meet the new boss

The election of Barack Obama ushers in a new era of racial harmony. It shows that anyone who goes to the right university and complies with the will of the right vested interests can rise up all the way to representing those vested interests.

Just as the elevation of Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell to the previously white enclave of US war criminals eradicated racism in government, so Obama's election opens up new realms of opportunity for people of colour.

Will his position as head of state bring forth an American apology for slavery and the African holocaust, paving the way to reparations from the great American wealth accrued from the free labour and plundered resources?

Or will he be continuing it?

These days it's considered ugly to have your slaves chained up in your back yard. It's far more tasteful - and even less responsibility - to squirrel them away in an Asian sweatshop, an African plantation or a South American mine, and just sit back and watch that wealth flow to you. The job of American President is to maximise that flow.

As Timothy Garton Ash notes of Obama

His proclaimed purpose is "to make this century the next American century". If George W Bush said that, we from the rest of the world might regard it as rank nationalist arrogance. Because it's Obama, we somehow accept it.

His first major appointment is his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. The guy who strongarmed support to get Clinton's sign-up to the North American Free Trade Agreement into law, a major pillar of America's entrenching of globalisation, concentrating the labour and resources of the world in the hands of its richest nations and, within those nations, in the hands of its richest citizens.

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I have this feeling that whoever is elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what you promise on the campaign trail - blahblahblah - when you win, you go into this smoke-filled room with the twelve industrialist capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there.

And you're in this smoky room, and this little film screen comes down and a big guy with a cigar goes, "Roll the film."

And it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before, that looks suspiciously like it's from the grassy knoll.

And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, "Any questions?"

"Er, just what my agenda is"

- Bill Hicks