Thursday, December 27, 2012

Let it happen...make it happen... wonder what happened ?

I often ponder on the way hopes have been dashed - political hopes for the USA, that is. The situation came into clear focus when I came across some words from a 2007 Guardian piece. Jan Morris, a remarkable woman (who was not always female), British, historian, novelist, traveller and author of some 40 books, wrote an affectionate piece about the USA in the UK's Guardian in February of 2007 which I stowed away for future reference. Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated. The American swagger has become bombast, the cocky GI a bully. But with luck the pendulum may be ready to swing back. For any passing reader interested in knowing more of Ms Morris's natal chart, see my post HERE.

Lines from her Guardian piece:
"..............Perhaps, with a future new president already champing at the bit, we are about to witness its rebirth. As a foreigner I am immune to the rivalries or seductions of American party politics, but I have loved the old place for 60 years, and I simply pray for an American leader to give us back its baraka, as the Arabs say - nothing to do with religion or economics or power or even ideology, but the gift of being at once blessed and blessing.................All it needs is someone with a key to unlock that Idea again, and I hope it will be that next president, whoever it is, even now gearing up for the election. Please God, may it be a poetic president. Inspiration has been the true engine of American success, and all its greatest presidents have been people with a divine spark. The dullards may have been efficient, respected or influential, but the Jeffersons and the Roosevelts, the Lincolns and the Kennedys have all been, in their different ways, artists.......
So may it be a president with the key of original inspiration who can release the Idea from its occlusion. "

Jan Morris's optimistic, perhaps naive, hopes haven't materialised. Here are the first paragraphs of a piece by Dave Lindorff published a few days ago at This Can't Be Happening blog: Playing to Lose? Obama’s Just Another Chicago Player Throwing the Game ~
(Photo credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)


If President Obama had been the commander of Allied forces during the invasion of Normandy 1944, he would have cut a deal with the Nazis when they launched the counter-offensive called the Battle of the Bulge, and WWII would have ended in Europe with a divided France and a still-extant Third Reich into the 1950s. If he had been president in 1965, we wouldn’t have Medicare today. If he had been Rosa Parks, black people might still be riding at the back of the bus.

The current president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, commander in chief of the most awesome military the world has ever known, is the most pathetic negotiator in the history of modern politics. Either that or he wants to lose.

During his first term, we watched him inexplicably water down his health reform program before it even got started, removing the option of a Canadian-style state-run insurance program known as “single-payer” from consideration, and then cutting deals with the insurance industry, the hospital industry and the pharmaceutical industry, before going to Congress with a plan that ended up being a gift to all three.

We watched him cave early on in negotiations over a crisis economic stimulus plan in 2009, giving Republicans a $425-billion tax cut that did nothing to boost jobs in return for getting a measly $425-billion in stimulus funding approved. He caved quickly too on the plan to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the newly created Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. The list of Obama premature cave-ins is long and ugly.

Now, when he is almost by accident in an unassailable position to have the hugely unfair and damaging Bush tax cuts for the rich finally expire on December 31, leaving Republicans stuck in January with having to pass Democratic legislation restoring tax cuts for just the middle class, he is giving it away, offering gratis an undermining of Social Security benefits for all Americans by way of a subtle change in the way inflation adjustments are made in future benefits....... It seems like the only place where this president ever stands his ground is in his insistence on killing lots of innocent people with armed drones in countries around the world that the US is not at war with (Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc.), and on threatening Iran with attack over its nuclear power program.

Read the rest at the link above.

What happened? What really happened? I've wondered about this many times, and have come up with three possibilities (there may be others). I still can't decide which is most likely:

#1. Barack Obama actually believed his own 2008 campaign speeches, he truly was a "progressive", a charismatic strongly left-leaning liberal in his ideals, but once elected was made aware of what was expected - nay, demanded , of him by The Real Powers That Be. If their demands on his policy direction were to remain unmet....? Three letters answer that: JFK. And who could honestly blame him if he found himself forced to meet their demands?

