The new piece in Vanity Fair arguably sheds light on why Barack Obama turned out to be a major disappointment to progressives who expected him to curtail growing economic inequality, crack down on banksters, put a lid on exorbitant “defense” spending, and so on. More here.
Why we’re still in Afghanistan
Nobody ever willingly gives up the Empire. Just look at our presence in Germany, Japan, Korea.
I agree Obama is a closet conservative. His current populist(?) posturing is an etch-a-sketch. He will etch-a-sketch again should he win re-election and come out of the closet, taking the ax to SS,Medicare etc while pretending to be a helpless little baby against the Repubs.
To understand why there is not much difference between him and Bush (or more generally a continuity between Dems and Repubs), I highly recommend the book “You call this a democracy?” by Paul Kivel. Policy is actually dictated by elite institutions like CFR (there are youtube shots of both Hillary and Cheney praising CFR) etc.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/947881.You_Call_This_A_Democracy_
And this one :
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/ – I myself haven’t looked into this deeply but is a reference cited by Paul Kivel.
Contd from above :
The elites present us 2 parties as “choices” , an illusory one while permitting some narrow band of difference between them. Noam Chomsky also has written about this but can’t recall the particular essay/book.