Hyde Park Dreams Forgotten: Obama, Jeffrey Immelt, and Relationships of Self-Interest

You probably don't remember the July 30, 2008 NYT article, "Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart". This fawning profile of the new political celebrity depicted an idealistic young lawyer above petty careerism, taking the path less taken as a humble, dedicated teacher at The University of Chicago en route to his Cinderella emergence on the national stage. Take a sip of that old syrupy reporting, just for nostalgia's sake:

Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status.

Standing in his favorite classroom in the austere main building, sharp-witted students looming above him, Mr. Obama refined his public speaking style, his debating abilities, his beliefs.

The article was complete with an image, supplied by the campaign, of Obama drawing a diagram on a lesson on the dynamics of power, and demonstrating that political power is more the product of underlying financial interests than true democratic will. The implication was supposed to be that he's aware of this state of affairs, and is something different:

If Fakenation ever comes to terms with itself, this image will have to go down as one of the most ironic pieces of propaganda ever supplied to the public, right up there with Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner proudly inaugurating the new state of endless civil chaos in the Middle East.  

You can, of course, draw several nearly identical diagrams to describe relationships involving the Obama administration. Either the law professor sold out, or he was actually mastering this system while pretending to campaign against it. We leave it to you to decide.

Though you won't see them on cable television any time soon, these hypothetical diagrams can be quite easily created using information that's readily available to the public. Take, for instance, the White House's relationship with just one powerful individual, Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE and prominent Obama apparatchik:

This web of relationships is entirely in public view, yet it is only spoken of in piecemeal terms, as nobody wants to put the dots together, least of all the fake opposition party, which would sooner die than be forced to talk about actual issues like this, as this would mean exposing their own corruption in the web. But it doesn't take more than a few Google searches to establish all this: 

• GE was a major contributor to the 2008 Obama campaign.
• Jeffrey Immelt was then appointed to a board that makes regulation recommendations, which is to say, rules to drive the competition out of business.
• GE, during the period of Immelt's tenure at the White House, owned 49 percent of MSNBC, meaning that the station was effectively reporting on itself.
• The Treasury Department rewarded GE with an effective zero percent tax rate, and, indeed, with positive subsidies. 

We at Fakenation know that this kind of mafia behavior has long been the norm in American politics, across both parties. However, Obama is the first president pictured drawing it out in diagram form, as if to mock us by showing us he knows just how the game is played. That's a special kind of fakery, an unprecendented level of utter disdain for the intelligence of the average American, who is supposed to drink this swill uncritically.  Don't expect to catch an analysis on MSNBC.