Finian Cunningham: The US Dictatorship and its White House Servant "President"

If there is one thing that the office of President Obama demonstrates, it is that democracy does not exist in the United States. For many people, the fact that the 44th president is the first black man to preside over the white house, with its American colonial style architecture, is a tribute to the triumph of US democracy, but many other telling facts indicate that Obama is merely a figurehead of an unelected government in the US. This unelected power of corporate elites - commercial, financial, and military governs with the same core policies, regardless of who is sitting in the White House. Whether these policies are on social, economic or foreign matters, the elected president must obey the direction ordained by the unelected elite. That kind of untrammeled power structure conforms more closely in practice to dictatorship, NOT democracy: As Michael Hudson and Ellen Brown reveal in their analyses of the US budget debacle, Obama is pathetically doing the bidding of Wall Street, much like an errand boy. Brown writes: "The debt crisis was created, NOT by a social safety net, bought and paid for by the taxpayers, but by a banking system taken over by Wall Street gamblers. The gamblers lost their bets and were bailed out at the expense of the taxpayers, and if anyone should be held to account, it is these gamblers. "The debt ceiling crisis is a manufactured one, engineered to extort concessions that will lock the middle class in debt peonage for decades to come. Congress is empowered by the Constitution to issue the money it needs to pay its debts." Obama's servile toeing of Wall Street's line is NOT the behavior of a free leader boldly defending the interests of the people and the greater good. Rather, his behavior is that of one doing what he is told to do, and is doing it with grateful deference. In this way, of course, Obama is hardly different from his predecessors, but the difference is just how blatant the White House now appears to function as a mere tool of the rich and powerful elite.