By: Jim Hoover

Princeton University professor, Cornel West, is bitterly disappointed in Barack Obama. Like many of us, he bought the egalitarian rhetoric Obama used doing the campaign and fought for his election. Now like many of us, he feels betrayed.

“The system is rigged against poor and working people and Obama is the head of it,” professor West said in a speech last year.

Obama has, in effect, already declared the corporate rich winners in their war against the middle class. Before long, there will be no “middle class”. The war will be against the lower 98% income levels. Why? Because that is where plutocrats are driving us, and there is no political force with the guts to fight for the common folk and not enough money to fight against the Supreme-Court-blessed billions in corporate funds that will bury those campaigning for the people.

Obama has demonstrated his choice is for the rich. Thus plutocratic war against the people is going beyond incremental. The result will be more polarization, more political unrest and perhaps even more violence among the radical fringes on both the right and the left. The Sovereign Citizens already claim to have 300,000 representing the anti-government right.

People will begin to realize – too late – that government has sold them out to rich interests. Taking to the streets will be the only path to being heard by a leadership that is deaf to the common good. State Republican leaders, having no national Democratic opposition, are free to pick the pockets of the middle class.

Thus the pace of plutocratic tyranny has quickened, represented by the bold anti-education, anti-union, pro-private-industry moves of Republican leadership in Republican majority states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

The tactics are fascist. They range from arbitrary takeover of duly elected local governments (in Michigan already), to strong-arm takeover of public property (in Wisconsin) by large corporations, to legislation curtailing rights for those likely to vote Democrat — in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, for example.

Deceived voters, many unemployed, many looking for opportunity, and many angry, swept in complete Republican majorities (governor and legislature) in 21 states. These are the states with the radical anti-people agendas. Five more states have Republican-controlled legislatures.

We were all deceived, abused and wronged by the corporate elite, a condition that has become more oppressive through the last 2 decades. We thought that Barack Obama was the crusader that would represent our interests. We were wrong.

Cornel West asks what we all should be asking right now:

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place? If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.”

This is the message that could have buffeted the greed and power lust of the rich after they nearly took the global economy down. But Obama has only emboldened them, supporting or acquiescing to their actions, their propaganda and their media of deception.

The problem now is that people have no champions on either side of the political fence.

We have the choice of complete corporate lackeys on the Republican side or compromised Democrats on the other.

If we choose the first, we might as well surrender now.

By choosing Democrats, we can hope to hold our own.