At the presidential news conference earlier this week, Barack Obama soberly dismissed his Republican torturers in a way that reminded old White House watchers of President Harry Truman who once took to a campaign train to whistle-stop across the country, ridiculing his "do-nothing" adversaries in the Congress.
Of course, there always will be missing legislators to alibi that their absence from Washington is necessitated by the urgent need to visit their families or otherwise keep in touch with their contributors in an approaching election year. It used to be called milking the cow.
This year, the Republicans, who aren't running for president, are pre-occupied with finding ways to rail against Medicare and other social programs. That prompted the president to sarcastically challenge the Republicans to stop protecting their fat cats' tax privileges. He ticked off owners of corporate jets, who pocket an estimated three billion dollars over 10 years, and hedge fund managers whose oil and gas tax credits net $21 billion. More than a week ago when he unveiled plans for a defense budget build-down that's been on many arms control experts' minds for more than a year.
Professor Gordon Adams, a veteran scholar who has studied defense budgets and arms control for a generation at American University in Washington D.C., wrote recently in the Washington Post that the president's proposal is to "reduce the projected [U.S. national security] budget by $400 billion over the next 12 years."
As Adams explained it, the reduction "is being driven by concerns over deficits, debt and a declining interest in having the United States act as a global cop." That's what Americans want to hear in an era of hard times: Halting the outflow of U.S. dollars before more of the U.S. treasury is sucked dry in part by the idealistic notion of subsidizing democracies in parts of the world that clearly demonstrate they do not have the stomach, the experience or the will for it.
Faced with devastating unemployment, saddled with bills to pay, bankruptcies or mortgages to cope with and medical bills or illnesses to confront, it does not take much brain power to realize that the country is being exhausted, demoralized, and its national spirit sapped by deficit spending.
Americans are desperate for change. They hunger for their imagination to be aroused and their can-do energy to find its way back into the country's bloodstream. If anyone can do that, it would seem to be Barack Obama in much the same way as he demonstrated it in Chicago's Lincoln Park and at the Democratic National Convention Center three years ago when he inspired the nation and accepted the nomination for President.
But he needs to bark or campaign once again, to call the nation to rally to his side, and it can't be done when so many Americans have been jobless for more than a year, when families are being forced from their homes and unfortunate children are facing the pressures of starvation and homelessness. Is this America? Of course not. At least it's not the America I remember from my days of growing up in three different foster homes during the Great Depression.
There's little doubt that the challenge is up to the president. He has it in his will and
capacity to energize the Democrats and independents by demanding that the Republicans abandon their gospel of tax cuts for the rich and hard times for everyone else. The GOP reveres them like the Holy Grail, which has to be put to rest once and for all. Otherwise, it will come down to class warfare which is nothing less than an obscenity.
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Having been relieved of all equity that wasn't nailed down by the banksters during this entire period of financial firestorm, and then watching helplessly as the perpetrators lined up at the Treasury's payout window to receive their reward, the American people have been told repeatedly that their problem was deficit spending, not the difficulties that arise when a person wakes up in a back alley with a big headache and his pockets turned out after having been rolled. Why?
The American business interest is sitting out this economy, pouring their billions into commodity and currency gambles. Deficit spending in such times as these ought to be inevitable when there are no jobs on offer, because the government of necessity can thereby become the 'spender of last resort', providing work opportunity for a citizenry that other wise can find none.
Capitalism is a dynamic fluctuating system, as by design. In an environment defined by peaks and troughs, why are the troughs so unexpected by those who should know they're coming?
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Unfortunately, the president is not up to the challenge. Under the best light, he's a well-meaning but inexperienced man who doesn't know what he's doing, and dozens of advisors giving him conflicting advice don't help matters.
But that's just one problem. Would it be that different if any other Democrat were president? No, and the reason it wouldn't is that the Democrats have stopped believing in their philosophy. Oh, they make a show of fighting the Republicans over tax cuts and ending unemployment benefits, but the sprit is not there. In the back of their minds, there's that little doubting voice saying, "But what if the Republicans are correct?" And one other problem is that neither party truly represents the people of America. Both are hopelessly dependent on the Corporatocracy (as is our Supreme Court now, apparently). I wish I could see a way out, but I don't.
What the heLL happened?
It's not funny because it's so revealing of seriously diminished capacity. But it still gives me a chuckle anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3p9y_OEAdc
The last several presidents have done the same thing. They've all hidden travel costs by doing "official" business on occasions where a fund raiser is held. Most of the time, the president's party reimburses the costs of security and transportation. If you think only Obama has done fund raisers while in office, you need to do a lot of studying to do.
The kind of change we need is far more basic, and much deeper.
What we need is change that will establish government that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.
To establish that, we must advance beyond this juvenile competition for the throne.
In other words, we must render the partisan political economic system obsolete, because it is divisive and corrupt.
See http://messenger.cjcmp.org/newdeclaration.html
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That's what we all USED to think.
But it turns out that Obama is too much of an incrementalist, in an age that requires much more than incremental change.
What we need is a progressive analog to Ronald Reagan - rightly revered by those on the right for being willing to conceive of and then implement a bold, new vision of less liberal government - breaking a cycle of the prior sixty years.
I'm not saying Reagan was right - or that Reaganomics ultimately made any sense. But he was a big picture chief executive who made a huge difference in the body politic - and had a great team to bring his vision to fruition, more often than not.
I'm very sad to say that Obama just doesn't look like that guy, the way he did three short years ago. We need change...and we've gotten spare change instead. The big combines - pharma, insurance, military-industrial, Wall St, big oil - are still running the game.