Call me skeptical.
Call me observant.
And then, call me for dinner and call me skeptical.
I remember all the haloed pictures of the anointing before the election. I remember all those promises of "change".
And then, even I asked, before the election, "Change from or to, what? Exactly?"
Sadly, in the first weeks of the Obama administration, I got my answer. Same old, same old. Republican/Democrat--change the initials, a few names, a couple of retitling of old projects, beefing up some really bad misadventures, secrecy up the Potomac, spying on all and sundry, spending through the roof for what we don't need, not much spending on what we do, and well...that was the change.
Exactly.
Precisely.
We have the same people in the Minerals Management Service granting the same permits without the needed safeguards, such as blowout preventers used everywhere except in the US of A, and we got change. Brother, have we got change. Just check out, on the YouTube, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and blowout preventers or the under-reported travesty that is this BP oil debacle, and you got it. Not a bit of change.
Want more? Bankers get fat and happy while loans to small businesses go away from the programs of banks. I guess the rich bankers like to keep the money in their vaults that would be yours or my, under the mattress safe.
Health care? Well we really got taken to the cleaners on that one. No public option, and Big Pharma gets to keep all but the 2 percent they gave up in those closed (transparency?) negotiations in the White House. Ask Greg Palast at Greg Palast's blog for that and more.
Now we have the destruction of the Gulf and Gulf States by means of Corexit. Check this out on Alexander Higgins, which is a great site for information on the BP disaster. And, it turns out that BP might not have actually hit an oil gusher but an asphalt volcano. Neither is good, but if the asphalt were allowed to remain together, as would also be true for oil, it would be easier to recover.
Which means that all the dispersant being sprayed around is doing no one any good, but at the levels it has reached in air and water may very well kill the same people who BP has hired to clean up the mess that destroyed all those careers and businesses. Of course, working for BP means no respirators, which means that the workers may well die as did cleanup workers from the Exxon Valdez.
All this makes me think that the BP disaster, coming as it did with a crushing of the First Amendment when the press were threatened with, and then arrested, just a tad bit too much like the general response after 911, and the secrecy that surrounded the destruction of that crime scene as the steel was carted off to foreign lands to be made into plowshares.
I hoped. On that last on, I really did hope. About the plowshares, that is.
Change?
Naw. We don't need no change. We just needed the label.
Is it all the President's fault?
Not by a long shot.
The problem is this. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will bring change. They can't. They are both the same. Labels different, same programs, same everything.
If we keep doing the same thing, as in voting for change, we will continue to get the same, destructive sameness. Repeating the same action expecting a changed result is the very definition of insanity.
Clinton promised change in 1992. We got change. Bankers and industrialists got rich as they offshored as many jobs as they could. Remember NAFTA?
Right.
That was change.
But it was merely another giveaway to the same rich one percent that got so much from Reagan and Bush I.
What we need is real change. Election of a real change maker, not the same old, same old.
So, your assignment today is to do the following.
Find someone with the brains, wisdom and courage to stand up to the special interests, and get them to run for office.
Find people that are independent, and not whack jobs, who possess the strength of character to live up to the promises they make.
If you are that person, then run for office.
Remember, Mr. Obama came from an obscure state senate seat he won because all of his opponents were removed from the ballot before the elections and the Senate race in Illinois collapsed as Mr. Obama entered the race. That is one of those lovely parts of Chicago politics, which is not, and never has been, beanbag. So to speak.
His only contested election, of meaningful contest levels that is, was in 2008. And that was as much a vote against the same old from the Republicans as it was a vote for Mr. Obama.
We need change. We've been promised it for decades, and none have delivered. It is now the moment when change is an imperative.
Be that change.
Just a thought.
2 comments:
A short comment on Change...
As a nation we have moved right since Johnson created both the Great Society programs and signed the Civil Rights act. It wasn't a sudden lurch. Nixon created the EPA. But even Jimmy Carter tended to look for "Conservative Solutions" in his reaction to the oil embargo rather than look for liberal solutions.
Reagan changed the face of Conservativism forever, enshrining Corporatism under the mask of Capitalism. (Real Free Market Capitalism is dead as U.S. Grant) Even Bill Clinton was a classic conservative in the manner of Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt.
This country after 30 years of Conservative domination has moved very far to the right. Obama's Health Care Legislation and banking regulation has shifted the pendulum back the other way. But we are still close to the top of the swing. The movement is very slow and the changes small.
It would be gratifying to see huge changes, but that won't happen. As a nation we are polarized. Only about 39% of Americans vote reliably outside a Presidential election. They keep Congress split and unable to create substantive change. We just have to keep fighting and working to make more little changes.
I agree Frank, but think the situation is more dire than you have stated. While it is true that we have had 30 plus years of ever increasing conservatism, the Obama administration has only further enshrined corporatism, elevating it to entirely new powers with ObamaCare, and his carbon-copy enforcement of some of the worst of the immediately prior president's policies.
We have two hot wars, another on the way, and health care fixes that did nothing to correct the problem, but expanded the worst of the insurance mess, enshrining failure to have insurance as a criminal offense. At the same time, runaway costs were not addressed.
We have not had the pendulum swing at all. We have nationalized the banks, which merely is an official recognition that finance and insurance corporations really are running the government through the Federal Reserve, and related corporations. We have corporate speech elevated as more worthy of protection than the speech of human citizens. We have got window dressing, when we needed to break the walls down that were put in place by decades of ever increasing corporatism.
Our country is no longer a nation of, by and for the people, but of, by and for the corporation.
Even Reagan would not look on these developments as a good thing. At least, that is my hope, because Reagan did, on occasion, pull the crazies back from their wildest policies. Of course, those same crazies just took over the WH a few terms later. Just ask Ray McGovern, former CIA officer who has spoken often of the 'crazies.'
As for the banking reform, most of the real guts of the reform were ripped out, and the banks wrote the rest. The result will be not a return to the securities that Glass-Steagall (sp?) gave us, but the insecurity of ripping those protections out of the Code under the Clinton and Bush administrations.
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