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I am speaking of Barack Obama, of course. Our hero of the day. Our hope. Our one last shot at redemption. And it's not because of his politics which are quite the same as every other politician on the take in a bought-and-paid for system of governance.
He's not perfect. He's the first to admit it. He'll make mistakes. And hell, at this stage of the game, we're not looking for heroic perfection. Simple decency will do. Anyone without criminal intent will do. Someone sane and authentic.
Bush comes off as authentic; the problem is he's insane. Senator Clinton is sane but she does not read authentic – more studied and pedantic. And McCain? He is just another George Walker Bush. Authentic and insane, I expect him to start walking around with Captain Queeg's marbles rolling around in his clammy palm. President McQueeg. That's all we need.
And Senator Obama? Sane and Authentic. Yet. A complete centrist. A globalist. A supporter of the supremacy of the military-industrial-complex. Obama is a globalist appeaser. But he talks about people in a way which makes people believe he can make things better, without really changing anything. And that's okay. And it's also how far we have fallen into disrepair and despair – "Change" is not to remedy the cause of disease, but to merely ease the pain of systemic dysfunction.
Obama is the best we can do. And that speaks volumes for our current predicament.
Obama is the furthest left politically we are allowed to go and you can already hear the right-wing propaganda dept. go nuts calling Obama-the-globalist a Marxist of all things. And of course the "L" world is out in full force. This is what the right-wing does. Anything to the left of fascism is communism. Obama-the-Communist before July 4, bet on it.
So, in my mind, Obama has to be one of three things: stupid, dishonest or a martyr.
Is he stupid? Every candidate who has ever run for President has promised to change things for the better.
(Except McCain. He promises to not change things for the better for 10,000 years.)
The problem is this; what is the "change" Obama is talking about?
Is he going to change the international banking system? Abolish the Federal Reserve? Stop the fool's rush to a global corporate state?
No. He is going to negotiate for worker's rights to a living wage and workplace safety and freedom from abuse. Not unimportant. But doesn't the battle show the face of the war? The battle to make people less burdened is a good one, but the war is against the corporate state without conscience, soul, morality or human empathy which does not view people as humans but as units of labor without feeling to oppress at will in the name of profit.
Obama is a firm believer in the so-called 'war on terror.' The war on terror is a mechanism used by special interests to inflate defense spending, promote militarism/patriotism and subjugate foreign lands and peoples for the sake of self-interest.
Obama is not a peace candidate. He has drunk the neo-con Grand Chessboard kool-aid about American Exceptionalism's "national interests" which always seem to lie so far away from home. Which is why it always takes lies to get folks motivated to die "over there."
The right is going to have a field day this year with Obama as the Manchurian Muslim. And why? Because we have given tacit permission with 'the war on terror' to effectively declare war with Islam (which sits atop most of the oil in the world.) To many right-wing Neanderthals, Muslim is just another word for gook.
I truly believe Obama cares about the people but I don't get the idea he really wants to change the system. He wants to prioritize expenditures within the system, maybe end some of the corruption – but change it? Hardly.
Because Obama is not stupid. He knows the system can't be changed, so he does all he can – work to make the system work for more people. Honorable. But is it honest?
So if Obama is not stupid, is he dishonest? The man has made a lot of promises and used the idea of 'Change you can believe in" as a center-piece of his campaign. Has he oversold? Obama always says when people ask how he's going to afford all his campaign promises, "Well if we can spend 10 billion a month in Iraq, we can spend 10 billion a month right here in America."
Which of course makes twenty billion a month we don't have. The dollar has devalued close to 50% in eight years. The Republican Deficit Spending Doctrine has increased the national debt we owe to private banks by trillions and trillions of dollars. The "market" economy is a fragile house of cards because of deregulation and speculation.
There is no money and will be no money for Obama's promises. He knows this. The banks and the Federal Reserve run the show. In order to service the debt to private bankers, he will have to do what Clinton did, move to balance the budget. Because Obama has no plans to end the 'war on terror', the military-industrial-complex will get its usual trough-pull, so he'll raise revenue and cut expenses. It will be politics as usual before you can say, "pork barrel."
So is Obama dishonest because he has made promises beyond what any mortal human can possibly deliver? Is the cosmetic change he's blown into an expectation of systemic change bound to disappoint again those skeptics who threw in with Obama anyway because it's what we always do with the best we can get? Is Obama's 'fierce urgency of now' just so much urgency of another ambitious politician saying whatever he has to get elected?
Is Obama dishonest?
No.
He's a believer in miracles.
And to achieve what he has in mind is going to take one: the mobilization of the American People.
Obama has got to convince millions of drugged, racist, fast-food, couch-potato, middle-of-the-road zombies to rise from their stupor and grunt a little at their bought-and-paid-for Congress. No more bridges to nowhere. No more sweetheart deals. No more graft in a "Grifters Gone Wild" world.
When Obama talks about showing the health-care policy process on C-Span, this is what he's talking about. The more the people can see, the more they will act against what they see. For generations now policy and process has been kept cloaked in the smoke-filled strip clubs of "K" Street. People have been kept in the dark, because policy has been designed by corporations for the sole purpose of corporate profit.
Obama, to his credit, knows sunshine is requisite to integrity. If we're not going to change the system, then let the system work the best it can out in the open with everyone playing by the same rules.
And this in itself, making the system work for the people, which is its founding principle, is a huge change. And would be quite enough for most people.
And you can be sure that a system that swings back toward 'the people' and away from 'special interests' is bound to be impeded by those special interests – war, energy, transportation, financial institutions, etc.
How many dogs do bite the hand that feeds it?
Obama knows in order to defeat politics-as-usual in America he has to motivate millions and millions of citizens to directly challenge the status-quo. He has proved he can do that – get sizable numbers of folks energized. But giving money or signing a petition or voting is not the same as recalling politicians, implementing boycotts, divesting portfolios, marching in protest against the war machine.
In spite of the power of the Presidency we have right now, thanks to the unitary emperor war president, all that power is in service to the system, not designed to change it. A reform president is a weak president. Obama knows only a mass movement of change from the grassroots up can make the change happen.
The stakes are high. If Obama is not the next president then pack your stuff and get the hell out of Dodge no matter what it takes, because things will only go from worse to living hell.
But Obama is no hero. He knows that too. He's a catalyst. A spark. A voice for a movement. But if there is no movement; if people end their involvement at the voting booth and let the politicians sort things out; then a chance at history will be lost and Obama end nothing more than a one-term weakling who couldn't get anything done.
Because, even if the Democrats win in a landslide, change will not be easy. The opposition will be fiercer. Trillions of dollars are at stake. And life is cheap.
If Barack Obama is sane, authentic, smart and honest, if he can mobilize a population to foment real change to the system, then he does represent a real threat to the forces of the status quo.
It doesn't mean Obama ends up a martyr, but it might mean Bush and Cheney do something really stupid, dishonest and insane...
After all, "change" can be almost anything.
