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Obama may disagree with the teaparty movement, but he agrees with the republicans far more often than he agrees with the left wing of his own party. That is the whole reason why more and more people are feeling "less enthusiastic."
If our own party keeps attacking us, repeatedly, calling us crazy, telling us to get drug tested, and in every major initiative refuses to even consider our goals, but keeps acting on what are normally Republican goals, then this is all going just as you would expect.
Obama started with 2 wars, and a massive mandate for peace. He had promised REPEATEDLY that he would begin withdrawals IMMEDIATELY in the first month. He didn't. instead he escalated troops several times. Even the current withdrawal comes with an escalation of mercenaries so that we aren't really reducing our actual number of American Forces. Just our number of OFFICIAL American Forces. All the Anti-War lefties were totally ignored, repeatedly insulted, called crazy, and thrown under the bus.
Obama was put in charge of the 2nd half of the Stimulus roll-out. Instead of following in the Bush model and giving the bulk of the money to Wall Street, he could have immediately shown his democratic and progressive credentials, shown that he listened to all the people who elected him, and diverted a hell of a lot of that money to Main Street, to Jobs programs and Mortgage Buy-Out Programs run by the Government. Instead, money got shoveled into wall street vaults faster than anyone could keep track. Very little of it went to main street. The little bit that did go to a mortgage buy-out program was given to banks to run, so the banks deliberately ran it into the ground so that the program failed and they kept the money.
Obama heard a constant drumbeat of calls for financial reform, and after delaying and delaying until it seemed like he couldn't delay any longer he finally gave us proposals approved by Geithner and Summers, which means they are mostly for show and don't actually cut into anyone's Profits. At most they will make Wall Street Firms tell us after the fact that they took our money, without having to give it back, of course. In the current age of reform, informing the public that something has gone wrong is an adequate substitute for regulating and preventing people from actively doing wrong.
Obama has a massive public mandate to implement universal health care. That is what the public wanted. That is what we all needed. That is what he campaigned to deliver. But he immediately excluded all liberal and progressive democrats in our own party from being part of the negotiations. And instead of inviting experts in medical care and public health policy to help write legislation, he invited insurance companies and heads of for-profit hospital corporations.
Worse, instead of telling them that they were there to help the American people or else, he instead asked them what they wanted and immediately gave it to them in order to "convince them to come to the table." He guaranteed the insurance industry that they would "remain necessary and profitable" in American Healthcare, when we all knew that the real solution we needed was to remove insurance companies. That move, from the very beginning, put him on their side instead of ours, and guaranteed that we had already lost the health care debate. Everything after that was public relations to try to make it look nice so that we would all swallow it without gagging. All the American people who elected him to provide universal health care, and all the people who voted for him because he ridiculed individual mandates to buy corporate insurance and promised to fight for something better got ignored by Obama because the Obama clearly thought corporate lobbyists were more important.
On Free Trade Obama promised throughout his campaign that he would bring NAFTA back up for renegotiation because NAFTA didn't have protections for labor and the environment, and Candidate Obama recognized, like the people who voted for him, that labor and the environment needed to be protected by law. But the moment Obama became president he appointed a Pro-NAFTA chief negotiator, who had been one of the architects of NAFTA, and abandoned any plans to renegotiate free trade. Instead, the plan was suddenly to expand free trade.
It is impossible for anyone to honestly argue that Free Trade has been good for any nation. It has only been good for the international corporations that cross borders and bleed nations dry, pitting nations against each other in a constant race to the bottom. Jobs have been lost, wages have been slashed, industries have disappeared, environmental and labor protections have been sacrificed, and only profits survive. Yet somehow, the lefties who have been demanding that we end NAFTA and the frameworks for so called Free Trade are the loony left, and Obama doesn't listen to any of us anymore. The people who have suffered under Free Trade aren't considered credible enough to listen to, but the lobbyists hired by companies that profited, they can all be considered experts.
This idea that we need to rally everyone to vote, because Obama is our Savior against certain destruction. Doesn't this person remember that it was Democrats who originally gave us NAFTA and Free Trade when Republicans repeatedly failed? And it was Democrats who succeed in pushing through Welfare Reform, permanently creating massive poverty for millions where Republicans had repeatedly failed.
Democrats, at their worst, are willing and able to create the worst catastrophes for America's poor and middle class. Democrats, at their worst, are willing and able to turn over the United States Wholesale to Corporate Masters better than Republicans ever could. And our Democratic leaders are able to betray us so thoroughly precisely because they are Democrats, and precisely people trust them to and rally to them, expecting them to protect us from corporations. We all give them our trust and expect them to do what is best, so we aren't constantly vigilant when they are in office the way we are when Republicans are in charge. We don't rally and watch and fight to prevent them from gutting our rights they way we fight tooth and nail against republicans.
Democrats get the opportunities that Republicans don't get, and Democrats are able to take advantage of those opportunities for their Corporate masters. That's how we got NAFTA. That's how we got Welfare Reform. That's how we got this Insurance Industry Profit Guarantee Act.
And that's why the whole idea that we should all rally to any politician as our savior against others is a farce!
Yes, we need to rally, but we need to rally for better choices. We need to get the corporate power out of government. We need to get Goldman Sachs out of the Treasury Department.
We need to appoint entire groups of political nobodies who aren't beholden to corporate money and don't owe anyone anything, and who honestly swear to serve the American People instead of Corporations! Then we need to build reform from the ground up to make sure this buy-out of government can't ever happen again.
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