IS OBAMA A COMMUNIST? A RADICAL? A SOCIALIST? A MUSLIM? PERSONALLY I DON’T CARE AT THIS POINT. IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT PEOPLE ONLY DREDGE UP YOUR PAST AND TRY TO HOLD IT AGAINST YOU WHEN WHAT YOU ARE DOING IN THE PRESENT IS THREATENING TO THEIR MONEY, POWER, PROPERTY, PRESTIGE AND PERSONALITY. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEN BARAK OBAMA IS TRULY NOT ONLY AN AMERICAN, AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN, BUT AN ALL-AMERICAN, AND HE DESERVES OUR UTMOST RESPECT AND ADMIRATION FOR THE CENTREPIECE LEGISLATION, FLAWED AS IT IS, THAT BEARS HIS NAME. FOR IT MATTERS NOT THAT BARAK OBAMA BE WHITE OR BLACK, CHRISTIAN OR MUSLIM, OR MUSLIM WHO THEN BECAME CHRISTIAN, BUT A MAN OF CONSCIENCE AND ABOVE ALL, A DEMOCRAT.
One comes to a point in one’s life when the burden of all the world’s overarching injustices becomes just too hard to bear and to just sit around and keep quiet about. One of the reasons I hardly ever watch TV anymore, especially the news, is that most of what is on TV is just Post Modern, Post Industrial, pop cultural infotainment Mc Garbage served up to us in a 100+ channel universe of other like-minded drivel, all designed to, as Frank Zappa sang about, to ‘rule and regulate you.’ Basically TV has become one big conduit of info-tabloid trash following the time-honoured dictum of the 4 ‘s’ es of Tabloid Journalism: Sex, Sports, Show Business and Sanguinity, meaning blood and guts.
So politics falls unhappily somewhere amongst those four very intellectually stimulating categories and straddles all four of them to a greater or lesser degree. That’s why I no longer watch TV, because it is simply a never-ending litany of ‘who got arrested, who got molested and who got contested’ with no real common thread weaving it all together, as long as the pot keeps boiling and making froth and the people keep on buying stuff to support the advertising revenue that supports the programming, the media conglomerates basically don’t care what they show in between the commercials, as long as folks watch the commercials and buy whatever crap they’re selling, it’ll sell the programs spliced in between the commercials, which of course have to be spicy enough to keep folks coming back so as to keep on being exposed to more advertising so that they’ll buy more stuff… And the beat goes on as they say.
But where does that leave American politics, pray tell? Pretty shoddily dressed I should say. Barak Obama came to the Oval Office in January of 2009 with very high hopes being laid on his shoulders to be able to effectuate the timely structural changes within American society which were going to be needed (and still are for that matter), to put America back in the driver’s seat both domestically and in foreign policy. Immediately the powers that be began to undermine his credibility regarding his desire to change American society to let ordinary US citizens obtain better access to affordable health care. He was a Communist all of a sudden. A Socialist, a Radical, he wasn’t even an American some said! Remember the whole ‘birther flap’ about people claiming he was not born in the USA? But the big bugaboo came with the Affordable Care Act or ‘Obama Care’ bill, which eventually passed after a Supreme Court challenge and much effort to defeat it by those who sought to not have their wealth taken away from them in any way. This is when people really started to line up and take pot shots at him and accuse him of all sorts of things, such as being a radical Socialist, Communist, even a closet Muslim. Even if Obama once actually WAS a Muslim in his youth, as some people claim he was, he converted to Christianity. A retired FBI officer online said that to fully renounce Islam one has to make a public disavowal of the faith, something this former FBI man says Obama has never done and so claims is still a closet Muslim!
Whatever. I think some people are just a little too paranoid for their own good. What bugs me is that one has to ask oneself this crucial question: If Barak Hussein Obama is TRULY a radical Communist, then why did he spend the greater part of his first term in office, nay the better part of his entire political capital as President, on fighting tooth and nail so that the 45 million Americans who do not have any health coverage, or whose coverage is insufficient, could get some in an affordable, timely manner, taking on some of the biggest, most entrenched interests of money, power, property, prestige and personalities in Corporate America in the process, so that the average American citizen can be free of the scourge of poor health, which ultimately impedes economic growth, well-being and prosperity, by deleting many millions of Americans from the ability to participate fully and equitably in the paid labour force, much less being able to start a business to create jobs in the first place!
And what about those REAL COMMUNISTS over in China? (Or as REAL as any Communist can truly purport to call himself for combining the totalitarian aspects of Maoism with the most rapaciously exploitative aspects of Capitalism within the bosom of a one party state!) As far as we can estimate, The People’s Republic of China currently has anywhere between 1.3 to 1.4 billion inhabitants, up from about half that amount soon after Mao took over in 1949. According to one estimate that I read from a very reliable source, fully HALF the population of China doesn’t even have access to a western-style doctor, much less a health plan for bypass surgery or a hip replacement! That’s anywhere between 650 to 700 MILIION people without coverage folks! And the neo-conservative element within American society has the demagogic GALL to accuse Barak Obama of being a COMMUNIST for fighting the very people who are calling him a Communist, to get coverage for the 45 million of his own people who have none or very little!
