Yup, many of us seem to have been fooled again.  You betcha.
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The only people who are not disillusioned are those who had no illusions to begin with. Isn t it obvious that power may seem to reside in the White House but it is effectively constrained by the real power centersa cautious Bureaucracy, an overblown Military, avaricious Big Industries and the fraud factories on Wall Street?
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That s where the clout is. That s where most of the political donations came from.  He ignores these complexes at his peril,  although, alas,  he already seems to share many of their assumptions and worldviews.
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Iftekhar A. Khan, a scribe in Pakistan writes about this reality.
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"Many who thought Obama would change US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been disappointed. Obama and Brown don't formulate policies; reps of powerful interest groups do. How could Robert Gates, who outlasted Bush regime, take a U-turn on the AfPak strategy he himself devised? He has been at the centre stage of conceiving and planning the brutal military offensive Panther's Claw in Helmand - Southern Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke on the AfPak scene is another face for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
When I was coming of political age, I was influenced by the work of C. Wright Mills who wrote about the Power Elite as a permanent government of special interests and institutions. Building on that, a former President of SDS, Carl Oglesby, came up with a theorybook that discussed the war within and between those elites.
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Oglesby  saw the conflict in regional terms with the new wealth of the  Oil Aristocracywho he called the Cowboys based in the Southern tier,  battling the old wealth of Wall Street, powercrats he called  The "Yankees.
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Herb Calhoun describes his argument, set against the background of the assassinations of the 60 s as growing out of these elite conflicts:
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"What all of these events had in common was that they were links in a chain designed to replace one set of power elite (members of the old moneyed "peace promoting" Eastern Yankee Establishment) with another (the Nuevo Riche and newly arrived, "progress through war" Western Cowboys). Thus it is argued here that the events connecting Dallas, Memphis, Watergate and the demise of the Hughes empire, are but threads in a common fabric, growing and evolving directly out of the systematic corruption of American politics and out of contemporary political realities.
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