting booths for the Democrats. Or, to be more accurate, they continued the work of keeping them off of the streets that they started in 2004 with “ABB” and repeated in 2006 with “Taking Back Congress.” So maybe there was something to what that old sly boots Ralph Nader said a while back about how being taken for granted means being taken! Or what Malcolm X said about how putting the Democrats first ensures that the Democrats put their faithful followers last.

Since they have constantly sabotaged any and every attempt at independent political activity in favor of “lesser evilism” they have absolutely no organizational vehicle to hold anyone to anything anywhere any ways. Thousands of anti-war activists, millions of Americans who agree with them, but not one representative in either house of Congress independent of the two pro-war parties.Or maybe UFPJ thinks that it can continue to turn what’s left of the anti-war movement on and off like a faucet and call yet another of its pathetic peace parades. Only that didn’t exactly make George Bush, a guy that they didn’t like, shiver in his cowboy boots, let alone stop the war and occupation. And we’re talking about Obama, a guy that they do like. Also don’t forget, for UFPJ, the “good war worth winning” in Afghanistan, which will be now be a front and center joint production of Obama and Gates, was always a non-issue from the get-go.

Indeed, the whole Obama phenomenon has been a media-made production (“Brand Obama”) from the get-go as the latest “outsider” to serve as the favorite son of Wall Street peddled his sound-byte banalities and platitudes about “change” and “hope” while all the time embracing the standard “right-of-center” DLC agenda of increased aggression abroad and austerity at home for anyone who bothered to listen. With a hated colonial war and an economic collapse intersecting, it was finally the chance for “Anybody but Bush,” as both the ruling and ruled classes had had their fill of the GOP’s mismanagement of both.

Far from being any kind of “insurgency” based on a “mass movement” the way Jesse Jackson’s campaigns used to pass themselves off as, Obama’s was a top-down internet fan club that mesmerized the burned out baby boomers, New Left left-overs and cyber-Stalinists like Carl Davidson desperate to finally get a Democrat into the White House. Had Hillary Clinton won the nomination instead, not only would we see the same cabinet appointees, but the same crowd of button-wearing fashionistas and “mass-movement” tailing fake-leftists. Only they’d be enthusing over the first woman president instead of the first Black one. One thing we can be sure they won’t be doing is organizing any kind of opposition to Obama’s wars and austerity attacks (”shared sacrifices”) just as they sat on their hands during the eight years of Clinton’s NAFTA neo-liberalism and “muscular internationalist” bombing and starving of Iraq and Yugoslavia. That will be the job of a real left.