#2. Barack Obama was "handpicked" by The Real Powers That Be very early on - even before his run for a Senate seat. His background, abilities and experience seemed tailor-made to be further groomed to manufacture a charismatic faux saviour of the masses, trodden down for 8 years by George W. Bush and his pals - said treading of the masses, of course, had been part of a plan too. Backing this manufactured but highly polished Barack Obama with all the weight of the mainstream media (also under the thumb of The Real Powers That Be) meant that even a strong run by Hillary Clinton, previously assumed to be heir apparent to the Democrat crown, was defeated in 2008. Once elected the faux saviour could begin to tread the path for which his manufacturers had groomed him.

#3. Barack Obama wasn't ever the least bit "liberal" at core, but in truth was a strongly right-leaning centrist, also clever and quite devious. He saw a chance of acquiring power via, at best the presidency, at worst a place in the Senate and went for it. His plan, devised by himself, aided by others, was to feign to espouse exactly what the people, fed up to the teeth after 8 years of Republican rule, were craving: a true populist liberal president. He played the part well. The play was received by the masses with much greater enthusiasm than he'd ever expected. Once elected he rapidly reverted to his natural right-leaning position. The people looked on, slack-jawed, unwilling to believe that they had been deceived. The people soon began making excuses.......and, even after another dose of exactly the same medicine, many of them still are still doing so.

14 comments:

mike said...

Call it Uranus-Pluto square, polarization, or citizenry just fed-up with government and themselves, I can't think of any country right now that is happy with their leadership. Countries aren't particularly getting along with other countries now, either, or are cooperating in ways that appear peculiar to other nations. Previous alliances are thinning and new groupings are occurring.

I've been alive long enough to see a visible decline in the American stock as viewed by other countries or by Americans within the USA...the citizens are feeling testy. Jan Morris' editorial is certainly true, but potentially applicable to the entire globe as we once knew it, not simply the USA.

Twilight said...

mike ~~~ Maybe so - maybe there is global malaise and disappointment about the way things are and are likely to be for some long time ahead, but the USA is the only location where we have close-up experience and can try to understand the roots of this malaise.

Many of us thought, in 2008, that we were about to "turn a corner" - we were so wrong!

Why were we wrong? The corner was there, right ahead.

I have my own theory: that there's an agenda behind the scenes (in the USA but perhaps globally as well) of which we, the public, are not aware. We're just pawns in their game. Conspiracy theory? Perhaps.
In respect of the US, it roughly matches #2 in my list of 3 possibilities at the end of the post.

Anonymous said...

Twilight,

You are the first blogger to have the guts to tell it like it REALLY is. I have voted Democratic since 1972 but in 2008, I saw the caucas fraud, the stealing of delegate votes from Hillary and given to Barry,calling anyone who didn't back him a "racist" until I finally sais, "This is not the Democratic party I believed in all these years.They didn't play dirty like the Republicans". Well they did in 2008 and I left and they pulled the same unehtical crap in 2012. As for Barry, it's a little #1 (The JFK analogy sent chills down my spine. You are right about that), some #2 thrown in, but 100% #2. Barry is a lazy fraud who the Powers To Be could manipulate to do their evil deeds;the perfect Manchurian Candidate. He sold this country down the river with Obamacare so that he could pay back the insurance companies and Big Pharma who were his big donors and lets' not forget Wall Street, although that romance has cooled.
We as a nation know next to nothing about him while all other presidental candidates are researched down to the sillest comment.
I never read astrologers comments on his chart. I don't believe the data. When his birth certificate was published on line, tech savvy commentators on various blogs used software programs to detect that the certificate had "layers"; that this document contained much cutting and pasteing. I'm not saying some of the more outrageous statements about him are true but, I believe he is indeed "manufactured" for the times and to appeal to a new and different voter demographic. In short a cleaver marketing campaign that appealed to low information voters, the American Idol crowd and the "Creative Class" that take themselves s-o-o-o seriously and expect the rest of us to do the same. I think the man behind the curtin will be exposed within a year to 18 months.

