Governments of the U.S. show remarkable continuity of policies, despite new faces being elected and placed into control of the government machinery. That is why one can speak of “the government” without distorting reality very much when the policies evolve and show evolutionary changes.
The government whose policies have been problematic for the Tea Party members is the same government that the Occupy protesters have objected to. The government that bailed out Wall Street is the same government that has invaded American privacy and prosecuted whistle blowers. The government that has invaded Serbia under Clinton and Iraq in 2003 under Bush is the same government that invaded Libya, Yemen and Pakistan under Obama.
Obama never fails to take digs at the Republicans. I have seldom seen such a partisan president. But these distinctions are not all that important in the larger scheme of things. His object is to maintain his store of power and that of his party. His beefs with Republicans and theirs with him are “all in the family”.
All of the major politicians in Washington are isolated from Americans, talking to each other, attending their luncheons, banquets and fund-raisers, listening to a closed circle of advisers, and being interviewed by deferential media. The way they view us is vastly different from how matters appear to us. Only someone with a distorted view due to this isolation would tell us, as Obama has, that intrusive airport searches do not mean a loss in American freedom.
The government that is responsible for loss of domestic freedoms is the same government that has encouraged the 1% vs. the 99%, and it’s the same government surveilling all Americans and dropping missiles in Pakistan and Yemen. Partisan political maneuvering will not make things better. Change is not going to come until people within each party put up candidates who want to carry out a very different agenda than that of expansionism, interventions, crony capitalism, police state, and surveillance state. For that to happen, Americans are going to have to take a stand against these policies, rejecting empire, imperialism, inflationary finance, public debt and executive power.
9:32 am on June 19, 2013
