Happy New Year, Mr. President

Beinhart's Body Politic

by Larry Beinhart, December 22, 2009

If you’re on the Left, you’re angry at Obama.

The Senate version of the health care bill is infuriatingly weak. It is, like our present health care system, a method of delivering excessive profits to the health insurance companies, Big Pharma, and large scale health care providers. “It’s legislation that could have been important and meaningful and instead is a neutered industry—a friendly cup of weak tea with a Draconian anti-choice amendment.”*

We’re still in Iraq. We’ve sent more troops to Afghanistan, committed to unachievable goals. We still rely on private contractors in the military and intelligence services. The standard for gays in the military remains Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. The “stimulus package” has saved the banks, made the top layers on Wall Street rich, but has done nothing for ordinary people. Obama’s kept his hands off the crimes of the Bush Administration, torture, the manufacture of evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, firing of the US attorneys, the collusion between regulators and the regulated. He’s failed to stop home foreclosures.

He has not restored limits on executive power and the Justice Department still plays the “national security” card to protect crimes and incompetence. Guantanamo is still open. There’s no significant action on global warming. He didn’t get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.

If you’re on the Right, you’re still convinced that Obama is plotting to turn America into a Stalinist, Fascist, Muslim, gay, atheist state that taxes the rich and redistributes their hard earned money to worthless, lazy layabouts who want abortion at will. He’s closing Guantanomo—moving terrorists to American soil! We’ll all be targets! Obama bows to foreign leaders, reads from a teleprompter, and, he did not get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.

Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) proposed this thought experiment:
Pretend for the moment that it wasn’t President Obama who was elected in 2008 but President Karl Marx along with his running mate Friedrich Engels. The Marx/Engels ticket promised sweeping change. Workers would control the means of production, banks would be nationalized, lending at interest would be abolished, the wealthy would be taxed out of existence, marriage would be 100 percent civil and open to any who were of age, and imperialism tossed into the ash can of history.