Thanks for this great post,the terrific links and for TELLING IT LIKE IT IS. I hope my country wakes up from this kool-aid induced fog before any more damage is done.

James Higham said...

Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated. The American swagger has become bombast, the cocky GI a bully. But with luck the pendulum may be ready to swing back.

It still is held up as a beacon of freedom and the war to the death on the Constitution between those supporting it and the freedoms it enshrines and the enemy within who would tear it down or try to rewrite it is a fascinating struggle watched by the whole world.

DC said...

IMO...#2.
I've realized this ever since Clinton.

mike said...

Where was the outrage during the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove debacle that lasted eight years and felt like eternity? The Bush administration firmly laid the path to the present and we inherited an astoundingly corrupt legacy. I'm neutral when it comes to Obama, but I don't believe any president following Bush could succeed at "pulling us up"...wishful, silly thinking. Did Bush's birth certificate validate him? Bush was hatched on Mars, I think.

Twilight said...

Anonymous ~~ Thanks for your comment - it's a comfort to know that others feel much the same as I do, especially someone who is USA-an by birth. I came here from the UK, some 8 years ago, so my views are always going to be coloured by that fact.

When I eventually became a US citizen and registered to vote, just before the 2008 election, I'd already seen and read enough to know that I could not honestly register as Democrat or Republican, so as the only other option was "Independent" I registered as such, and have been glad I did so. Had I arrived here maybe 20 or 30 years earlier I might have felt okay registering Democrat - I can't know that.

I supported Dennis Kucinich until he withdrew in 2008. He WAS the real deal - until Obama took him on a flight in Airforce One and persuaded him to stop opposing and vote in favour of the Affordable Care Act. Who knows what was said on that flight!? And Kucinich has now lost his seat in the House anyway. Politicians like him, totally on the side of the people, will not be tolerated in the USA! That is becoming clearer every day.

I do hope you're right about exposure of "the man behind the curtain", before 18 months have passed. :-)



Wisewebwoman said...

T:
You and I have always been in a agreement on this. There is no such thing as democracy, we are all living in oligarchies.
Here in the Great White North, our puppet has sold us out to China and trashed the environment in the process.

We are on our own. I think the prime minister of Australia (then Kevin Rudd) said it first.

BO has always bowed to his masters. Every tiny nuance of his presidency is carefully rehearsed right down to no mention of gun control laws in response to the carnage at Newtown.

And the drones killing thousands of children. How can he? Puppet.

XO
WWW

Twilight said...

James Higham ~~ Well, if struggles here in the USA entertain y'all, what can I say? It must seem like a film noir on good days and one of those old Hammer Horror films at other times!

As for re-writing the Constitution, I guess you refer to mainly the Second Amendment. Discussions arose on this because of recent murders of 20 very young school children.

Few people wish to deny citizens ownership of a gun, but clarification of what that Second Amendment really meant to the Founders, in the context of the time it was written, is long overdue.

I'm going to copy a comment here I saved it because it makes a lot of sense to me - it was written by jrp1900 as part of a discussion at Common Dreams about 10 days ago.

