It’s long past time to put away your Obama t-shirt and take out your protest banner

and, yes, i voted a straight democratic ticket...

I’m sure Obama believes he is doing the best he can in a corrupt system – but it’s not true. There is another way. Imagine if, when he came to office, he had articulated the real solutions – and, when he was blocked, named the corrupt corporations and the corrupt Senators stopping him getting healthcare for sick children or preventing another crash. Explain that it is time to drive the money-lenders out of the temple of American democracy. Tell the American people they will always be screwed over until they end this corruption and pay for the democratic process themselves, and propose serious measures to achieve it. Call for a mass movement to back him, just as Franklin Roosevelt did – and succeeded. At least then there would be a possibility of real progress. Would the outcome conceivably have been worse than this – being beaten by the foaming Tea Party Republicans with almost nothing to show for it?

At moments, there have been flickers of what this alternative Obama Presidency would have looked like. His huge government bailout of the auto industry kept millions of people in work, was hugely popular – and is already making a profit for the government. In the final days of this election campaign, he is railing against the massive corporate donations to the Republicans – a hypocrisy, for sure, but a popular one, pointing to a better path he might have chosen, and still could, if enough sane Americans shake themselves awake and pressure him hard.

Yes, on the night Obama won, I too felt that great global ripple of hope, and shed a little tear – but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed in the Rust Belt and their homes blown to pieces in the SWAT Valley as a direct result of Obama’s decisions. They are the ones who deserve our empathy now, not the most powerful man in the world, who has chosen to settle into and defend a profoundly corrupt system, rather than challenge and change it. It’s long past time to put away your Obama t-shirt and take out your protest banner.

whaddayagonnado...?

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