Doublethink

Abandoning the Obama movement

Like any good technocrat, I’ve been woefully (understatement of the year) disappointed in the Obama administration. Let’s take a look at the hit parade of awesome that has been the Obama presidency thus far.

1. Leaving ~50% of appointed positions unfilled. Speaks for itself; I saw an article on this earlier in the week but I can’t find a link to it now.
2. Appointing the usual suspects, i.e., the people in the pocket of the extant powers in the financial industry or those who caused/supported the financial collapse, to major positions of power in the government’s financial regulatory apparatuses: Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, etc.
3. Appointing the RIAA’s hitmen to be copyright cops in DOJ. Really?
4. Allowing his healthcare agenda to be co-opted and corrupted by a group of unprincipled hack Republicans and corrupt “blue dog/balls” Democrats. It’s sort of pathetic, actually.
5. The healthcare bill itself. The more I learn about it, the more it looks like a handout to entrenched insurance companies. I like the government, but I don’t like subsidies to private industry disguised as government programs (see, e.g., the AIG bailout).
6. The utter and complete lack of transparency in almost all aspects of the administration, including the bailouts and war/torture/terrorism (state secrets). I mean, come on, this is the guy to campaigned on a transparency/sunlight platform and suddenly everything is a big secret?
7. The DOJ DOMA fiasco, which was belatedly and half-heartedly corrected. Still, if he can’t control his own DOJ, can he really manage the government effectively?

I can come up with more, but you get the point - this is “business as usual.” We wanted change, we got more of the same. I could spin out cliches about this all day, but suffice to say these early months have been a massive disappointment. The Obama administration has been, at best, ineffectual, and at worst maliciously incompetent in governing and enacting reforms. We’re at a crucial moment in history, and “our guy” can’t wait to take a big shit on us while running toward the monied interests on Wall Street and the Bible thumpers down South.

My thought this morning, as I woke up to more news about how fucking awful things are, is to give up on the guy. Instead of blindly backing his initiatives, like the health bill, maybe we should be cutting him up for participating in the further selling-out of government in favor of special interests.

The counter, of course, is that he has to “play ball” until he gets re-elected when he can really make an impact on things; until then, his hands are tied by the machine, and we should support him in hopes of a fruitful second term.

Fuck. That. It wouldn’t have been controversial to put some real reformers into positions of power in the financial system, for example; if the political will for it ever existed, it existed in the past 8 months. But he can’t piss off his huge contributors at Goldman, can he? Or his supporters in Hollywood who want increasingly draconian and senseless copyright laws and enforcement? Everything goes back to the money, and Obama is/was as susceptible to it as anyone else, except the Republicans are vaguely more honest about their corruption.

It was naive to think he was in a position, or had the will, to “fix Washington,” I get it. Call it youthful idealism crushed by the realities of how corrupt our elders are. Whatever it is, I’m withdrawing from the Obama revolution and getting back on my stump to call out how totally fucked Washington is, left or right.