The Empire of Illusion

Another rousing Obama success was recently noted by Glenn Greenwald: "...the surviving banks are bigger and more powerful than ever, thus maximizing our dependence on them, and the primary stated goal of the bailout (increasing lending) has not been achieved." The stated goal will not be achieved because it was never intended. More lending would lead to greater empowerment for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. The purpose of the "Obama" revolution is to ensure perpetual dependency on the financial oligarchy in the interest of maximized profit. It is the anticipation of those profits that is currently driving the Wall Street rally.

Why is so little effort being devoted to hiding the installation of members of the financial elite in key positions of political power? The "Obama" strategy is to habituate the public to seeing these executives in positions of political authority. By doing so, we will gradually be induced into accepting their control over our political institutions. lready in the health care debacle of the last three months, we have come to accept the control of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries over Congress and the executive branch. Eventually, we will accept direct control over public policy by industry executives.

The corporate media plays its role here by pumping out pundit-authorized intellectual haze over the real issue: the direct administration of public policy by and for the interests of the financial elite. With the placement of their man Obama in the executive branch, they have little fear of large-scale resistance. The marketing strategy used in the Obama campaign has been extraordinarily successful and they are now proceeding to consolidate their gains, both in terms of the profits reaped from public funding, as well as their now visible control over the policies that lead to those profits. It is precisely Obama's progressive image that authorizes the next phase: the transparency of their control.

The aura of Obama's progressive credentials, recently reinforced by the Nobel Prize, allows us to accept corporate control and appear enlightened at the same time. The underlying reality is as Henry Kaufman in his recent book "The Road to Financial Reformation" states, "When the current crisis abates, the pricing power of the huge financial conglomerates will grow considerably, at the expense of borrowers and investors." Kaufman, "The Road to Financial Reformation", p. 229. Solidifying this pricing power and preparing future profits is clearly one of the prime goals of the "Obama administration."

The destruction of real wealth which this entails is accepted as a personal failure by the working population, who now scramble to find new ways to please their corporate masters. And those masters will surely find ways for us to fulfill their needs.