"Gun nuts" (as they are rightly called) will often wrap themselves
in a Constitutionalist garb. They claim that the "right to bear arms" is fundamental, because it alone guarantees ALL the other articles in The Bill of Rights. But you will have noticed that as long as gun nuts have access to all the guns they desire (from 22 rifles to automatics), they seem to care not a whit for the other rights spelled out in the Constitution. Now that the Republic has become a "National Security State," given over to Empire, the peaceable assembly of the people is increasingly disallowed. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects" has been eviscerated by the Drug War and the so-called "War on terror." "Unreasonable searches" are now normal, and many of them take place in total secrecy. Entrapment is used to make people "bear witness" against themselves, and the right to a trial by jury has collapsed, as plea bargains, and miltary tribunals are now the preferred methods of jurisprudence. In certain instances, defendants have no intrinsic right to confront witnesses and the use of secret evidence is not unknown. The Bill of Rights guarantees legal representation, but in many instances (particularly involving the poor), "the assistance of counsel" is a cruel joke. (Scalia even said that a defense lawyer who sleeps in court meets the Constitutional standard). Confiscation of "private property" is a favorite tactic of the Drug War. "Excessive bail" is often used for purely punitive purposes, and some people are "held" indfefinitely(or is it "detained") without trial or charge. "Cruel and unsusual punishment" is now legal in the form of "enhanced interrogation," but everyone understands that the government really means "torture." And although "race" and "color" cannot be used to deny or abridge voting, in many areas of the country (but especially in the Old Confederacy) this is exactly what happens. In sum, in numerous ways the Constitution is ignored, flouted, subverted, skirted, or any other word you care to use. And second Amendment fundamentalists will often have nothing to say. As long as they have all their guns, life is good.

Twilight said...

DC ~~~ Thanks - I'm glad someone else with longer experience of US politics sees things this way too. :-)

Twilight said...

mike ~~ As I recall there was plenty of outrage from what the US calls "the left" about Bush's doings - that was early on in my time here, however, and all was alien to me.

I agree that Bush's legacy was nothing but a horror show - but President Obama has done nothing of substance that would even begin to attack the edges of it - in fact he has simply carried on where Bush left off, and in the opinion of some people has made things even worse.

The reason, according to my gut feeling: there's an agenda at a level beyond the pantomime of politics we are allowed to see.

Twilight said...

Wisewebwoman ~~ Yes, we are on the same page - same paragraph and same line, on this, WWW.

There's nothing we can do about any of it at the moment though (or perhaps ever), but being aware and awake is important.

mike (again) said...

I don't know your idea of a federal conspiracy, but I know of several that aren't even conspiracies at this point. The global financial sector has raped this nation and others...the money industry is in control. Call them the Bilderbergs, Illuminati, or New World Order, if it involves $$$, they are in control. I suspect drug dollars are part of the group action, too. I would think they are global and in control of many nations. Maybe it originates from the Vatican Bank, Istituto per le Opere di Religione? The butler was on to something?!

The USA now has a 16.4 trillion dollar debt...$52,000 owed by every American alive. What do we Americans want? No more taxes! We've grown weary of the two wars we started and their financial whirlpool. A better education system...more security...more jobs...don't cut services or entitlements, etc. Jumping off the proverbial fiscal cliff and showing austerity is probably the best thing for the USA...pay more taxes. An American story will not return until we citizens take responsibility for our actions and debt.

We didn't walk into this mess in 2009 onward...all of the symptoms were there several decades prior, much of it at the start of deregulation...a Reagan favorite ensconced by the Bush administration. OK, blame it on Obama...he SHOULD be able to turn it around.

Twilight said...

mike ~~ I don't have any clear idea of the "conspiracy" as we'll call it - I just am sure it exists, right now. I don't know how long it has been so - you, and others born in the US will be able to get a sense of that, having lived through more experiences here than I have.

Whatever names and associations are involved, as you say, money, and equally important power/control, are the driving forces. Whether the situation was brought about as a deliberate long-term plan, or whether it came about as an accidental convergence of situations, I won't try to guess. It's here now and will be just about impossible to change, without some natural or military (world war) interruption.

I too think that going over the dreaded "fiscal cliff" would be the better option. It would bring things to a head. I bet they find some solution "just in time" though, maybe just to kick the main part of the can down the road for a while longer, while clipping bits off Social Security as a sop to the GOP.

We couldn't have expected Obama to solve every problem, to right every wrong, but we could have expected him to fight harder and not to turn against and disrespect those whose views aligned with his own campaign promises. What did his former Chief of Staff call progressives who criticised him? "Fucking retards"!

Most of all, we did not expect Obama to be Bush The Sequel.