Wall Street's takeover of the Obama administration is now complete. The mega-banks and their corporate allies control every economic policy position of consequence. Mr. Obama has moved rapidly since the November debacle to install business people where it counts most. Mr.William Daley from JP Morgan Chase as White House Chief of Staff. Mr. Gene Sperling from the Goldman Sachs payroll to be director of the National Economic Council. Eileen Rominger from Goldman Sachs named director of the SEC's Investment Management division. Even the National Security Advisor, Thomas Donilon, was executive vice president for law and policy at the disgraced Fannie Mae after serving as a corporate lobbyist with O'Melveny & Roberts. The keystone of the business friendly team was put in place on Friday. General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt will serve as chair of the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. That is the spot, under a different council name, previously held by Paul Volcker. Both he and his post now will be airbrushed out of Obama administration history to align the past with the inglorious future.
Mr. Obama last week obediently recited the Chamber of Commerce's liturgy about governmental regulation being the cause of what ails the American economy in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. This public oath of allegiance signaled his now admitted complicity with those who supposedly had been his opponents. The one example of alleged bad regulation he cites in the WSJ op-ed is something about saccharin and the environment. The prospect of our corporate moguls being released from the bonds of saccharin regulation doubtless has China's President Hu and his colleagues quaking in their well-tailored suits.
Let's make one thing perfectly clear. These actions were not imposed on Obama. They are not the inescapable outcome of political circumstances. He chose this path. It conforms to his behavior from the very start of his presidency. It was a newly-elected Obama who hand-picked Geithner and Summers. Who installed as his right-hand man Rahm Emanuel from the board of scandal-ridden Freddie Mac and deal-maker at Dresdner Kleinwort. Who declared at a press conference on the eve of his inauguration that he would not seek to repeal the Bush tax cuts but rather let them drain Treasury revenues until they expired, which of course he has conspired to prevent. Who met clandestinely with Big Pharma to cut a secret deal that ruled out the government's bargaining on drug prices. Who met clandestinely with health industry giants to cut a secret deal that ruled out the public option.
This is the same Obama who does not know the main provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935 -- as evinced on repeated occasions. Who put Social Security and Medicare on the rack by rigging his deficit commission with the appointment of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. The Obama who avowedly takes his inspiration from Ronald Reagan; who spent his holiday in Hawaii reading an account of how the Gipper's White House office was run for him. The Obama who has reserved his harshest and heartfelt words for attacks on progressives. Political expediency is not the reason for turning his back on his supporters and on his pledges. After all, spurning his constituents and kowtowing to the entrenched interests led to the biggest off-year disaster in American electoral history. In short, all the evidence is that an old-school "moderate" Republican occupies the White House.
So, what are liberals/progressives to do? They should begin by recognizing who they are and how they typically behave. Democrats generally see themselves as more "responsible" than Republicans. They worry about the consequences of their actions for the country, for our public institutions. They fret about being too assertive, about rupturing ties. Liberals are more "responsible" than conservative Democrats. They carry free-floating guilt for whatever goes wrong, or might go wrong. They hate the thought of hurting people. Self-labeled progressive Democrats are the kind of people that your mother wanted you to hang out with in high school -- short of Canadian exchange students being available. Faced with passionate and unscrupulous enemies, they are confused and uncomprehending. Just as if they accidentally found themselves in the midst of a Saturday night bar room brawl. Such brutal faces; such tortured souls. They wonder how these people became so maladjusted; how sad that their families didn't get the attention of a really good, caring social worker.
Faced with betrayal, they freeze at pronouncing the word, of thinking the thought, of feeling the emotion. They are easy marks for the upscale con man with the high-minded rhetoric. They see taking offense as itself somehow offensive. They shy away from accusing, from denouncing. So when Mr. Obama spits in their face week after week, they are stunned into denial. Some declare: Our Saviour is also a rainmaker -- a thousand blessings be upon him! Others turn the other cheek. A few instinctively reach for a handkerchief. The more imaginative suggest that he was really aiming at the Republicans, but he's under such great stress that he lost his aim. The truly original believe that it's all part of a clever strategy so ingenious that we poor mortals can't conceive of it. Mysterious are the ways of Our Saviour.
