Todd M. Siebert: Presidents are actors for the oligarchy

“All the world‘s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” — William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act II Scene VII.

Awards for best performance by a male and female in 2016 are being polished and will be presented to two veteran actors who both have put in the performance of their lifetimes. I’m speaking of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Election 2016.

Not since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? have such great actors been in the same production. Virginia Woolf dealt with illusion and reality. Election 2016 focuses solely on an illusion.

The Clinton/Trump performance is all the more remarkable when you consider they have been close friends for decades and are members of America’s 1 Percent Club. They can stay in character and portray their concerns for everyday Americans as if they really felt them.

How is it possible for the ultra-rich and powerful that have spent a lifetime building their legacy to suddenly care about the American people? They don’t. They sell themselves to the highest bidder.

One needs to look no further than the 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama. For millions he was the pulse of change; the constitutional scholar who promised to smooth relations between blacks and whites and with the cooperation of congress enact policies that would rebuild the American economy.

Instead there is a president that has trampled on the Constitution, usurped powers to a degree greater than any peacetime president, acted with extreme hubris in dealing with congress and brought forth the worst economic recovery of any president since the Great Depression.

Between 2009 and 2012, overall income per family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren’t shared evenly. Real income surged by 34.7 percent for the top one percent while the bottom 99 percent saw a meager 0.8 percent gain. In the wake of the mortgage crisis — the period between 2007 and 2009 — almost 9 million jobs were lost.

During Obama’s first year in office the average U.S. household lost almost $100,000 from its property and retirement portfolio values combined. Eleven million home buyers were slammed by foreclosures from 2008 to mid-2012. As a result, millions of the 99 percenters lost everything; homes, cars, jobs and, worst of all, any sense of worth that even a small savings account would provide.

No segment was hit harder than the black community, 95 percent of whom voted for Obama in 2008. Today we have an economy worse than when Jimmy Carter gave what became his “malaise speech” in 1979.

Black Lives Matter is a distraction for the oligarchs

Nowhere has Obama’s failures been more tragic than the brewing race war between blacks and whites.

But Obama has been an outstanding President to one group — his bosses; the powerful oligarchy whose self-interests are in growing their wealth and power regardless of the social costs.

Obama has even put a target on the back of the nation’s police forces by ginning up rage in the impoverished black community.

Obama has ignored the real needs of African Americans, who have fallen further into poverty during his eight years in office. To address this, Obama has deflected blame away from himself onto what he has convinced so many blacks to be true, systemic racism in the United States that seems both dreadful (dead protestors and police officers) and more ridiculous (NFL football quarterback’s Colin Kaepernick and other athletes refusal to stand for the National Anthem as a protest against “white power”).

Throwing gasoline on race hatreds is fodder for network news channels that offer daily updates to travesties real or imagined. Like Obama, the media serves the same masters, the richest 1 percent. Left standing by the roadside is the 99 percenters, black and white, who have no political power and whose economic needs are ignored.

If elected, Clinton will continue Obama’s betrayal of the 99 percent. She is part of the 1 percent. She and husband and former President Bill Clinton have an estimated net worth of $111 million.

In 1976, the total amount of money certified for candidates and conventions was $71 million. Between January 2015 and August 2016 Hillary Clinton raised $517 million, 72 percent of which was campaign donations and 28 percent was from Super PACs. Clinton’s number one backer is the securities and investment industry which through September 2016 gave her $47.6 million. Soros Fund Management alone has contributed more than $7 million. George Soros has infinitely more influence than you or I.

Obama received a then-record $44.3 million in 2008 from the “finance, insurance and real estate” sector. That was a lot of money, but Obama paid them back like a runaway slot machine.

This from Forbes, July 14, 2015:

Most people think that the big bank bailout was the $700 billion that the treasury department used to save the banks during the financial crash in September of 2008. But this is a long way from the truth because the bailout is still ongoing. The Special Inspector General for TARP summary of the bailout says that the total commitment of government is $16.8 trillion dollars with the $4.6 trillion already paid out. Yes, it was trillions not billions and the banks are now larger and still too big to fail.

As of July 21, 2016, Clinton had raised $264.4 million, while Trump had raised $89 million. Even a billionaire like Trump needs financial help to become president of the United States.

The United States has become exactly what the Wise Men (President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Republican Senator Barry Goldwater) warned of, an oligarchy. In 1987 Goldwater said:

“The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of constitutional liberty, an independent legislature free from any influence other than that of the people.”

By coincidence, Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street was released that same year. It pulled back the sheets on American enterprise and showed it for all of its ugliness, though few if any saw it as a harbinger.

In the climax, the rich and corrupt antagonist Gordon Gekko explains the world to his despondent prodigy Bud Fox:

The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip (sic). We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy?

I started with, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now I ask you: who’s Afraid of Hillary Clinton?

Yours in good times and bad,

— John Myers

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