In Obama do we trust

I supported Barack Obama twice in his presidential campaigns. Our title caricatures the nation’s motto, mirroring a glitch in Obama’s presidency, or revealing a flaw in the current system of governance.

We are constituted to be a government of checks and balances, not to oppose each other over sliced power, but to ensure that certain perspectives are considered in the nation’s decision-making process, maintain 100 percent efficiency of function.

The three branches of government consist of the judiciary, which balances lawful precedence with the dictates of conscientious reasonableness. Mindfulness is their best asset, and commonsense process their stock in trade.

Reasonableness emerges from the filtered will of the people through the Houses of Congress. If the judiciary guards commonsense sanity moving from the ground to the Supreme Court, Congress shows the will of the people, from the constituency that sends them to Capitol Hill to the reflected voices of local legislatures that speak for immediate interest. Accountability of the Congress is legislative efficacy. The question abides: Is the will of the people reflected in legislation?

The effectivity of the people’s will to direct the people’s affair is designed, made to be cost-effective, and efficiently programmed in the universally elected executive office. The legislative branch ensures revenue stream and a reasonable budget for the executive to operate out of, and the judiciary judges if the effort is within the bounds of law.

The context of government behavior in our time, however, has been reduced to how it arrives at numerical financial worth and value. Since the market crash of 1929, the United States pegged value on future incomes of citizens and their businesses rather than on their accumulated savings from the past. E.g., I am assigned a credit rating and I can operate out of a credit line as if it was already my worth. Uncle Sam does the same allowing for the usual practice of deficit spending. My immediate value, like that of a government, is my credit rating.

The “free” market itself is programmed to increase value in time until reality forces its adjustment, and when it goes too far on promise more than possibility, it crashes to rebuild itself anew. But the stock market since 1929 has been massaged for political reasons so it is not totally dependent on market forces.

This is where Obama’s actuations are deemed regressive. Roosevelt’s New Deal put money in public works to broaden employment, spread equity, and ensure optimism in the market. Eisenhower rode on the Interstate Highway Act of 1935. Assisted by a marketing that zeroed on what we wanted rather than on what we needed, the economy flourished on our whim. Clinton was hailed for not interfering with market forces; Bush 1 and Bush 2 had Cheney who maneuvered decisions to the corporate world of fossil fuel that he surreptitiously inhabited and protected. Cheney spent for wars that the U.S. waged, costing a fortune that led Wall Street to collapse under its own weight.

Obama bailed out business concerns for political reasons, minimizing suffering that would have resulted if it did not interfere otherwise, he says. Wall Street is seen as holding Pennsylvania Ave. by the throat, and a do-nothing Congress sings praises to corporate spigot$, so the country developed “occupy” impetus, “tea party” ideology, and a broadside of critics ready to jump on Obama’s every move. The abiding trust was for nebulous but democratic Main Street to reclaim the nation’s sanity and health. 

For now, we have Congress in gridlock incapable of anything; the Supreme Court is gowned to figure out who can legitimately f**k who; and an executive branch bails out Wall Street but leaves Main Street alone to string bed sheets at the Park for therapeutic outbursts. 

The word is finally out: Obama’s foreign policies are inimical to the interest of the Pentagon and thereby the nation, while a U.S. spy plane violates Swedish air space to escape Russian land radars that locked in on the U.S. U2-type of spying. As humorist Borowitz of The New Yorker declared, the GOP is upset over Obama’s West Point speech about not invading another country without any reason!

Wall Street is in bed with the fossil fuel industry guarded by Uncle Sam’s military might, and a financial system that lives off the revenues it collects from the rest of the world through its preeminence in the technologies surrounding the monetary system it overlaid and imposed. Ninety percent of the American economy serves Uncle Sam’s global network, while three percent farms more than it requires, and the manufacturing sector shrinks further as it out-sources elsewhere.

Obama presides over all of these. Do I in Obama trust? Hell, no! Do I have faith in Boehner and Reid? Roberts? No, thank you! I take Obama and his executive orders (behind count from those of Roosevelt and Eisenhower), still. Meanwhile, my bed sheet and I head for the Park.