Good Evening, and Welcome Back

This blog has not been updated in more than two weeks, largely because of my despondency over the lack of readers.  This lack of readers is no surprise, as I have taken exactly zero measures to gain readers.  The despondency is not due to a feeling of rejection, but rather to a feeling of futility.  What is the point in writing if nobody is going to read?  If I write and nobody reads, have I truly written?  I have not participated in a conversation.  The point in writing is that I love to write, and that I will at some point soon begin to solicit readers, and when I do, they will have plenty to read.

Lately, I have read two pieces of Matt Taibbi's work in Rolling Stone, and I have fallen in love with his journalism.  Today I discovered his blog from the Huffington Post.  This guy is the real deal, and I agree one hundred percent with so much of what he says.  I am going to become a follower.  His most recent substantive post is one anyone with an interest in government of the people, by the people and for the people -- rather than for the rich and corporations -- needs to read.  Let's take a look at how Obama has done, and we will see that "change" and "hope" were just campaign slogans for him.

Let's face it, Wall Street bought Obama in November.  Michael Moore shows it, lists the millions Obama received from the different wall street firms.  And from medical industry companies.  I already linked Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece that demonstrates Obama's sellout on health care.  He also has continued the multi-trillion dollar redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the upper class we call the "bailout."  Taibbi documents it all.  And in this blog post, he gets to the heart of why Obama is a failure for those who want real change, and why the ordinary American needs a new leader:

"[W]e have problems whose solutions involve taking on powerful interests, political challenges that will necessarily involve prolonged and hard-fought conflicts, but what we have in the Democratic Party is an organization dedicated to avoiding such conflicts and resolving issues in the manner of a corporate board, in closed meetings with the chief cardholders where things get hashed out to the satisfaction of everyone present."

In short, Obama is not a fighter.  He is a consensus-builder.  That is generally good.  But when you have wildly disparate interests, and those interests are directly in conflict, and the people on one side have vastly greater bargaining power than the people on the other, if you are going to try to enact "change" that involves redistributing some of the rewards of the more powerful people to the other side, you need a fighter.  We  need someone who is willing to FIGHT.  As I saw mentioned on AlterNet, Obama has good values, but does he have "principles"?  In other words, will he stand and fight for anything?  That is an open question.  He sure won't fight for economic justice for ordinary people, or for quality health care for all.

In future blog posts, I will begin laying out what I believe should be the platform of a revolutionary party.  I've been giving this a lot of thought.  We want a society in which everyone is guaranteed the opportunity of social mobility from anywhere to at least the mid-middle class.  To be solidly middle class.  We want a society where everyone who works a full-time job can be a middle class citizen.  There should be the opportunity to a few to go much farther.  But everyone should be able to be "middle class."  In order to have that kind of society, there need to be a lot of changes in how we govern ourselves (for I hold the citizenry responsible for the government it has, as all governments exist on the consent of the governed).

"Ask not if this change will be good for me.  Ask if this change will be good for the general welfare."