With relief they all reach for the ultimate non sequitur: "Think how much worse it would have been with McCain and Palin." Frank Rich of the New York Times writes seven columns about the Palin coven for everyone saying anything bad about Obama. And never two in a row of the latter -- that's one emotional upheaval too far. It's somehow "unfair." The McCain-Palin line has come back in vogue as liberal/progressives turn their bloodshot eyes to 2012. The New Realism is to take our place dutifully behind Mr. Barack Obama as responsible people must. Responsible people should not even think of doing otherwise. For that means those awful (albeit maladjusted) right-wing fanatics will take over the country. Of course, we have a duty to tell Mr. Obama that we think he's gone astray -- in some respects. But not too loudly, not in a way that could hurt his feelings. We must remember that he is all that stands between us and the Tea Partiers. Oh my gosh!
Meanwhile the hyenas across the aisle can barely contain their laughter. Just as they barely can keep a straight face as Barack Obama hides his unconditional surrender behind clichés about bipartisanship and compromise -- while putting on a stern countenance and turning his sword (fierce rhetoric) against those unspeakable purists whom he has just sold out -- lock, stock and barrel. It's like watching the Serengeti drama of predator and prey, except that there is a bizarre lead actor who plays both roles. And the antelope keep expecting the protection of this hybrid who now prefers to idle with the fangs at the watering hole.
What is to be done? Liberals' hopes have been dashed. The outlook is bleak -- only storm clouds on the horizon. Worse, our country's afflictions are fated to get worse. The Wall Street plutocracy is in control -- their power reinforced and reconfirmed. Their brothers in the business world are crowing. The poor are cut loose, middle America is squeezed, public services are under the knife. The country is in a time capsule hurtling crazily through the 1920s hell bent for the Gilded Age of the 1890s. We've lost; we've lost with barely a fight. We've lost again even when given the chance of a lifetime. All the pieces were in place to restore a decent society, to cast the discredited Republicans into political oblivion. A godsend became a curse. Our champion might as well be one of them. Deep down he is.
Our one remaining hope is that the chaotic disintegration of the American political system goes even further. That out of this maelstrom emerges someone with the fire and honest conviction to shed a sharp light on our national predicament; to generate a sense of outrage. After all, the turmoil already has thrown up the improbable Sarah Palin and the improbable Barack Obama -- the two figures who dominate our political life. Maybe, just maybe, a valiant soul is out there who is moved by more than his self promotion and self gratification.
As for Mr. Obama, the time has come to send a blunt message: You want to stay in the White House until January 2017? Then satisfy us liberals or you'll soon be finding out if Chicago is still your kind of town. And mean it.
"The meek shall inherit the earth" says the Good Book. If that were true, liberals/progressives would be first in line. But when might that day of reckoning come?
The Liberal Democratic Party of the United States of America
www.facebook.com/LDPUSA
Sign this petition at WWW.DEMOCRATZ.ORG if you want to get congress to enact a $10 an hour minimum wage, The Employee Free Choice act, a real prescription drug benefit for Medicare in part B, an End to 2 expensive wars, a single payer government health insurance plan, Tier 5 unemployment benefits extension, A social security COLA Payment, an end to tax cuts for the wealthy, an end to Republican filibusters and the women's freedom of choice act into law.
After you sign this petition Join the the facebook page at www.facebook.com/Sign.this to invite your friends to sign the petition.
I hereby propose that the intellectual community, those who consider themselves vanguard of ideas, opinions and articulation on public policies, assemble in an ongoing evolving directed online forum discussion on a model of future America as we the people envision it should be like. With one proviso --- the forum discussion should be targetted to provide a clear goal and guideline on what to do about the future of politics, economy, society in next 2years leading up to 2012 election, and next 10years of this decade about concerns of we the people on:--
1)Empire, republic, militarism, war and peace;
2)Liberty, justice, equality -- what do we mean?
3)progressivism, regressivism, nihilism, individualism, capitalism, corporatism, collectivism, socialism, populism, spiritualism, ...
Invite keynote panel speakers+writers in each area.
Form a 'sub-party' underneath the umbrella of the Democratic Party, much the same way Charlie Army formed the Tea Party underneath the umbrella of the Republican party.
