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Obama Joins Club of the Super-Rich – Defends Global Capitalism in Lecture (1/2)
TheRealNews on Jul 29, 2018
Prof. Leo Panitch and Paul Jay discuss Obama’s Mandela lecture; Obama wants the impossible – a world where the super-rich give up “a little” and there is no massive inequality.
Paul Jay: “… This speech was a defense of the system that gave him such power and prestige; a defense of global capitalism. It’s an important speech, I think, because it lays out what Obama sees as the achievements of globalization, which he thinks are many. He sees the great inequality that has been produced, and the rise of the populist right, and says that the solution to these problems is more global capitalism, but one that’s more enlightened and inclusive.”
Obama Says Inequality Led to Rise of the Right, but Takes No Responsibility for It (2/2)
TheRealNews on Aug 1, 2018
Prof. Leo Panitch and Paul Jay discuss Obama’s Mandela lecture where he describes how globalization led to the politics of fear and resentment, but won’t acknowledge how global capitalism and his presidency created the conditions for it.
From the archives:
85 Billionaires and the Better Half by Michael Parenti
Chris Hedges: Generation Wealth and The Cult of Self
MFTN: Poverty Will Kill More Of Us Than Terrorism
The Rich Are Only Rich If We Let Them Be by Dariel Garner
Inequality, Social Dysfunction and Misery by Graham Peebles
The Injustice and Crime of Extreme Inequality by Graham Peebles
Michael Roberts: OECD Advises Countries to Curb Extreme Inequality
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World by Michael Parenti
Wealth Belongs To All Of Us – Not Just To The Rich by Dariel Garner
Dandelion Salad 
Pingback: The Same Old Know-it-all Neoliberal Obama by Paul Street – Dandelion Salad
Really good, need to listen again.
Yes, I thought so, too. Thanks for watching, David.
Been trying to post this comment, continually blocked again….
Yes. Excellent analysis & critique. Leo Panitch is admirably lucid.
Obama is a very slick salesman ~ a plutocratic propagandist, and preening populist. Professor of spin incarnate: “all the world’s knowledge…” in the palm of the hand of a child, now that is some statement! Only it’s really just clever advertising….fake-cake recipes and ‘jam tomorrow’ sales-banter. Talk about pimping the presidential ride. Forget the kitsch-logic; what about our biological limits, and where exactly are they to be drawn? Clearly not in his playground.
His arguments, although confidently fluent, assured and ostensibly extemporaneous, are actually strangely threadbare and vacuous. He appears to be utterly intoxicated and blinded by the glamour of his own selective statistics. He can reel out these gift-wrapped, spectacular historical developments, as though they are the sublime work of providence ~ naturally enough, (his subtext meticulously affirms…) a bank-rolled providence, of which he is/was an ethnically distinct and privileged agent.
So despite his cautionary sophistry, he blatantly fails to portray the greater existential/ecological challenges; the true depth of our universal crisis…..and it is a crisis, let us not deceive ourselves, make no mistake…..about the ‘metaphysical’ implications of a cosmic Earth writhing from the swarming, profit-driven erosion of viable habitats and the painfully urgent, human-made threat of collapsing primary ecosystem infrastructure ~ those irreplaceable functions that regulate our holistic planetary biosphere. It is not as though this is exactly a mystery.
So such talk is sheer human arrogance in my opinion ~ supreme hubris on stilts, bordering on solipsistic madness.
There is also that small detail about decreased violence…. I can’t help but speculate what kind of smug rhetoric would have been in evidence, were he addressing those who had been surviving recipients of his aggressive Wall St approved, US ‘drone diplomacy.’
He deftly dodges the fundamental issue (the cluster of dilemmas for all of us, who are struggling to understand and master the complexities of life) ~ namely: how to satisfactorily invite that rare miracle of prescient visionary insight, that is also substantiated by reliable, credible and intellectually magisterial (multi-disciplinary) intelligence.
Politicians are generally more ‘successful’ when they reinforce what we want to hear, not when they tell us what we actually need to know.
At last!
David, can you give me more information on why you are having trouble posting comments here? Blocked, by whom?
Thanks for your commentary, David, as always.