Barackodile Tears: Obitchuaries on the Obama Years

By Randy Shields

The best American tools aren't made by Porter-Cable–they’re made by Goldman Sachs.

One such tool hammered in the last nails of the 1960s coffin– the real hope and change– an undertaker who cleaned up the messes of the Bush-Cheney crime family and buried the anti war movement, black militancy, Medicare for All, habeas corpus, government whistleblowers, Occupy Wall Street, the 3rd Amendment, the Employee Free Choice Act and prosecutions of spying telecoms, thieving bankers and CIA torturers.

Besides satirical essays lamenting what was lost during the Obama years, this book also contains rhapsodies to Mose Allison, Keith Emerson, Sam Greenlee, Michio Kushi, Rachel Rosenthal and Gil Scott-Heron. There are essays on home sweet home (The Devil’s Real Estate Dictionary), online dating (Codebreaker), a scary/fun wooden roller coaster which doubles as a prison for war criminals (I Am the Rhombus), a punny play on Watergate by way of Shakespeare (McDick) and a review of Brian De Palma’s American history lesson Blow Out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781329706743

Book preview

Chapter 1

The More Effective Evil

The best American tools aren’t made by Porter-Cable — they’re made by Goldman Sachs.

What can you say about a US president who inherits two wars, starts five others and wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his trouble?

You could say that he probably also promises the most transparent administration ever and then prosecutes more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined.

He’s probably a constitutional scholar who rails against climate change deniers and then opens up the Arctic Ocean for drilling (twice), fracks harder than Bush and Cheney, bails out the justly failing nuclear power industry and unleashes the fury of the police state on Dakota Access Pipeline protesters.

Barack Obama was so talented that, within 18 months of delivering a supposed fence-mending speech to the Arab world in Cairo, he released the National Endowment for Demockracy Spring onto the region and turned it into a divide and conquer bloodbath for the United States of Israel, leaving in his wake the smoking ruins and refugees of Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.

Maybe Obama was a natural or maybe Harvard teaches classes on how to euthanize the antiwar movement, anesthetize the historically most progressive element of the US working class (blacks) and how to calmly preside over the greatest inequality in wealth since the Great Depression. When Obama waved his magic drone joystick wand, Bush’s tax cuts became permanent and black misleaders began supporting school privatization.

Always breaking new ground, Obama became the first Democratic president to put Social Security cuts on the table, explaining that he wanted to put your grandma on Friskies so that someday, maybe, your children could have Fancy Feast. And that became his dismayed supporters’ war cry: Please, Barack, take Friskies off the table!

Late in Obama’s second presidency Wikileaks released the Podesta emails which showed that Obama’s entire cabinet was selected by Citigroup on October 6, 2008 — this explained why no banks were prosecuted for fraudulent NINJA loans (No Income No Job or Assets) made to unqualified homebuyers.

Five million families got kicked out of their homes and the bailed out banks bought them up for pennies on the dollar. In response to multi trillion-dollar bailouts and the gangster banksters divvying up part of the taxpayer loot for Christmas bonuses, Occupy Wall Street formed  — which Obama’s police state goons infiltrated before its first event and destroyed in six months.

Obama’s greatest achievement was having 75% of the American people begging for single-payer health insurance, Democratic majorities in both houses of the US Congress and being able to figure out a way to not give Americans Medicare for All or even a public option while bestowing a $1 trillion bailout to the parasitical sickness-care extortionists who most Americans hate with a passion.

His plan left 30 million Americans completely uninsured and 40 million others underinsured. The affordable plans turned out to be like not having medical coverage at all as they often came equipped to battle the sick with $7,000 deductibles, high co-pays and limited choices about providers. And if you didn’t accept his defective gift you had to pay a $975 penalty at tax time.

Hovering over the proletarian carrion was/is an exquisitely planned wealth extraction system where unprofitable do no harm prevention is off the table in favor of highly profitable pharma-centric treatment.

