Obama? No. He Can't.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.

(Notice that I compared him to Neville Chamberlain the appeaser, not to Hitler like the neocon "deather" trolls crashing the health-care town hall meetings do, compulsively invoking Godwin's Law.)

Now consider the actual structure of this oligarchic republic. The Founders intended to prevent democracy in their 1787 constitution that established an electoral oligarchy in the new United States. The result is that when the election's over, the citizens' role in government vanishes. Citizens have no voice in government except on election day. (This applies above all on the federal level. Some states and localities have limited direct democracy.) So neither the President nor Congress has to listen to the American citizens at all. Usually, they listen to the richest CEOs and their lobbyists instead.

Alas, Obama turns out to be no exception. He doesn't care about you, American people. He, like nearly all other American politicians, serves first and foremost those corporations that bought him into the White House. In the case of health reform, it's the very corporations that started and spread the "deather" conspiracy theory in the first place. With the war, it's the military profiteers who laugh at the powerless people's desire for an end to the war; after all, America's business is war. If he weren't such a pushover, we'd have Canadian- or European-style socialized medicine by now, rather than yet more taxpayer money crammed down the collective throat of the corporate welfare kings.

Also consider this: Obama is carrying on Bush's massive bailout of Bush's bankster buddies. Instead of helping the victims, he's helping the Wall Street crooks who crashed the economy and screwing the victims. He's letting AIG and Goldman Sachs give out even more obscene bonuses, and punishing those who criticize them for it. Worst of all, he's not only not stopping the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but escalating them — exactly like the hated Bush!

Is this the Barack Obama we thought we elected? Hell no! President Obama has already surrendered to the corporate health care lobby; the bill he's now pushing guarantees massive corporate welfare for them and a raw deal for us. The military-industrial complex all but owns him the same way it owned Bush, which is why he has been so eager to prove that he doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize by immediately acting like a warmongering Bush and escalating the Afghan war.

In an electoral oligarchy, politicians don't represent the people. They represent whoever buys them into office. In the corporatist system that currently controls the Western world, that usually means the biggest corporate welfare kings. Obama has turned out to be no exception.

That's why I'm afraid I have to say:

No, he can't.

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