Dump Obama? Do I Care?

Last night I was carousing with some of my pinko socialist cronies on-line. The most reasonable group consensus seemed to be that we should work for Obama's re-election and hope for the best during a second term. In other words, let's hope he somehow becomes willing to stand up for some sort of social and economic justice. But in the cold light of morning I'm not so sure.

Barack Obama isn't a liberal. Hell, he's barely a Democrat if you stand him up next to Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson. That's okay. He never pretended to be a liberal. But he did promise transparency. Remember his line about putting the national health care debate on CSPAN? As soon as he took office he made a U-turn. He cut his teeth on Chicago politics, and does it show? It sure does. “National health care” became the Chicago Plan, brokered behind multiple smoke screens, and now he's doing it again with the deficit ceiling negotiations. America, prepare to be sold down the river one more time. (That would be the Illinois River—the one that turns green now and then, and has dissolved a lot of corpses over the years.)

Sell-Out No. 1 – No cost-of-living increases to Social Security benefits.

Here's a site which calculates inflation of the U.S. dollar by a number of methods:
http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/

If you receive a monthly SS benefit today of $1600, you're not living high on the hog unless you have a lot of other income. Now let's roll that amount backwards 15 years, using the above calculator. In 1995, the relative worth of $1,600.00 from 2010 is:

	$1,120.00	using the Consumer Price Index
	$1,180.00	using the GDP deflator
	$1,090.00	using the unskilled wage
	$1,010.00	using the Production Worker Compensation
	$941.00	using the nominal GDP per capita
	$809.00	using the relative share of GDP

You can see why the wankers in Washington would love to amputate any COLA from Social Security. The long-term impact is enormous.

And by the bye, it's interesting to go to that website and plug in numbers from your own life. For example, if your rent in 2000 was $700 per month, that translates to at least $860/month today by the lowest of those calculation methods.

Sell-out No. 2 – Unfunded Foreign Wars

Yes, Obama always “owned” the Afghanistan thing, but he also tripped all over himself to tell us how he wasn't “nation-building” and how this wasn't Vietnam all over again. Well, guess what? Osama bin Dead for awhile now, and his organization left town long before. Why haven't we? I know why, and so do you. Too many Important People are making too much money. It's $10 billion per month x 12 months x how many years? I'd love to have a pizza contract for that game!

The President is the Commander in chief. He can order the troops home any time. He doesn't need Congress for that. He just needs the courage, but I don't think it's in him.

Someone needs to explain to me why, exactly, I should care whether Obama is re-elected. He re-upped on the Patriot Act. He gave all the lifeboats to Wall Street and left the rest of us to suck seawater. He short-circuited any chance for real national health care. He relentlessly feeds the military-industrial complex while helping stake the space program. Now he's willing to gut Social Security and Medicare, which I've paid into all my life and now rely on almost totally. He's a sweet, smooth talker, but it's all bullshit. Bush Jr. was dangerous because he's a stupid tool. Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al are dangerous because they're fascists. Mitch Romney is dangerous because of his vanity and hubris. Michelle Bachmann is dangerous because she's a flake with cunning and hubris. Tim Pawlenty is yet another fascist bully. (I'm from Minnesota. Trust me on this.) But are any of them worse than Obama? Pretend I'm from Missouri.