Politics: Nationalism and Corruption

White Nationalism and Corporate Corruption in the Age of Obama

Republicans have once again shown their dexterity and willingness to do anything and everything to cling on to power. Indeed hail to the Grand Old Party (Elephants) who are discipline with their messages and resolute in their convictions for the furtherance of corporate corruption/domination and inequality in our national and global social and economic polity. They have certainly bastardized the Democrats in the just concluded midterm elections with the perfect tide and/or message of the great recession and our spineless Commander in Chief who acquiesced to the conservatives on many occasions. President Obama and the Democrats are clamoring for life support and have not begun to go through the stages of grief. The irony is that the President and his party that often want to be “Republican lite or diet-GOP” could not have made things anymore easier for the current whirlwind of victory that the Republican party and their siblings the Tea party are celebrating.

            President Barack Obama seemed oblivious about the reality that it was progressives who were disillusioned with the President Bush and Vice President Cheney eight year administrations that propelled him into the white house in 2008. These “professional left” like the white house christened them, were the ones that organized a cynical society to take a chance on Mr. Obama. The coalition of young progressive Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caucasians, and elderly African Americans voters became the springboard for the change we thought we could believe in. However, the Democratic politicians quickly took the rugs from under the legs of these constituencies who made far reaching sacrifices and investiture in voting for the Obama administration. Instead of heeding to the demands of the left, the President decided to court and gratify the right. On January 13^th 2009 the newly elected president Obama hastily embarked on an appeasement tour of the just defeated conservative media luminaries. The President went to the house of George Will in Chevy Chase Maryland to dine with the same neo-conservative figures that supported and became the mouthpiece for the Bush and Cheney cowboy policies.

            Consequently while other national capitals around the world were busy preparing indictments against the President Bush and Vice-President Cheney war criminal team, the Obama administrations sort to shield them from internal and/or external accountability and prosecutions. Hence, President Obama became a defender of war criminals, torture, American hegemony, and our patriarchy structures. Obama single-handedly attempted to exonerate the previous regime from their illegal invasion of a sovereign country that resulted in the mass deaths of thousands of innocent civilians half way around the world in the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq. President Obama restricted Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to seek some modicum of justice for the voiceless.

            Interestingly, these acts of unprincipled cowardice by President Obama enabled the opposition that had lost a historic election to begin their strategy of mass antagonism. Our so-called “socialist” Mr. Obama went on to further alienate the progressives and independents while he played “footsie” with Wall Street by granting them their request to appoint Professor Lawrence Summers as the white house director for the National Economic Council (NEC) and Mr. Timothy Geithner the Secretary of the Treasury. Progressive economist like noble laureates Professor Paul Krugman and Professor Joseph Stiglitz were bypassed by the new administration.

Thus the banks were recapitalized with taxpayers’ monies and nobody in government thought it was a decent idea to force them into signing memoranda of understand and/or contracts with regards to financial reforms. The new president continue the same unconditional corporate hangouts that began in the Bush administration under former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson. For example Citigroup went from near collapse to been able to purchase Chevy Chase bank in Maryland with some of the $300 billion government guarantee bailout funds. Hence Citibank, Bank of America, and other banks forced students with loans and homeowners with mortgages into bankruptcy and foreclosures respectively after they received taxpayers sponsored monies. President Obama in his unrealistic bid to please all sides went on to exacerbate the problems of the lower and middle income individuals and/or families who were loosing their jobs and homes in quick succession.          

However, the Republicans love them or hate them were able to come up with a well oiled and effective message that used the growing economic crises and their support for white hegemony as a rallying cry to egg on conservatives and some independents. The Tea Party sub-set of the Republican Party demanded their country back from the “Socialist African Witchdoctor Nazis Indonesian Muslim African-American Nationalist Chicagoan Gangster Hawaiian Commy.” They seduced and intimidated the media into granting them nonstop coverage. In fairness the Obama administration and the Democratic Party did not respond to them with any substantive public campaign because the battle was already lost. Our corporate owned and sponsored media that cheered on as President Bush and Vice President Cheney swindled us into an unprovoked war in Iraq became accessories to the Tea Party zealots like Sarah Palin.    

Invariably, the Republican Party and Tea Party who denied and negated the Americans that voted in 2008 are now lecturing us that indeed the “true Americans” have spoken. The same personalities that did not recognize the masses that voted on November 4th 2008 during the United States 56^th quadrennial elections and those (2million strong) that came to Washington DC on January 20^th 2009 for the President Obama inauguration ceremonies from all over the country and the world. Republicans and Tea baggers want us to give credence to a mid-term election in which about 30million Americans who voted in the 2008 general elections did not bother to show up. But then again the Republican Party and the Tea Party folks present with hubris that could be summed up as the Audacity of Spin and Misinformation. They would do anything to keep a government ineffective in order to continue their self-fulfilling prophecies (that the government is the problem) and assume roles as the problem solvers while conveniently negating their roles in the hemorrhaging process.                     

Nnamdi Frank Akwada, MSW, BA, Community Activist
Masters of Social Work (2010)
University of Maryland Baltimore
Health Specialization
Management and Community Organization/Clinical Concentration
University Student Government Association
Chief of Public Relations, 2009-2010
Social Work Community Outreach Service-
Maryland Community Fellow Intern 2009-2010
Bachelors in Criminology and Criminal Justice (2001)
University of Maryland College Park