> See the above analogy.
> Absent any evidence to the contrary one can safely assume the
> relationship of any politician to those of the moneyed class is not
> dissimilar enough to label one a "worshiper" of money and position
> another politician against them as being fundamentally different. This
> is borne out again and again and is well supported by historical
> precedence. It is most definitely not an article of faith.
> The required relationship to money and the moneyed class is, for all
> intents and purposes, identical among politicians and especially those
> who seek the Oval Office. To position one as outside that paradigm
> requires something other than anecdotal evidence although even that is
> lacking in this case.
>
> John Thornton
I liked Omali Yeshitela's way of putting it. Obama's an "honest opportunist", true, but that doesn't mean his relationship to the presidency will be any different than that of any other candidate or actual officeholder:
<...> "The other thing is this. It doesn't matter about an election. We were having a discussion in a meeting the other day and we were doing a study on question of the state as an organization that represents the interests of the ruling class and the existing social system. We were speaking about Obama in relationship to the state. The state is an oppressive organization. It is an organization of coercion. It is like the prison system, the courts, the jail, the military. All these forces constitute what you call state power.
"In the middle of the discussion, we brought up Obama and the fact that, because of the existence of this state of the bourgeoisie, of white power imperialism, it didn't matter who got elected. And somebody said, 'well yeah, but look at Obama's history because he doesn't have a history of this and that'. I don't care if Obama had a history of being the most militant member of the Black Panther Party who was also secretly an advisor to Elijah Mohammed at the height of the influence of the Nation of Islam. The reality is, if he became President of the United States he would be subservient to the white imperialist bourgeois state!
"It doesn't matter about his history. What you need to know is about the history of the state as an institution that exists in human society. If you know that, then you know that whoever's in charge, whoever is supposedly in charge there, is subservient to that institution.
"Now, Barack has a potential for believing this stuff, you see, because Obama is new to the African world. I mean that in the literal sense of the word. Because he never lived with Africans. He never went to school with Africans. He lived in other places. His understanding of America is the ideal of America that's been promoted and taught in schools and stuff like that.
"Obama hasn't shared the African experience like that. Except you know he lived in Chicago. He did some community work, which is different. You can find those people in the Peace Corps. And they used to have the U.S.-based Peace Corp, VISTA, where the white people used to be in your community. They had all these kind of programs. You can do that and work in the African community and I think that's the kind of experience that he's had.
"It's different for Africans who are not born in the United States. I'm coming to learn a lot more about that. I've read where the majority of the African students in the Ivy League campuses today are students from Africa, not students from here. And it's because the students from Africa are easier to manage. Because the students from here, they say, are aggressive. And I didn't notice that about them. For me they look like something else. But they're hard to handle, because of the whole direct slavery experience. Africans here ain't never got enough, while Africans who are coming from home got the best s**t they ever had, because they're coming from terrible circumstances to what appears to be great circumstances over here. So they're easier to get along with, than the Africans who are here.
"They come here. They've read all the stuff about America and they found 'oh, it's true'. You know, they can go to the movies all the time. They can do all other kinds of things that they could never do at home. They even got streets that work, where in most places in Africa you got dirt roads, and sometimes it's an overstatement to call them roads. They're like a row of ditches that you have to travel through. I've learned while I was in Ghana on this last trip what an automobile can withstand. I never would have imagined that an automobile could handle the kind of stuff that I saw in Ghana.
"So they get here and for them this is a whole different thing. Africans who were born here, coming from the slavery experience, etc., are still fighting. So I can see how Obama might actually be an honest opportunist. But in any event, he doesn't offer a solution. And I think that we have to really help African people to grapple with this question, because people can be disarmed. At a time when the masses need clarity more than any time, people can be sucked into this whole thing of the Democratic Party. At a time of crisis when people need to be finding alternatives to Americanism, to be sucked into the embrace of the Democratic Party is seriously problematic."
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