The new President has lots of promises to keep.
The Oval Office race this year cost a tad over One Billion Dollars, roughly half of it from each camp. Maybe Obama spent a bit more than half a billion. Maybe the split was 60/40.
The split isn't what matters.
What matters is that most of that billion came from private and corporate donors. They paid for the race from start to finish. It was largely a private investment.
Everybody is free to vote. Only people with money to spare get to decide whom may be considered by voters.
Americans call this normal. Imagine that!
In a country where hundreds of billions followed by further hundreds of billions are available completely off budget, completely borrowed from the next generation for wars, for bank bailouts, for subsidizing the airline and auto industries, in a country where the national debt increased by a full trillion dollars during 23 days in October -- our selection of political leaders remain almost exclusively the private concern of wealthy investors and corporations.
Without a half billion dollars, no candidate gets anywhere near the Oval Office. Without promises as to policies and perspectives, that half billion is not forthcoming. The bargain is implicit.
One tenth of one percent of the money thrown into the black hole of bank bailouts would pay for completely free, public, open elections where fresh ideas could be heard and judged. The public could hear from parties not promoted out of corporate boardrooms, but promoted out of the streets and fields of our nation.
But no. Government is private property. You need enormous, private financial backing to even be considered, much less vetted, much less run a serious campaign, much less win office.
Mountains of money, all the way.
So, Obama has lots of promises to keep. His policies and perspectives have long since been agreed upon among the people who paid his ticket. The same would be true of McCain if he had won. It is just the way a private matter like selecting candidates is done in America.
Obama's actions as a Senator --
joining his Democratic colleagues in failing to stop or even effectively protest the war crimes of the Bush Administration,
actively funding them instead,
actively legalizing them after the fact,
voting to keep the Patriot Act above the Constitution,
refusing to pursue universal health care in favor of rewarding private insurers instead,
calling for a bigger war in Afghanistan,
threatening Iran,
and supporting the criminal swindle known as the Wall Street bailout --
give plenty of indication that his goals are to sustain the American Empire, at whatever cost to the American nation, the American people, and the Americans not yet born.
Don't expect a revolution. Obama was invested in largely because he will tone down the militant idiocy of the past eight years. That didn't work out as advertised, so it's back to making nice with other nations. Back to the Clinton Administration, in terms of policies, and personnel.
Our government and major corporations will still go after American domination of the other nations of the world. America has to. If America slips from atop the globalized economy, we will have to pay our bills.
And we can't. We haven't stopped borrowing from the future since we borrowed money to drop bombs on Hanoi. It has gone way beyond insane levels of debt, and it has gone practically exponential at this point.
And Obama will appoint Clinton era politicians to run things. Robert Rubin, Rahm Emmanuel, Paul Volcker. The same people who helped create the wrecked economy we are in. Obama will use the same tools that created this mess to clean up this mess.
Einstein said doing the same thing while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
America needs a 180 degree turn. We are going to get five degrees to port, and that's all.