This is my response to Seneca Doane's recent diary advocating a primary challenge to President Obama; I realized as I got writing that my response was too long for a comment, so here it is in diary form.
The executive summary is that primarying Obama is a waste of time because, really President Obama is just a guy doing a job for his sponsors. The people who matter and need our attention are the people who sponsor candidates, because they are the people who drive the national agenda regardless of who is president.
Check it out below the squiggle:
Obama's sponsors are the folks who are going to again provide huge amounts of cash to his campaign. In 2008 only about 25% of the 750 million dollars that Obama raised came from small donors. This time around, Obama is looking to raise a billion dollars and he's asking his big supporters to collect $350,000 dollars each.
My guess is that Obama's going to raise that billion dollars and, just like last time, he's going to provide good value to his wealthy and corporate sponsors. I'd guess that we can look forward to more appointments of "strong progressives" like Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Emanuel, Daley, Immelt, Gates, Holder, etc. to help Obama chart a course favorable to his sponsors. The agencies of the Obama administration are rife with regulatory capture and needed regulation is not happening. Obama's "Justice" department does not seem to be able to rouse itself to enforce the law on a whole range of things from the bankers that looted the economy, to the oil companies that despoiled the Gulf of Mexico; hell, they can't even be bothered to prosecute people who have commissioned or committed torture. Obama's "Justice" department seems more interested in persecuting whistleblowers that have leaked information that is embarrassing to the powerful than anything else.
The folks who sponsor politicians are ever so helpful, not only to the President, they're also helpful to congresspersons. For example, one day Senator Dick Durbin accidentally told the truth while the cameras were on:
Certainly bankers are only a contingent of the collection of wealthy corporate elites that have captured our government, but it was nice to see a politician admit that his institution is bought and no longer serves the people. If you want to see how the Mortgage Bankers Association feels about congress, go here and watch them celebrate.
Well, that's two out of three branches of government that are hopelessly compromised. So what about the Supreme Court? Well there's this:
Government watchdog group Common Cause says records show Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report $686,589 in income that his wife earned from a conservative think tank from 2003 to 2007.
Common Cause says IRS records show Virginia Thomas received the money from the Heritage Foundation for her work there over that period. The group’s president, Bob Edgar, said in a statement that his group discovered the discrepancy while researching any potential conflicts of interest in the Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision, which opened the doors for unlimited campaign contributions by corporations.
...
Last week, Common Cause asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves during the Citizens United case because they attended events hosted by Charles and David Koch, billionaires who supported conservative groups that benefited from the decision.
And there's also this:
The Roberts court is accepting more businesses cases and ruling more often for business interests, in percentage terms.
The Roberts court has ruled for business interests 61 percent of the time during its five terms, while the Rehnquist court sided with business 46 percent of the time in its last five years, the New York Times reports.
The findings are part of a study by Northwestern law professor Lee Epstein, University of Chicago economist William Landes, and Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in Chicago.
The story also cites a study (PDF) by the Constitutional Accountability Center that found the Roberts court ruled in favor of positions advanced by the Chamber of Commerce 68 percent of the time, while the Rehnquist court favored chamber positions 56 percent of the time in its last 11 years.
The three branches of government are clogged up with office holders whose agendas are not aligned with progressive interests and due to the founders design of government to insulate it from rapid changes, it will not be possible to throw them out of government quickly. Even if it were possible to dump Obama and get a real progressive elected there would remain lots of bought-and-paid for congressmen and senators, not to mention lifetime-appointed robed masters still working assiduously for their sponsors.
But wait, not only are the three branches of government hopelessly corrupted by the sponsors, apparently so are the people. We now have a major "grassroots group," the Tea Party that was created by sponsors and does their bidding. The Tea Party was founded by Koch brothers money, organized by professional political organizers (Dick Armey and Freedom Works) and is relentlessly flacked by Fox News, but the press treats it as if it is a legitimate grassroots group. Incredible!
The sponsors so totally dominate our news media, it is in the hands of comedians to hip the public to the truth:
I don't know about you, but I'm not happy with the state of affairs Carlin presciently described. I'm not willing to give up my Social Security or anything else that the sponsors would like to take from us without a fight. It appears to me that incrementally changing a few corporate lackeys "serving" in the government here and there through the election process is not going to get us the change that we need and voted for if we keep trying to elect "more and better" from now until the Koch brothers announce that there will be no more elections.
I propose that we take the fight directly to the sponsors, skipping the middleman. I'm suggesting that we find creative ways to screw with the elite vampire squids that created this plutonomy (PDF). We also need to take the fight to the media, creatively challenging them with every weapon we've got. I favor using everything from commercial boycotts to social ridicule to both annoy the sponsors and interupt their game. We should do everything from protests of their businesses to asking the bartender to switch off Fox News. We need to use social media tools to move public sentiment against the sponsors and their businesses.
I do not want to take the heat off of our elected officials or suggest that anybody stop voting, it's just that I think we need to open up a new front in our struggle to put things right because the old tactics just aren't working. Working within the system has failed, the system is owned by the sponsors. If you want to vote for Obama because you think that he'll arrange for the sponsors to more slowly steal your Social Security or will trade you a few months of Unemployment insurance now for further cuts to services at a later date, well, go for it. Of the choices on offer by the system, Obama is a rational choice. But voting D is not going to fix the system.
What exactly it's going to take to wrest control of our system from the plutocrats and get it back into the hands of the people, I don't know. I think that this clip sums up where we are pretty well: