The Prez did a q&a with a bunch of liberal bloggers yesterday, but they seem to have been overawed by the majesty of the office and asked softball questions.Following that, he did 30 minutes on the Daily Show, where Jon Stewart was a little tougher on him than the bloggers had been. Obama's responses were sometimes prickly, and he spent a lot of time talking about all the awesome things he's done.
However, neither the bloggers nor Stewart addressed the bottom-line issues that have characterized the crushing failures of both this administration and the one that preceded it, namely their inability or unwillingness to rein in the out-of-control military-industrial-security complex which continues to grow and suck up a greater and greater percentage of the national budget, and their failure to enforce the law in response to the blatant criminality of the largest banks.
These epic failures are due, of course, to the fact that the Pentagon and the banks have penetrated the workings of government so thoroughly that to some extent they ARE the government.
What we're seeing isn't just the failure of the Obama administration, but the failure of the American system of governance, and this has created a pre-revolutionary situation in which people will respond to the crises that befall them by having to go outside the law, and take matters into their own hands. I have in mind the buyer who purchases a house that's been foreclosed upon, only to be subjected to foreclosure himself because he bought the house from an institution whose claim to ownership is challenged by another institution, or the reservist who is forced to serve five tours of active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I'm talking about things that everybody knows are wrong, and that happen every day because neither the Bush nor Obama administrations have been willing to even honestly address the root causes.
When integrity and honesty are criminalized, only criminals have any integrity. Just ask Julian Assange.
FY 2009
1 comment:
Dave, this post caught my eye again. The root of evil has eluded philosophers through history, it seems. Or if they found it, it was either explained too unclearly, no one was listening, or they actually kept it secret.
I've called it as competition against others. That seems pretty weak as an evil since it is just the way things happen for people daily. Yet predation is still predation even if the means is by a thousand cuts. A better statement of the root of evil may follow. Unwillingness to give up our natural animal passions. That seems aligned with the Buddhist idea of taming our desires.
Post a Comment