A bone to pick with Obama

No doubt this post will annoy some Obama supporters. A few years ago I would have been reluctant to anger so many people that I count as friends. After all, I voted for Obama. I understood why so many were drawn to Obama's sermon of hope and change. I watched the inauguration with tears in my eyes, naively confident that our newly elected African-American president would shake up the status quo feverishly defended by rich greedy white men. I mean--he was a community planner--he actually helped poor people! What other president in recent memory had actually made a living by helping the poor and downtrodden? I had reason to hope--or so I thought.

But now I no longer care if I rock the boat. Sounds harsh, I know, but something has fundamentally changed in my personality since dealing with these immigration issues. I have glimpsed how utterly lost and maligned our country has become. It's bad enough that we have ignorant and clinically disturbed politicians in office, that people are detained without ever having committed a crime,that we-- the richest nation in the world-- cannot afford a national health care system, that our elected officials won't take care of our veterans and wounded solders, and despite the irresolute commitment to improving our education system we have declared war on teachers while simultaneously slashing school budgets. If that isn't madness, then I obviously don't know what is.

We have become a spoiled, callous and corrupt nation. Even more egregious is how many of us collude with this depravity by embracing a collective rational that engenders silence and denial of the chaos, madness and injustice that permeates our country. We become subsumed into political scandals, celebrity mishaps,a myriad of frivolous pursuits and the long expired (if ever it really existed) myths of American exceptionalism, entitlement and moral superiority.

Obama, in my estimation, has been a huge disappointment. I could easily hold him solely responsible for grievous errors committed against the most vulnerable in our country. These errors include renewing the Patriot Act, the raids and arrests of non violent activists, his proclamation that the government can spy on Americans by intercepting any calls made internationally, his implementation of the National Emergencies Act which allows him to revoke Habeas corpus for any American who is deemed an enemy combatant,etc, etc, etc..

Especially noxious is Obama's reluctance to implement any real push to initiate immigration reform--a campaign promise. He has said that despite having the means to offer relief to individual families dealing with detention and separation he is reluctant to do so because "we are a nation of laws." Bah humbug. We are a nation of laws that favors the wealthy and powerful. For the rest of us we live with inequity everyday.

While any of those listed reasons could be the apex of my disappointment there is another, more profound reason for my lamentation. You see, I believed in Obama's rhetoric because I still believed that the office of the President still held some power. I believed that the President had the ability, within certain limitations, to correct injustices against the people. I believed that the integrity of the President still helped to shape the nation and subsequently the laws that governed that nation.

However, I now realize that the real power in Washington is governed by lobbyists, and particularly shaped by the wealthy corporate lobbying machine. In essence, The President is a figure-head and only acts in accordance with the will of the corporations. The two party system is irrelevant. Both parties are corporate whores.

I could hold Obama solely responsible for these misdeeds, but that would be a mistake. Essentially, Obama is at the mercy and the whims of wealthy corporations--just as the rest of us. He has little autonomy. It now occurs to me that perhaps I was too hard and critical of George W. Bush during his presidency. He had as little autonomy as Obama. I still don't feel that Bush was very astute but maybe he wasn't the evil man that I thought he was. He was just a puppet on a string.

I do have a bone to pick with Obama and here it is: my biggest disappointment is that he undermined my belief in the American political system. I can never go back to the naive bliss of blind faith. Perhaps, in the end...that is a good thing.