If I were to listen to my fellow Progressives, Barack Obama's Inaugural address was the second coming of FDR and JFK with some Martin Luther King Jr. thrown in. The now famous words and delivery maybe of the same eloquence, but we are calling a man the epitome of Progressive ideas who sits at the right hand of Richard M. Nixon on many economic and social issues. In point of fact both Obama and Bill Clinton are to the right of Richard Nixon politically.
My problem with Obama and the Democrats pretense to Progressivism begins with the narrative that the party tells. All politics is first and formost a story embodying the party's ideas of how America got here and where we need to go to move forward. The Democratic Party narrative on economic issues is not much different than the Free Market fables of the Republican Party. In fact Obama has done more damage to our public school system with his privatization attempts and neo-con falsehoods than the Republicans themselves.
Look also at who Obama continues to surround himself with in his advisors and cabinet appointees. The same Wall Street corporate criminal cartel that wrecked the country in the first place. Over and over Obama's impulse has been to bail out Wall Street over any other crisis.
Jack Lew, his choice for treasury and yet another Wall Street investment alumnus, doesn't even want to accept that Wall Street was the guilty culprit in the collapse of 2008. Geithner and Bernanke his Wall Street predecessors, may have funneled as much as 16 trillion dollars to these same criminals under the table during their tenure serving President Obama.
To this day if you are a black kid who steals a boom box from Wal-Mart you will suffer a much more severe penalty than Jamie Dimon, Blankfein, or any other to big to jail criminal from Wall Street. It is sort of like Jean Valjean doing twenty years for stealing bread to feed a sick child in Les Miserables, while the wealthy stole huge amounts with impunity and are rewarded with lavish praise as economic leaders of our nation.
Many Progressives tout Obama's Affordable Care Act and try to delude the rest of us into believing this is the greatest piece of legislation since FDR rammed through the various aspects of his New Deal. My question would be how could this be so Progressive when it was essentially written by the Heritage Foundation, the Right Wing think tank, in 1992 in response to Hilary Care. That is right down to the mandate forcing everyone to purchase insurance or be fined.
Since Obama lacked the courage to fight for a public option his mandate forces all of us to buy over priced con jobs from the private insurance industry which has no motivation to do anything but raise prices even more to take advantage of the captive consumers who now have no options.
That gets us to Mr. Obama's unwavering support for the rudimentary trappings of a surveillance police state. He has expanded NSA's eavesdropping through the Patriot Act in violation of all of our rights contained in the 4th Amendment to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. With NDAA he has continued, no matter how many denials Democrats make, to leaving open indefinite detention of Americans. He has set himself up as judge and jury with his drone program and his kill lists that include Americans who would be denied Habeas Corpus, a jury trial, innocence until proven guilty, and the right to confront their accusers among other things this administration has removed from the Bill of Rights under the pretense that giving up our liberties makes us safer.
Coupled with the assaults to the First Amendment contained in HR. 347, one is tempted to ponder whether all of this is for actual terrorists or the possibility of our own citizens demonstrating like Occupy Wall Street as the economy continues to falter. With its endless wars and the drab sameness of an economy that may provide lots of impetus for investment but absolutely none for workers to raise productivity or improve job quality and skills because there is no reward for work, America begins to look increasingly like Orwell's 1984 not the rebirth of Progressivism.
Global Capitalism the economic culprit of our national demise, as posited by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, is little more than a pseudo-scientific restating of what once was the Divine Right of Kings. Unlike Robert Filmer's 1680 defense of the right of the noblility to do what they pleased with laws being for everyone else because God ordained it, Rand and Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom worship at the alter of the Free Market.
Friedman postulated that the Free Market, (God) if left unfettered by government would determine who should win while the rest of us are restored to lowly serfdom. Because this is theoretically scientific like Newton's laws of Gravity, we have no complaint coming because this divine power has the aura of science to it to fool the gullible into believing this fictional fraud is real instead of a cover for the theft of our national assets.
These theories have nothing to do with individual liberty as the Right claims unless you mean the individual liberty of the wealthy to do as they please with no interference from any legal code. Deregulation just means the freedom of the wealthy to abuse the environment and treat the labor force as slaves and to evade responsibility for any criminal behavior, yet Obama and much of the Democratic Party continue to be the second biggest cheer leaders for economic policies that have hollowed out this nation like a Halloween pumpkin.
Dems have to focus on Gun Control and abortion as a diversion so that we will ignore the 23 million without jobs and that both party's are selling middle class America out. I won't hold my breath waiting for the Progressivism to start during Obama's second term because I could be holding my breath a very long time.
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