I'd call it The Middle American Party, or the Middle American Patriotic Progressive Part (MAPPP) or MAP cubed, to emphasize the importance of the interest of the declining middle and working classes.
I suspect, while a large portion of Tea Partiers are not very smart or informed or are rabid racists who can't stand a black man being President, I think what fuels them the most is the decline of the middle class. Unfortunately for them the Tea Party was created by the wealthy, of the gullible non-wealth, for the wealthy. If there was a real party representing real Middle American interests, I think it could have some effect. The real problem is, nothing ever happens without money behind it. The Tea Party was founded by lobbyist money.
Who will fund MAP? {chrickets}
Sign the petition at http://www.democratz.org
And then, how the other, gave us an eloquent but unproved (and unknown) cipher of a candidate who said all the right things but who has, as those of us who paid attention knew he would, become merely the sugar that helps the bitter medicine of the class war go down.
Obama was vetted by the same powers that Hillary, dubya, and Bill were, the Try. _Lateral Commission and the Build. _erberg group. The bankers he has ceded his power to are proof that we now longer elect a president, we vote for a temporary renter in the white house who takes his orders from Wall Street. Obama was 'chosen' for us, and the MSM was complicit in his coronation. Notice how any one of the contenders with true progressive credentials were marginalized by the press right from the start.
Then how can Americans protest and complain when President Obama continues and expands on two multi-trillion dollar wars and occupations, distributes power to the powerful, distributes wealth to the super rich, while the American economy is deflating from credit bubble excesses, the American people are suffering from unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, healthcare crisis, crumbling infrastructure, disintegrating social safety net for the old, vanishing public education for the young, and exploding rates of incarceration for the social misfits? Nobody in America, no Americans have given the hired President a job description, and told the President that he cannot do that, or is not supposed to do that, ...
or YOU ARE FIRED, as the slick TV game show lures Americans into living vicariously on illusions and delusions.
THIS story, or one like it, should be the main story on the front page JUST so we could hear the still faithful try to debate it.
You might want to write a followup that explains why it is that so many, especially here on aitch pea, still support Obama so vocally and without reservation. There must be some way to explain the psychopathology of this self defeating insistence that all is well, when your article so forcefully shows that it is not.
These guys own the media, they can choose the candidates.
Of course, entrusting one's life and fate to Republicans would be like entrusting to Jack the Ripper.
Now if we could only get President Obama to use his left hand to move to the left, and quit compromising with the Right.
To those still preaching the "lesser evil" meme, to those still hoping President Obama will miraculously turn into the illusion we elected, to those who claim we have no other choice and cite past third party efforts as "failures" doomed only to further failure, to those who preach "pragmatism" and call those who disagree "naive" (and worse), to those who point out crumbs and call these things "victories", to those who counsel working to change the Democratic Party from within, to those who all but stick their fingers in their ears and sing "la-la-la" when exposed to the facts of President Obama's continuation--and expansion upon--G.W.'s most egregious Constitution-trampling and International Law-breaking behaviors as well as his most blatant corporatist Choices, to those who claim the Republicans have magically made him do things that don't even remotely involve Congress, to those who have given up and say it's already too late...
As someone who has fought for many, many decades to change the Democratic Party from within as it tilted ever more right and become ever more wholly corporate-owned, I used to preach much of what you preach. No More. The harsh reality is that Democratic Party has not only become filled with Republicans in Democratic Party clothing, it has also become filled with refugees from the Republican party when their own party slid over the crazy cliff.
Both parties now represent megacorporate interests. Not, The People, megacorporate global interests that really do not care if our nation survives. In fact, it would seem that they actively seek to destroy all pretense of democracy and turn all of us into serfs. This has nothing whatsover to do with being pro-business or anti-business. Small businesses--the true drivers of the real economy--are under siege every bit as much as working individuals. (One example: That "American" company CEO that President Obama just tapped to be an "economic advisor" is no more an "American" company than President Obama is a liberal or a socialist. Just check out GE's holdings and how much U.S. tax they've paid in recent years.)
It no longer matters if a Democratic Party politician wins--we will get a Republican, anyway.