Maybe people in America and Canada should be looking at analysing why such people are denying Americans and Canadians access to such services as health care and education, all in the name of ‘creating more wealth’ and ‘cutting taxes’, and ‘creating more prosperity’ (yeah, but for whom? Surely not for Joe the Plumber, or the people of Detroit, Cleveland or Flint Michigan, right? Or is that just the ‘Free Hand of the Market’ which is practicing a form of Socially-Darwinist Natural Selection? Enquiring minds want to know, y’know!), when in fact they are shutting down more and more factories every year and shipping production to either Mexico, China, or the East Indies, but especially China, where such entitlements do not exist AT ALL, and where these men of power ally themselves with the COMMUNIST government to ensure that they do NOT come to pass!!!
So essentially, like I mentioned in another article, Free Enterprise is like an Alligator or Crocodile Mother which devours its young as soon as they’re born. I say this because Capitalism seems to attempt to grind down wages to a subsistence level at every turn, and in doing so always attempting to destroy the very consumer-based market mechanism which it claims is the fundamental basis upon which civilization is predicated, by virtue of undermining the stability and ability of workers to inject purchasing power into the economy by always insisting on keeping wages so low that workers can never hope to actually aspire to consume the goods they are producing in the factories in which they are working, which leads to all sorts of worker alienation, strikes, rebelliousness, sickness, death, and so forth, the likes of which we have already witnessed in North America and the west as we evolved out of the Industrial Revolution ourselves and hoped for a better future after two bloody World Wars, only to be now subjected to the harsh brutality of ‘market discipline’, while upper management congratulate themselves with handsome and outlandish executive compensation packages to ship jobs overseas and accuse a President of Communism and Radicalism while continuing to knock the economic legs out from under him!
So I ask you, is President Obama a Communist? Or perhaps are not certain elements of Corporate America latently or even blatantly Fascist? Remember that when FDR proposed the New Deal in the 1930s, a group of wealthy American business men approached a high-ranking American military officer who’d been accustomed to overthrowing foreign regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean for the US government, to offer him tens of thousands of men to do the same thing in America itself and to boot FDR out of office so as to prevent his Democratic reforms from being instituted. They did not want the government increasing their cost of doing business, even if it was going to help their bottom line in the long run by providing greater market stability, safer factories, and healthier and better educated citizens and workers! So this particular military man refused to overthrow the democratically-elected government of the United States of America and the New Deal remained in place and was replicated in peacetime and led to the greatest era of prosperity and social peace in the history of our two countries.
So why are we having so much difficulty maintaining that lead in the world? Why are we arguing so much about money and power, property and prestige and personalities, all overlaid with sterile Left/Right ideology, which, quite frankly, really rings hollow? Why can’t we work for the common good of humanity and see beyond the base imperatives of money and wealth and power and property and prestige, personalities and so forth? There’s so much work to do in this life to make this world a better place to be than to be Lording it over our neighbour and watching them suffer as we ‘eat and drink, while tomorrow they die’ as U2 said in their song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’ Did you know that the word ‘Lord’ actually means ‘loaf keeper’, or ‘one who feeds dependents’, because the Lords of yore were supposed to be the ones, by virtue of their ownership of the land and the granaries which held the wheat at harvest time, were the ones who had the great responsibility, honour and duty to ‘feed their sheep’ or ‘feed their lambs’ with bread. The fact that they did not always do so is testament to the fallen nature of humanity.
However, this is why we call Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, for he feeds us with the true Bread of Life in the Real and True Presence of His Body and Blood in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist on the Altar. He is the one true Lord of all creation, and it is rightly so our duty to give him homage. The fact that Barak Hussein Obama laboured to feed his sheep and his lambs in the same manner is a testament to his desire to do the will of Our Father in Heaven and to remain true to the Covenant wrought between God and Abraham, our Father in Faith, regardless of what faith the President ultimately adheres to, all three of them derive from the same source in the land of Ur.
So let us take a moment and reflect upon Mr. Obama’s accomplishments as President. The Affordable Care Act, or Obama Care stands as one of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American history, which had to fight its way through an egregiously and diabolically flawed legislative process to get enacted, all the while every special interest in the country was trying to undermine and water it down, not to mention sabotage it outright. The fact that it still stands is a testament to one man and one man alone’s dogged determination to act in the interest of his Nation: Barak Hussein Obama. An All American President and above all, a Democrat. Hail to the Chief!
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