The cherry on top for the Obama years: his racist right wing frenemies — screaming inanities about his birth certificate while he burned down Southwest Asia and North Africa, and gave away the country to Wall Street (which the frenemies totally approve of) — wouldn’t take the best Republican president they ever had as yes for an answer.

****

The genesis of this book was what I thought of as the cruel summer of 2012 when two heavyweight eviscerators of the American empire — Alexander Cockburn and Gore Vidal — ceased counterpunching and goring within ten days of each other, followed up two weeks later by South African police killing 34 striking miners and injuring 78 others.

The Marikana miners massacre was particularly heinous with police shooting unarmed strikers in the back and running over others with police vehicles. Lonmin mine board director Cyril Ramaphosa — the current President of South Africa — is believed to have given the order to shoot. Ramaphosa, former head of the National Union of Mineworkers, became a multimillionaire oligarch after apartheid and, along with Nelson Mandela, sold out the South African working class to business interests.

The devolution of perceived leftists, particularly ones of color, into repressive enforcers for capitalism and getting handsomely rewarded, epitomized everything wrong with the Obama years. These sellouts could be heads of state like Ramaphosa or Obama or US mayors, civil rights leaders or Congressional Black Caucus members.

After the deaths of Cockburn and Vidal the floodgates opened with the demise of other astute empire critics (Sam Greenlee, Gabriel Kolko, Eduardo Galeano, the Socialist Labor Party’s newspaper The People), noble reformers (George McGovern, Chokwe Lumumba, Otis Pike) and heroic empire resisters (Hugo Chavez, Berta Caceres, Fidel Castro.)

Triumphalist killings (Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, Anwar al-Walaki), Israel’s US-supported Gaza massacres and Obama’s bombings of weddings and funerals mirrored mass shootings (Fort Hood, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Orlando) and the ever louder beating of the tell-tale heart of racist police killings (Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Michael Brown Jr., Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray.) Some of the mass shootings (Baton Rouge, Dallas, San Bernardino, Chattanooga) were in direct retaliation for police killings of blacks and US military massacres overseas.

The Commiserator-in-Chief offered meaningless thoughts and prayers but never any accountability, personal or national self-reflection, or changes in his own policies. (Barackodile tears are tears shed by America’s historic first black president about dead, generally white, American children gunned down in massacres while he simultaneously murders brown-skinned children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, etc.)

Obama was the fake-folksy condescending last nail in the 1960s coffin — the real hope and change — an undertaker who cleaned up the messes of the Bush-Cheney crime family and buried the anti war movement, black militancy, Occupy Wall Street, habeas corpus, the 3rd Amendment, government whistleblowers, the Employee Free Choice Act, Medicare for All and the prosecution of spying telecoms, corrupt bankers and CIA torturers.

In the beginning, Barack Obalmer was supposed to be just what the ruling class spin doctors ordered to make the decomposing undead empire more appealing to the global south.

In the end, he replaced unpopular land invasions with lower profile death squads, drone assassinations, proxy terrorist armies and punishing sanctions. He banned torture, kept rendition (so US allies could do the torturing) and failed to close Guantanamo but proudly didn’t add to its inmates as terrorism suspects were no longer arrested but simply murdered – and 90% of people killed in his drone wars were innocent civilians. He was a supreme killer of hope and change.

In hindsight his presidencies made perfect sense: drill and frack the US in order to achieve energy independence instead of relying on the Middle East. Move the money, arms and military personnel further east to speed up the encirclement of Russia and China with military bases and bioweapons labs — the so-called pivot to Asia — throwing millions under the bus in the collateral damage nations of Ukraine, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan and Malaysia, soon to be joined by Taiwan, Germany and all of Europe.

Most of these essays were written as the events happened and a few in the present, looking back. Besides obitchuaries on what was lost during the Obama years, there are also rhapsodies on under-known (but not underrated) people who have brought me enjoyment and inspiration.

