Obama: Change You Can Believe In -- NOT (Kéllia Ramares)

  Truth To Power is delighted to publish the first in an exclusive series analyzing Barack Obama and his platform. Kellia Ramares has done her homework and documents that an Obama administration, backed by the same corporatocracy that is presiding over the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world, has no investment in change beyond rhetoric and ostensible extreme makeovers.

   Part 1. The Economy 

   (Speaking Truth To Power) -- It is often said that you are known by the company you keep. If that is true, then progressive voters should familiarize themselves with at least some of Sen. Barack Obama's advisers and fundraisers, and by this I don't mean Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I mean the real movers and shakers who are the answer to the question: "How does a young, black, first term Senator rise so quickly in politics so as to be standing at the threshold of the White House?" You will see that those who made it possible are not Weather Underground, or vociferous ministers, but are the people who will insure that Barack Obama will not make any fundamental changes to the way the United States does its business -- here or abroad. 

   The Religion of the Free Market 

   The Democratic presidential candidate's chief economic advisor is Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, an economist described by author Naomi Klein as "on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right."1  Goolsbee is very much a home town pick, and not merely because he and Obama both live in Chicago. Obama taught at the law school of the University of Chicago for a decade, and, as Klein says, "is thoroughly embedded in the mind set known as the Chicago School."2  The Chicago School's long time "Headmaster" was the late Nobel Prize-winning monetarist Milton Friedman, who made a secular religion of "the free market." According to Klein, Goolsbee qualifies as a leftist in this group because he acknowledges inequality as a problem. But his answer to it is more education.3 Sound familiar? During his years in the White House, Bill Clinton emphasized retraining for the people who were losing their manufacturing jobs to "downsizing." But, besides the difficulties inherent in retraining someone who had spent a decade or more on an assembly line to be a computer programmer, (and helping him or her maintain a home and family during the process), there was the not-so-little matter of technical jobs also being outsourced to the other side of the world, a problem that has been growing since the Clinton Administration, as the United States loses the ability to make anything except bombs, debts, and rich executives.

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