I mean not personally. Anyone who gets as far as actually becoming President of this once hopeful nation has sold his soul a long time ago. Mavericks don't get to be President. No one deemed an unreliable servant of our filthy-rich overlords gets past Go. Ask Howard Dean.
The problem isn't who is president, it's who the presidency serves - and it ain't us. The entire system stinks to high heaven and has for as long as I can remember - and it's only gotten worse over time. The corruption and the greed is rampant. The presidency itself is discredited. And all of this happened long before Obama showed up.
Obama is not unprincipled nor incompetent, or at least no more so than any other president. He's not foolishly bipartisan. He's not a naïve outsider who is failing in what he's trying to do. He's doing exactly what he means to do. He's doing the only thing he can do. He's being an obedient employee as the official spokes-model for Amerika, Inc. - and that's all any president will ever be or do until we change the system. Obama is not responsible for the system, but he is a part of it. As a candidate, he was ostensibly all about change but he has worked tirelessly from day one to prop up the status quo – which is of course his real job. Welcome to the future. Welcome to the United States of Goldman Sachs.
So primarying Obama won't change anything. By virtue of the very nature of our system, we can only get another neoliberal-approved, MIC-sanctioned, Wall Street-certified lackey to the ultra-rich fascist bastards who are the sole owners of Amerika, Inc. The America that once boasted government of, by and for the people has indeed perished from the face of the earth.
Don't blame Obama for our present circumstances or our present direction. He has very little to do with it. He is merely the President, the face of power, not the heart of it. No, to find the beating heart behind the wars, the greed, and the corruption one has to turn to those who give the orders, the MIC/Wall Street shadow government that has taken over our country. The office of President is, among other things, a lightening rod. It draws all the heat away from those obscenely rich assholes who are really driving our policy and strangling our nation, those who own us and our government, those who are cutting their slimy deals behind everyone's backs and selling out the country in their orgy of greed and madness.
The truth is that Obama takes his orders from the same people who gave Bush his – the shadow bosses of the MIC/Wall Street cabal. How is that supposed to work out for us? It isn't. It's supposed to seem like it may...if we clap loud enough, if we GOTV hard enough, if we dedicate our entire lives to our political causes by giving rich people and their proxies more and more of our hard-earned money. But no matter how hard we clap, no matter how dedicated we are or how how much of our precious money we give to our filthy-rich oppressors, we're going to get screwed for our troubles because that's the order of things in this country. Serve the rich, screw the people. It's simple. Like it or lump it. All the rest is illusion - an elaborate illusion of control over our own destiny.
Some say it is a conspiracy theory to suggest there is a shadow government pulling the strings, but you'd have to be asleep to believe that.
The illusion of government as public service has been lifting. Often they don't even bother trying to hide the skullduggery anymore. They know most people aren't paying attention. Average Americans are all caught up in the bread and circuses, Dancing With the Stars, American Idol or Is Anybody in This Godforsaken Country Smarter Than a Fucking Fifth Grader?
"If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal."
Emma Goldman
Our political system is a sham and a diversion, a grand and compelling circus for the educated and those still bothering to pay attention at all. They manipulate the vote, they steal the vote, they game the system any way and every way they can...and when that doesn't work they haul in the lawyers. And the loyalties of the winners are mercurial at best and gravitate straightaway toward the Big Money irrespective of party affiliation, constituencies, campaign promises, sweet reason or the common welfare. It's all money and no principle. All the better Democrats in the world aren't going to change this beast. When you throw a good person into the DC cesspool, you change that person, not the cesspool. We're going to have to find another way to do it. And we're going to have to do it with a population too dumb to care.
Only 4 in 10 Americans believe in evolution. I'm not sure how many believe in gravity.
And in the midst of all this madness there are those calling for moderation, which is just another cry to protect the status quo. And the reeking, rotten, stinking status quo must go!
What do we want? MODERATION!
When do we want it? As soon as it can reasonably be expected!
Change is driven by discontent. And what do we have to be content with? A rogue government hijacked by the biggest assholes in the world? The climate deniers, warmongers, torturers, tax-cutting tinkle-downers in a dumbed-down fake democracy drunk on greed whose only priority in the face of unprecedented challenges to our continued existence is to despotically squeeze the last few drops of wealth from the lower 99% into the coffers of the already obscenely wealthy who refuse to do anything useful with their money? The fall of Rome wasn't this fucking ugly.
The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on e-Bay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it's 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn> Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But – of course! - you already have.
Here's an example of how you have worked together. In 1995 the House was going to repeal the subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn't seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers' cash – until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from the tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: "It's gone on here for a long time." So get your bids in: the House is open for business.
America is now officially for sale
It troubles me that we have come to accept blatant injustice as the new normal. Some people are able to look past the fact that Bushco got off Scott free for torture and lying the country into war...not to mention their myriad other transgressions including the largest strong-armed robbery in history. How can people be willing to just look the other way...as if justice only matters when it's convenient or practical?
But since Pelosi took impeachment off the table and Obama refuses to look backward we are all sentenced to watch as the sickening, internationally broadcast images of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove shame all of us and our nation before the world.
His sadness over Hurricane Katrina is not for the victims in New Orleans, as Mr West understood, but for the damage done to his reputation by that snap of him staring blankly and aloofly down on the catastrophe from the window of Air Force One. His paramount distress over Iraq is not over the loss of life, civilian and military, but how that banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier came to make him look naive and vainglorious. He reveals his shallowness and vapidity with these reflections in the most crystalline of clarity, and hasn't a notion he is doing so.
