Eric Zuesse

Greg Palast headlined at his site on August 7th, "How Barack Obama could end the Argentina debt crisis," and opened:

"The 'vulture' financier now threatening to devour Argentina can be stopped dead by a simple note to the courts from Barack Obama. But the president, while officially supporting Argentina, has not done this one thing that could save Buenos Aires from default. Obama could prevent vulture hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer from collecting a single penny from Argentina by invoking the long-established authority granted presidents by the US constitution's 'Separation of Powers' clause. Under the principle known as 'comity', Obama only need inform US federal judge Thomas Griesa that Singer's suit interferes with the president's sole authority to conduct foreign policy. Case dismissed."

Singer is a major funder of the Republican Party. Palast's report attributes this fact to Singer's trying to buy that Party's support in Singer’s duel against Argentina:

"Since taking on Argentina, Singer has unlocked his billion-dollar bank account, becoming the biggest donor to New York Republican causes. He is a founder of Restore Our Future, a billionaire boys club, channelling the funds of Bill Koch and other Richie Rich-kid Republicans into a fearsome war-chest dedicated to vicious political attack ads. And Singer recently gave $1m to Karl Rove's Crossroads operation, another political attack machine."

Palast implies that Obama is merely trying to induce Singer to throw his money to the Democratic Party instead of to the Republican Party. Palast says: "There's a price for crossing Singer. And, unlike the president of Argentina, Obama appears unwilling to pay it." Obama is doing this because he's afraid of "crossing Singer"?

But that's just nonsense. Obama isn't afraid that Singer will donate to Obama's political opponents. The Singer money, if that were the case, would supposedly be coming to the Democratic Party at this time when Obama is no longer running for any political office -- Obama's already in his final term of office. Political donations wouldn't be to his benefit anymore.

Furthermore, Singer isn't a Republican only after he became embroiled with Argentina. He has a long and deep history of funding not just the Republican Party but the Heritage Foundation and others of its far-right think tanks. Moreover, on 3 February 2012, Palast himself headlined "Romney's Billionaire Vulture," about "'The Vulture' Singer and why he needs to buy the White House." Oh, so Paul Singer needed Romney to win in order to be able to control the White House? Really? Obama was Singer’s enemy? So, why then was Singer the financial angel of Republican Rudolph Giuliani? That's before Obama's Presidency.

In fact, up through the end of 2013, Paul Singer had politically donated $7,909,427, of which 99.6% went to Republicans. And that record goes all the way back to 1990 if you click on "View all campaign finance data for Paul Singer" and download it.

Palast's hypothesis is simply absurd.

Palast's report continues:

"Obama's devastating hesitation is no surprise. It repeats the president's capitulation to Singer the last time they went mano a mano. It was 2009. Singer, through a brilliantly complex financial manoeuvre, took control of Delphi Automotive, the sole supplier of most of the auto parts needed by General Motors and Chrysler. Both auto firms were already in bankruptcy.

Singer and co-investors demanded the US Treasury pay them billions, including $350m ( 200m) in cash immediately, or -- as the Singer consortium threatened -- 'we'll shut you down'. They would cut off GM's parts. Literally.

GM and Chrysler, with no more than a couple of days' worth of parts to hand, would have shut down, permanently forced into liquidation.

Obama's negotiator, Treasury deputy Steven Rattner, called the vulture funds' demand 'extortion' -- a characterisation of Singer repeated last week by Argentina President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

But while Fernández declared 'I cannot as president submit the country to such extortion,' Obama submitted within days. Ultimately, the US Treasury quietly paid the Singer consortium a cool $12.9bn in cash and subsidies from the US Treasury's auto bailout fund.

Singer responded to Obama's largesse by quickly shutting down 25 of Delphi's 29 US auto parts plants, shifting 25,000 jobs to Asia. Singer's Elliott Management pocketed $1.29bn of which Singer personally garnered the lion's share."

What, then, really accounts for Obama's doing Singer's bidding? He does it because he supports Republican policies and did so even before he entered politics in 1996. As a black man in the era after Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, in which no black man could reasonably aspire to win Republican Presidential primaries, especially in the Southern states, and so he had no reasonable likelihood of being able to win the Republican Presidential nomination, he entered politics as a "Democrat," instead. It's what he had to do to be able to get to the top, and as an intelligent person he knew this; and, so, it's what he did.

All along, his aspiration was to win the White House and to move the American political center to the right, in the way that only a far-right "Democrat" can even possibly do.

No matter how conservative a "Democratic" office-holder is, no Republican contender for that office can possibly win the Republican Party's nomination to contest for it unless he's offering to Republican voters in Republican primaries policies that are more conservative than the incumbent Democrat's policies are. Consequently, only a conservative "Democrat" has the capacity to move the political center to the right. Similarly, only a liberal "Republican" (none of them exist) can move the center to the left.

American aristocrats who fund "Democrats" in Democratic primaries are therefore looking for a gifted politician who will move the political center to the right. Bill Clinton was one. Barack Obama is another. Hillary Clinton is another. (Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are even more conservative than was Bill Clinton.)

Barack Obama is the most effective Republican President since Ronald Reagan.

Obama isn't for sale. He is a committed fascist, an adherent to fascism. (Mussolini's other term for it was "corporationism.")

That's why Obama refused to do anything to support a public option in health insurance as soon as he won the Presidency in November 2008 -- though he had campaigned on the public option. That's why he appointed the aristocracy's drones, such as Timothy Geithner to run Treasury, and Lawrence Summers to run economics, and Eric Holder to run "Justice, and now such a far-right "Democratic" threesome at the FCC so that they're able to outvote the 2 Republican members on the 5-member FCC Board and end the open Internet, in a move that's so far rightwing that even the 2 Republicans on that Board voted against it.

And that's why Obama's "Justice" Department intensified Karl Rove's and Leura Canary's frame-up of Democratic Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, the most gifted Democratic politician in the South, and refused to free him from prison on the faked charges that George W. Bush's team had used to get Siegelman framed and convicted.

And that's why Obama is fighting like hell for the Koch brothers in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with Europe, to force the EU to weaken their anti-global-warming standards so as to allow Europe to import the Alberta Canada tar-sands oil of which the Koch brothers own around 40% and two other U.S. majors own a good chunk of the rest.

And that's why both of Obama's two Secretaries of State, Clinton and Kerry, rigged their Environmental Impact Statements on the Keystone XL Pipeline project so as to lie and say it would have virtually no impact on global warming, when that proposed Pipeline’s only major intended use would actually be to export those filthy oils into Europe.

And that's why, in a historically unparalleled recovery after an economic crash, wealth-inequality has soared after George W. Bush's economic crash, the opposite of the norm, such as was the enormous reduction of wealth-inequality after Herbert Hoover's economic crash.

Unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama is a committed fascist.

Face it, Greg Palast, and all other willfully blind liberals, who don't see what they'd rather not see, because it’s even uglier than what they allow themselves to see.

The only way forward for the Democratic Party, and for the United States, is for a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives to introduce the first impeachment resolution to remove Obama from the White House, using Democratic not Republican reasons for it and Democratic not Republican arguments for it, and then to challenge all of those Republicans who mouth their wanting to impeach Barack Obama to show their true colors and vote the way they had said they want to vote, or else to vote to keep Obama, the man they repeatedly damn, in office.

The result of that vote in the House, if it takes place prior to the November 2014 mid-term congressional elections, would be to upset the 6-to-1 odds that now are set, that Republicans will control both the Senate and the House in 2015 and 2016, and to make both houses of Congress be controlled instead by Democrats during President Joe Biden's brief reign, 2015 and 2016. Biden would then be splitting with Hillary Clinton the conservative vote in the Democratic primaries, and the lone progressive candidate in those Democratic Presidential primaries would win the Democratic Party's nomination and so the Presidency, and the catastrophe of the Republican Trojan Horse, Manchurian candidate, Republican-in-"Democratic"-sheep's-clothing Barack Obama's Presidency will become replaced by our having a real Democrat, in the mold of FDR, back again in the White House -- and along with a solidly Democratic Congress.

The vote for impeachment, if some Democrat in the House has the vision and the courage to introduce such a resolution, would be a majority vote for the resolution. It would then go the Senate, which would likewise majority-vote for it.

My analysis of the public-opinion polls relating to impeachment, now and during GWB's Presidency and also during Bill Clinton's, is that the public sentiment to remove this President is stronger than for either of those Presidents, and would be far stronger when the final congressional votes will be taken on the matter than was the case in 1998 regarding Bill Clinton.

And it would make a huge favorable impact on America's future, as well as on the world's future. But it's got to be done fast, if it's not already too late to start.

Barack Obama is now a deadweight to Democrats in Congress who are set to bear the blame from voters for policies that Obama and the Republicans in Congress have actually caused; and here would be the only opportunity for congressional Democrats finally to say: “Enough now, of rule by Obama and other Republicans! Elect me to fight them!”

Tell your Democratic Representative in Congress: Do it or else! Or else the Democratic Party dies and America will continue to be ruled, at the Presidential level, only by two conservative Parties.

Polls show that Obama has moved not only American politics but American public opinion to the right, except on "social" issues, which aren't critically important for the aristocracy anyway.

America’s movement into fascism needs to stop, now: and be reversed. This is the only way it can happen.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of Christ's Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity.