William Greider has asked the crucuial question in the shell game in which the Obama adminstration has been conducting becomes more and more obvious. It's kinda like Dubya when he "took responsibility" for "mistakes that were made" and fired a bunch of subordinates while not once entertaining the thought that he too had culpability in the matters for which he "took responsibility".

It might be worthwhile for President Obama to ponder the words of former President Kennedy:

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable".

Ammo sales at the local Wal-Mart in my neck of the woods have been skyrocketing according to the guy who mans the counter at the outdoors section. Every affront to decent and civilized discourse and community organizing that gets patronized or rebuffed just adds more recruits to the torch-carrying mobs who will one day descend on the enclaves of privililge to liquidate their tangible assets.

Poet

I'd like to share that I have been having bad dreams about our country hitting rock bottom with hungry and homeless people into the millions. Yet I have hope that the President is getting good advice and that Americans will soon get some help with the stimulus (es). My only hope for better dreams is to turn off the incessant rumor and fear machine, the cable networks. I used to wonder how the network execs could be trying to undermine the President, because wouldn't it be bad for business, as in advertising and other business interests of its investors? But I understand things a bit better. The pressure exerted through the mainstream media comes from those power brokers who do not want things to change, and who believe that if the American people endured our more than 4,000 soldiers dying in the senseless war of Iraq, that thousands, even millions of dispossesed Americans will also be endured, and the powers that be will keep all their tax loopholes and their billions.
I am praying harder than ever that President Barack Obama will resist pleasing the superwealthy and form a very different and new banking system, as well as a very different and new educational system, taxing system, etc., etc., etc.
One thing that I am very sure of, with the multitudes of lay-offs, foreclosures and repossessions, the sleeping people of this country are waking up and are scrambling to make their voices heard. I just hope that the incessant misinformation and fear mongering that goes on in the mainstream media will be offset by artists and teachers and small business bosses who know the truth. As for me, another way I am working on chasing away my nightmares is to pick up a sign and stand on a street corner, or go knocking on doors. Maybe you'll see me.

Greider should not forget how much money WS execs and fat-cat investors are fighting for these days. Obama cannot go against these masters of the universe cold turkey and deny them the bailout they "deserve" (since they "concede" to the taxpayers the money that the taxpayers get anyway, according to their slave-plantation-owner world view).

If he tried to, this neo-feudal class of parasites would cough up in a sec more than enough savings to hire full time and for several years every one of the many mercenary armies of the USA plus the whole of organized crime, just to get rid of him.

So be patient and be careful about what you ask for else you may end up having to whine about "the friend of the usurer" aka Joseph Biden...

Obama knows that and does not want to be a martyr and go down in flames. He must proceed carefully and knows he can change things only when the situation is ripe.

Fortunately, time is on his side since the dozens of trillion dollars of financial vaporware that need to be "saved" cannot possibly be "finessed" without ruining the USA or ruining the fat cats.

So the whining and hoping for the great leader's redemption (on TV, so we can watch) must stop. What is needed now is

i) that lazy left-wing economists, historians, and political scientists finally make the effort to document in detail --and then publicize non-stop-- which are the great fortunes that demoblicans are trying to save when they cry wolf about "saving the financial system" --including useful idiot Krugman initially-- and that they denounce with names and addresses the owners of these fortunes who have bribed for decades mainstream demoblicans, journalists, pundits, and economists and have ordered them now to save them from their apocalyptic exposure to wrecked financial vaporware which will otherwise doom their political and economic power (no, nobody wants to save "the banks" or "WS", how can anybody be so naive and fall for such an obfuscation!);

ii) that progressive activists make sure that Obama and the demoblicans are confronted at every stop with questions about the specific *individuals* who would benefit personally most if the financial system is "saved" and about why exactly these *individuals* deserve so badly to be saved at a price of billions of dollars each; and

iii) that progressive economists, historians, political scientists, and activists convince the public that the bailout money can and should rather be used to jump-start the economy directly with or w/o the co-operation of WS and private banks;

Steering public anger towards the actual figures whom bribed top politicians now must defend either they like it or not, but who will become de facto indefensible if everybody becomes aware of who they are, will give Obama the freedom to move in the right direction.

