All Over, but the Shouting

In the beginning there was some argument with me from Glenn Greenwald about Barack Obama's betrayal. Lately he's rather prolific about his assessment of the last three years. Whatever made a majority of the American people believe he was somehow God's gift of "hope and change" everyone could trust only shows how gullible people really are. Now while everyone is trying to justify their voting this liar into the Office of the Presidency of the United States and proclaiming his worthiness for another four years, he's quietly sold everyone done the river.

This past week Glenn Greenwald has written some rather important and thought provoking articles, well worth reading. This one  caught my attention, specially this quote from his: Obama takes tough stance on banks.

The intensely angry "town hall" political protests from last August, though wildly misdirected at health care reform, gave a glimpse of the brewing societal anger and economic anxiety; even Tea Party politicians are now being angrily harangued by furious citizens over growing joblessness and loss of opportunity as Wall Street prospers and Endless Wars continue.  This situation -- exploding wealth inequality combined with harsh austerity, little hope for improvement and a growing sense of irreversible national decline -- cannot possibly be sustained for long without some serious social unrest.  As Yale Professor David Bromwich put it in his extraordinarily thorough analysis of the "continuities" in what he calls "the Bush-Obama presidency":

The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s "debt deal" -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.  

Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.

Economic suffering and anxiety -- and anger over it and the flamboyant prosperity of the elites who caused it -- is only going to worsen.  So, too, will the refusal of the Western citizenry to meekly accept their predicament. As that happens, who it is who controls the Internet and the flow of information and communications takes on greater importance.  Those who are devoted to preserving the current system of prerogatives certainly know that, and that is what explains this obsession with expanding the Surveillance State and secrecy powers, maintaining control over the dissemination of information, and harshly punishing those who threaten it.  That's also why there are few conflicts, if there are any, of greater import than this one. 

Just to make everyone's day, this bit of news from Bloomberg hit mainstream news today:

Fed secretly loaned $1.2 trillion in public money to Wall St. firms: report

Differing from the $16 trillion in loans made through asset swaps and preferred stock agreements, which were first revealed by a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit mandated by Congress, these loans came from public money, representing the greatest largess of the financial sector during a crisis that threatened to pull the whole globalized system of finance to its knees.

If you're interested here's the list of his latest articles:

Obama v. Bush on power over Congress - Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A prime aim of the growing Surveillance State

U.S. Mideast policy in a single phrase

The Libya War argument

Obama administration takes tough stance on banks

--Joe