It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied him. Unlike Mr Tony Blair, who emerges from his well-calibrated if often chilling memoir as a man of colossal cleverness (though not intellect), W has the self-awareness of a bison. There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him.
How did this wastrel ever find his way to the White House?
IMHO our entire government is a corrupt, illegitimate criminal enterprise. People are often viscerally reluctant to accept such harsh criticism of our system, which does absolutely nothing to change the reality of it. The greatest heists of all time have taken place in recent memory with the full knowledge and support of our pathetic, sold out, gangster-enabling government. Wall Street and the MIC have reamed us all with the active assistance of our own elected officials. And this crap has been going on for decades.
Why do you think they have so many secrets and blow a gasket when some heroic someone spills the beans? They don't want us to know who they really are. Our government trains right wing military types how to torture and murder poor peasants in South America and elsewhere who have the temerity to ask for justice, and have been doing so for decades at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. We occupy the planet with 737 military bases around the world from which we push people around like the giant bullies we are. We torture, we murder and we take what we like. We don't own this damned planet, we just act like we do. And then we're all shocked that anyone would want to do us harm.
Culturally and politically we seem unchanged from the people who slaughtered the Indians and took their land. I can imagine no greater indictment and no greater shame.
Yes our government is up to no good, and yes they should be stopped, and if Wikileaks contributes to that end as I believe they do then halle-fuckin-lujah!
As for the WH, it's worse than tone deaf....they're not actually on our side. And it's not just Obama. No one who ever inhabits the WH is ever going to be on our side. We the people are the opposition to the oligarchy – and they own the White House. They act like they don't care about us because they don't. We're just the suckers in this game...the enemy.
Oligarchies have been tyrannical throughout history, being completely reliant on public servitude to exist. Although Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy; but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy. Some city-states from ancient Greece were oligarchies.
wikipedia
Democracy is dead in the USA. Citizen's United v FEC finally dispensed with all pretense of democracy and enshrined the plutocratic/oligarchic frankenstein we are left with...a Wall Street Government. The best government money can buy.
Why would our government connect an extension of unemployment benefits with tax cuts for billionaires? So they could accuse us of being hateful to the poor if we object. It's cynical, it's hateful and it's typical.
While we are consumed in a bitter struggle to keep millionaires and billionaires from continuing to get outrageous tax cuts in the midst of economic hardship for everyone other than these spoiled greed-besotted cutthroats, the following goes largely ignored:
an alarming worldwide water crisis
unimaginable suffering in Haiti, Africa and elsewhere
unemployment, homelessness and financial desperation in the USA
ongoing mindless worldwide ecological destruction
accelerating climate change
numerous ongoing, horribly expensive, profoundly immoral and decidedly unnecessary wars
and a concerted effort to push us into 'all war all the time'
CNN -- When the president decided to send more troops to a distant country during an unpopular war, one powerful senator had enough.
He warned that the U.S. military could not create stability in a country "where there is chaos ... democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life."
"It's unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people," said Sen. J. William Fulbright, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1966 as the Vietnam War escalated.
Fulbright's warning is being applied by some to Afghanistan today. The U.S. is still fighting dubious wars abroad while ignoring needs at home, says Andrew J. Bacevich, who tells Fulbright's story in his new book, "Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War."
As the Afghanistan war enters its ninth year, Bacevich and other commentators are asking: When does it end? They say the nation's national security leaders have put the U.S. on an unsustainable path to perpetual war and that President Obama is doing little to stop them.
Is America on the path to 'permanent war'?
This is maddening and totally unacceptable. They're robbing us to pay for these stupid, shameful and profoundly immoral wars.
There's always been an element of bluster in our politics. Just when it became all bluster is hard to say...but it happened some time ago. We've been had by our own government...there's no point in denying it. They've sold us out to the corporate war golem.
Our politics have become a game like football. We crowd around the 'tv' and agonize over every play. People develop expertise on the game stats, who gained yardage, who lost it, who's making good plays or not and why. It's all very compelling but ultimately meaningless. Whoever wins, the American people lose. The game is rigged. Who doesn't know that by now? It's an illusion, a neo-Roman circus produced by the ignoratti for the multitudes.
Everything, anything, election results, poll numbers, whichever way the wind blows is interpreted as yet another excuse to do exactly what they want to do anyway which is turn this country into a rightwing fascist police state so as to better control those who've been raped, robbed and pillaged.
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power."
Benito Mussolini
It's hard to say just how bad it will get but the signs are not good. My son was telling me about the "Free Speech Zone' they have at his university. A 'Free Speech Zone' at an American university? What have we come to? We've been changed into a society that cowers in fear, inviting a police state and ignoring abuses up to and including torture. The once feared 'political third rail' of cutting social security is now being tossed around cavalierly by democrats of all people. How much stranger will it get? Who the fuck knows? We go on playing these games, wallowing in distraction, believing in fairy tales as the rich get richer, the middle class are screwed out of what little they have left and the poor are left for dead...and the largest challenges humankind has ever faced are shoved off the public stage and out of the public consciousness.
The outcome so far is not pretty and it's getting uglier every day. In the short run I expect the rightwing agenda to be ever more aggressively shoved down our throats. It's hard to envision how it will ever get any better, but that's always possible I guess. Like Carl Sagan used to say, somewhere something wonderful is waiting to be discovered.
Something wonderful would be nice right about now.
"Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons."
George Bernard Shaw
Wikileaks Mirror Sites