Imagine Obama asking the citizenry, e.g., if it really wants that the Randolphs' billions in derivatives be purchased from them at face value by the taxpayers "to save the financial system".

So let's stop complaining about WS, the banks, and the great leader's lack of leadership and vision. Let's make sure that the citizenry understands where the debate and the country should go and why, and that it starts demanding both from Obama and loudly so.

Instead of no gas day, or lights off hour, why don't we as a country take a sit in Thursday. Everyone stay home, not go into work, etc.

Sioux Rose

It is difficult to imagine a scenario less loathsome than that being served up by state leaders. The naked championing of endless costs in favor OF war or armaments (the tools of mass destruction of others used so casually these days as if without war, the US would have no viable economy) added to this exorbitant lavishing of funds on amoral bankers who have gutted the global economy and made life a living hell for millions... even in fiction it would be tough to devise a scenario this toxic to human welfare, and this bent on eagerly and unapologetically destroying living (eco)systems. It's apparent that not only cream rises. We have absolute CRUD at the top defining the nation's course with clear ramifications that are the equivalent of the new shot felt round the world.

The bottom is falling out of the biggest pyramid scam in history; and when it does, I suspect Poet's gum shoe research into the local sociological implications of increased small arms sales may foreshadow near future events.

"Ideas that could lead to the creation of a corporate state ..."

What do you think we've been living in, Mr. Greider?

"BONUS" What we need is less "BON" and more "US".

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Baron Acton in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887.

Although enjoying William Greider's article, "Obama Told Us To Speak Out, But Is He Listening?" missed is a more fundamental problem than entrenched elites. Followed these last thirty plus years is what passes for orthodoxy in the "discipline" of economics. Obsessed with production, effectively it constitutes neo-mercantilism. Unconstrained is production, while constrained is compensation, freeing capital for production. This has evolved, I believe unintentionally, towards increased compensation for the wealthy and decreased compensation for the less wealthy. Why is because human consumption is limited. Correspondingly, as income for the wealthy increases, they do not expend it for tangible goods, they invest it, providing increased productive resources. As income for the less wealthy increases, they expend it for tangible goods, they do not invest it, providing decreased productive resources. Neo-mercantilism being economic orthodoxy, when academically and politically alternatives have been suppressed, no other alternative is available. Concurrently, however, the public no longer accepts neo-mercantilist "trickle down" economic doctrine. Obama apparently having a taste for the technocrat--Secretary of the Treasury Geithner being evidence--while propounding populism, he is caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

"The president is now trapped between these two realms -- the governing elites who decide things and the people who are governed. Which side is he on? If he does not choose wisely, the anger could devour his presidency."

This is a very telling statement, in my opinion. It seems a recognition that our government does not work for the people but for the oligarchy at the top. Thus our Chief Executive does not belong to us but to them, and to insist that we can reach out to him, with a DLC corporate loyalist like Rham Emmanuel guarding the gates, with the way he has surrounded himself with the same old corporatists who practically guarantee the same old solutions, is simply a ludicrous idea.

This nation has long since passed the point in which one might find relief at the ballot box, has come to a time when emails and letters and communications to our elected officials falls upon deaf ears, ears that listen only to those who provide the cash to run elections and the future in which six and seven figure incomes are assured those who did their masters bidding.

Until and unless this nation's concerned citizenry takes to the streets, in endless and massive demonstrations, we cannot hope to turn a government from its single minded course, one that steers the great majority of us onto the rocks.

"My new book -- "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country" -- asserts that we're at the end of the long and mostly triumphant era that started with victory in World War II."

Sorry, I don't think so.

What happened after WWII was that we had the bomb and we had used it to scare the hell out of everyone else on the planet. The Euro-capitalists--with us as their proxy thug--seized the moment and it's been aggression ever since, and on a scale never seen by man. Using the Soviets as scare tactics, it gave them an excuse to build their war machine. And here we are in 2009 and the euro-centric crusade continues (through us, of course) in Iraq, indeed, throughout the world with our 700+ military bases, financial institutions, and media cartels entrenched everywhere.

Thats where the money went and where it goes. To pay off, shore-up and buy protection for our continued expansion, all the while destroying our nation here at home.

There will be no solution to our problems until the leaders --political and corporate in Washington and New York-- are dispatched from power. The time is here. The time is now.

With respect to the author, I'd substitute his book with "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (James Lowen).

Obama will be a one-termer and someone even more right-wing than he will follow as president. That's the price Americans will pay for voting for the lesser of two evils.

Of course, his supporters are still in denial. They're still making apologies and excuses for the most corporatist, anti-labor, pro-war Democratic president since, well, Bill Clinton.

Obama is looking more and more like a monstrous political scoundrel with each passing day.

And if John McCain says "leave Geithner alone", you know the punk ought to be hung from a telephone pole.

Is the president really trapped? Is popular anger even worth noticing?

Popular outrage can only act as a force for change if it is informed outrage – anger that includes an alternative vision of how financial power could be organized and administered.

What we are currently experiencing is quite different. The media campaign over AIG bonuses is a classic diversionary maneuver. It focuses public anger on a tiny 165 million in bonuses while the 200 billion dollar transfer takes place without objection. After some ritual legislation, the outrage over bonuses will be vindicated and the massive transfer can take place unnoticed.

As Greider accurately portrays it, “many people have thrown off sullen passivity and are trying to reclaim their role as citizens.” Yet his very characterization betrays the progressive removal of that role from the citizenry over a period of many decades. Most have long since succumbed to a purely private vision of their role in society and have no model for the role of a public citizen. As David Michael Green put it recently, “Just as in Orwell's ‘1984’, the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.” - David Michael Green, “Barack Obama and the Altar of Greed”, March 20, 2009.

Anger is not enough because anger can be quickly redirected toward new targets when it is convenient. Greider perpetuates the fantasy of citizen action in declarations such as “Timely intervention by the people could save the country from some truly bad ideas now circulating in Washington and on Wall Street.” But how, exactly, can the people intervene? Writing forceful letters to their congressional representatives? Do they even notice such campaigns anymore?

The Obama campaign is a perfect illustration of the realities of American democracy today. He was elected in one of most successful political advertising campaigns in recent memory, largely paid for with Wall Street money. To invoke Obama’s “independent base of support” as a possible counterweight to his Wall Street sponsorship is to confuse cause and effect. The advertising campaign had a deep understanding of the dissatisfaction of the public and used that to garner mass public support. The size of his “independent base of support” demonstrates outstanding marketing effectiveness. This doesn’t mean that those targeted by the campaign are not sincere in their admiration for Obama.

But unfortunately it does mean that they cannot act as a coherent political force. Obama understands this and his efforts are focused, as he says, on redirecting that anger: "I don't want to quell anger. People are right to be angry. I'm angry," he told reporters on Wednesday. Then he pivoted: "What I want us to do is channel our anger in a constructive way." This is precisely the role of the Democratic Party – to act as a lightning rod for those social forces that could push for fundamental social change and redirect them into safe channels where they can help prop up the current order.

Greider accurately characterizes the objective sought by the Obama administration: “Whatever the intentions, this ‘reform’ would effectively legitimize the existence of a corporate state. This concentrated power would be neither socialism nor capitalism, but a grotesque hybrid that combines the worst qualities of both systems. Government and politics would become even more responsive to big money, but also able to tamper intimately with private enterprise, picking winners and losers based on political loyalties, not on performance. Capitalism with its inherent tendency toward monopoly would have the means to monopolize democracy.” Obama’s actions indicate his true loyalties.

Mobilized citizens are indeed the answer, but who will do the mobilizing?

What about the smaller enterprises?! The right question is what about the working class and the poor? And there is no conflict in Obama. Obama has consistently proven that he sides 110% with the capitalist elite, with the rich over the rest. But now there is a nice juicy scandal to prove it. It seems like his administration was involved in making sure the bonuses to AIG and others weren't banned in the stimulus bill. And they might still be involved in restricting the legislation currently coming out to tax those bonuses. Populist anger "could" devour his presidency, but far more importantly, it should, and the sooner the better.