This book is dedicated to the late great Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report who maintained that Barack Obama wasn’t the lesser evil but the more effective evil.

For Glen’s invaluable insights, inestimable integrity, biting wit and dedication to the eventual triumph of the working class majority, get the posthumously published collection of his writings The Black Agenda.

Power to the people!

Chapter 2

Timeline

2008

10/6/2008  — Citigroup chooses Obama’s cabinet, revealed by Wikileaks on 10/7/2016 in the Podesta emails

12/27/2008-1/18/2009 — Israel kills 1,400 Gazans — Obama silent

2009

1/1/2009  — police kill Oscar Grant in Oakland, California

1/13/2009 — actor Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner, dies

4/16/2009 — Obama announces he won’t prosecute CIA torturers

6/4/2009 — Obama’s Cairo speech: unbreakable bond with Israel

6/28/2009 — US-backed Honduran military coup

12/10/2009 — Obama’s Nobel War Prize acceptance speech

2010

1/21/2010 — US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision

2/16/2010 — $1 trillion bailout of nuclear power industry

3/23/2010 — $1 trillion bailout of health insurance industry

3/31/2010 — Obama opens up the Arctic Ocean to drilling

4/5/2010 — Wikileaks releases Collateral Murder video

4/9/2010 — film director Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Network) dies

4/20/2010 — Deepwater Horizon oil spill

5/31/2010 — Israeli commandos execute Turkish American Furkan Dogan on a humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza — Obama silent

7/25/2010 — Wikileaks releases Afghan War Diaries

10/22/2010 — Wikileaks releases Iraq War Logs

11/28/2010 — Wikileaks releases 250,000 diplomatic cables

12/1/2010 — Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully threatens Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa to stop making payments to Wikileaks

2011

2/15/2011 — Wisconsin protests to defend collective bargaining rights start, NATO destabilization of Libya begins

3/6/2011 — protests start in Daraa, Syria — unbeknownst to the public the CIA had already sent terrorist proxies from Libya to Daraa and weapons from its Jordan office to the Omari Mosque

3/18/2011 — takfiri fanatics kill both police and anti-government protesters in a false flag attack in Daraa, Syria, a tactic repeated in the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine

3/19/2011 — Russia and China disgracefully abstain as UNSC votes to bomb Libya, guaranteeing its destruction

4/14/2011 — New York Times Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings details US regime change plans known as Arab Spring

4/24/2011 — Wikileaks releases Guantanamo Files

5/2/2011 — Osama bin Laden killed

5/27/2011 —  musician/singer Gil Scott-Heron dies

7/16/2011 — Dutch demolition expert Danny Jowenko, who publicly called the World Trade Center bombings controlled demolitions, dies in a suspicious auto accident

7/24/2011 — 30th anniversary of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out

9/1/2011 — Socialist Labor Party’s The People newspaper ceases publication after 120 years

9/17/2011 — Occupy Wall Street begins — Obama likens the jobless, houseless movement to the Tea Party

9/30/2011 — Anwar al-Walaki killed, his 17-year-old son Abdulrahman — a US citizen — is killed 14 days later in a drone strike and his daughter, 8-year-old Nawar, is killed on 1/29/2017 in a US commando attack

10/20/2011 — Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi killed — cackling psychopath Hillary Clinton says, We came, we saw, he died.

11/16/2011 — Obama announces pivot to Asia (i.e., destroy China) at Australian Parliament

11/18/2011 — Obama re-legalizes horse slaughter for human consumption after Bush banned it

11/19/2011 — eco-feminist pioneer Marti Kheel dies

11/29/2011 — EPA approves cancer-causing chemicals for over 1,200 fracking wells, revealed in New York Times article on 7/13/2021

12/31/2011 — Obama signs into law indefinite detention without charge or trial, including of US citizens, voiding habeas corpus

2012

2/26/2012 — George Zimmerman kills Trayvon Martin

2/27/2012 — Wikileaks releases Global Intelligence Files

5/7/2012 — Vladimir Putin elected president of Russia

5/25/2012 — Obama launches the Orwellian Vietnam War Commemoration Project, a $65 million multi-year PR campaign whitewashing US war crimes against the people of Southeast Asia

5/29/2012 — in a ceremony of the dead, the master of war and surveillance, Wall Street bailouts and main street foreclosures, the deporter-in-chief of 2.5 million immigrants, hangs the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the necks of Bob Dylan, Madeleine Albright, Dolores Huerta and Shimon Peres (father of Israel’s nuclear weapons program) – Obomber stole Yes, we can (Si se pueda) from Huerta – empire burlesque indeed

6/19/2012 — Julian Assange enters Ecuadorian embassy

7/21/2012 — journalist/author Alexander Cockburn dies

7/31/2012 — novelist/essayist/playwright Gore Vidal dies

8/12/2012 — Defense Intelligence Agency document shows the US intends to use ISIS against the Syrian people

8/16/2012 — 34 striking South African miners killed by police

10/21/2012  — Sen. George McGovern dies

11/14-11/21/2012 — Israel kills 160 Gazans

12/10/2012 — CIA pro-torture film Zero Dark Thirty released

12/2012 — CIA begins Operation Timber Sycamore to overthrow Syria’s government, the largest CIA operation since Operation Cyclone

2013

3/5/2013 — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dies

4/15/2013 — Boston Marathon bombing

6/6/2013 — Edward Snowden discloses NSA spying

6/18/2013 — journalist Michael Hastings dies in suspicious auto accident

7/3/2013 — Egyptian President Morsi overthrown in US-bankrolled coup and replaced by CIA asset Abdel el-Sisi

7/27/2013 — Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History book released

7/30/2013 — Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning sentenced

9/7/2013 — Xi Jinping presents Belt and Road Initiative at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University

12/5/2013 — former South African President Nelson Mandela dies

12/13/2013 — Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland admits in address to the US-Ukraine Foundation that the US has spent $5 billion to overthrow Ukraine’s government

12/17/2013 — actor Peter O’Toole (The Stunt Man, The Ruling Class, Lawrence of Arabia, My Favorite Year) dies

2014

1/20/2014 — investigator of CIA crimes Rep. Otis Pike dies — his famed committee devolved to the chairmanship of CIA stooge and Russia-gater Adam Schiff

2/20/2014 — false flag sniper attack blamed on Ukrainian government (a la Daraa, Syria), killing 50 protesters and police in Kiev

3/21/2014 — 96% of Crimeans vote to rejoin Russia

4/12/2014 — New York Daily News article names the Rev. Al Sharpton as an FBI informant

4/25/2014 — Flint, Michigan water source changed, exposing 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels

5/19/2014 — novelist/poet Sam Greenlee, war historian Gabriel Kolko, Martin Luther King Jr. speechwriter Vincent Harding, die

7/8-8/26/2014 — Israel kills 2,300 Gazans

7/17/2014 — police kill Eric Garner

8/8/2014 — FBI agents raid the home of drone whistleblower Daniel Hale — in 2021 he’s sentenced to 45 months in prison

8/9/2014 — police kill Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri

10/19/2014 — journalist Serena Shim dies in auto accident

11/22/2014 — police kill 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland

12/28/2014 — macrobiotic practitioner Michio Kushi dies

2015

3/9/2015 — Obama sanctions Venezuela, leading to 40,000 deaths according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research

3/25/2015 — Saudi Arabia begins bombing Yemen — the US provides the Saudis with bombs, mid-air refueling of Saudi planes and satellite targeting information – and Yemeni weddings, funerals, markets and school buses are immediately hit

4/13/2015 — novelist Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins) dies

4/19/2015 — Baltimore police kill Freddie Gray

5/10/2015 — performance artist Rachel Rosenthal dies

8/11/2015 — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States released

8/18/2015 — Obama approves more Arctic drilling — on 11/29/2018 Obama brags at Rice University that oil and