At what point should a president realize that it just hasn’t worked out as he had planned; that he is going to be incapable of delivering what he told himself he wanted? Did Barack Obama not understand, before he took the oath that there were powerful forces at play in this land and that their interests are not those of the people, and, giving him every benefit of the doubt, not those of Barack Obama? Where was Barack in 1994 when the insurance lobby spent $300 million dollars, by one account, to defeat Clinton’s mess of a healthcare bill which was in its essence a series of gifts to the very companies that paid that money? What explains the administration’s utter lack of preparedness for the fight that has been going on for the first year of his presidency over healthcare?
What does it take to figure out that the monied, corporate interests in this country do not play around? They have the resources; employ the finest minds to utilize them; and from now on, given the Supreme Court’s most recent abomination of disingenuity, will have no legal barrier to their utilization. And the insurance companies may well be considered the pikers in the crowd compared to the power the banks are prepared to wield. Barack Obama was well aware of the potential for banking influence on political campaigns; he was the beneficiary of a serious check from UBS during the course of his run for the presidency. What does it take to figure out that there are enormous impediments to a semblance of democracy in this country, the first of many necessary steps toward the dismantling of which would be a movement to strip from corporations their standing as persons under the Constitution. The birth of the idea that corporations are persons as set out in the Santa Clara County case in 1876, or so, in itself is a bald exposition of the extent to which our governors are now, and forever have been, beholden to the rich.
So the choices are two. President Obama can give in to the structure of our society as it exists and do as little overt evil as possible, and the occasional small bit of good, and in that be doing his best to attain the coveted second term, or he can give up any hopes of a second term and start to plant the seeds of revolution that at some distant moment will bring the reform without which we are all doomed to misery, be it material and spiritual, or just the latter..