You wanna hear something sad? I was just watching a report on the Keystone XL Pipeline, which will pipe a tar-like material, thinned with highly toxic fluids so it will flow through a pipe, but still heavy enough that it sinks in water and sticks to anything and everything, making it practically impossible to clean up. That liquified tar sand pitch completely kills anything it comes in contact with. The Keystone XL Pipeline will attempt to move this horrifically nasty goo to the Gulf of Mexico, past all the U.S. refineries, and into the global oil market, oil being a fungible product that can be refined anywhere and moved quickly to the are of the world that will pay the most money for it.
Moving it over American soil doesn't do one damned thing to help our economy, to increase oil availability, reduce our reliance on foreign oil, or fight climate change by moving us off carbon based fuels. What it does do is guarantee that more carbon will be released into the atmosphere and threaten every wildlife ecosystem, water supply, and farming acre it comes near.
And here's the sad part.
Obama's record on supporting governmental actions that violate our Constitutional rights, his record on allowing corporations, regardless of his speeches to the contrary, to run roughshod over the middle and lower class, his record on politics as usual, has me convinced he will allow the pipeline to go through.
Obama has used the divisionary tactics of the GOP against them with great skill, taking the social issues that the GOP tried to use to divide the nation and using those same issues to unite his electorate, but when it comes to being a good president, he has a tendency to slip in favor of corporations. I get it that the GOP refuses to allow a decent jobs bill to go through, but that doesn't mean that all that's left is to play the GOP's game of corporate fascism. While I want corporations to make scads of cash, I want them to do it without destroying the environment and the health and prosperity of people within their sphere of influence. I want CEOs to make scads of cash, too, but after every single person that works under them is paid a wage they can live on. And I have come to expect Obama to kowtow to corporate interests.
And that sucks.
He was supposed to be the outsider, the common man, the guy that broke the stereotype and fought against the wrong in favor of the right because he had no allegiance to the old system, and because he been a professor of Constitution Law for heaven's sake, a man that knew every letter, every intent, that went into the design and evolution of our form of government of, by, and for the people. Instead, half the time, when no one's looking, he's George Bush's cynical corporate elitist "mini-me". Not always, but enough that I have actually come to assume that when money is involved, he'll side with the money.
And I hate it.
I want him to be the person the people that hated George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted him to be, the people educated enough to know that Reaganomics did and still does suck expected him to be. I want him to be more Bill Clinton than Bill Clinton, minus the affairs. I wanted him to slap the GOP back into place, I wanted him to make sure another Bush-Cheney/Nixon administration could never again exist, I wanted him to reinstate the controls on the executive by punishing those that had abused the executive branch's powers. Instead, he practically pardoned Bush and his cohorts, he's allowed Bush's policies to stand, he's allowing the Constitutional violation of privacy by the NSA, he's gone after people who blow the whistle on those Constitutional violations and war crimes like a rabid dog after fresh meat, and he's siding with corporations when the basic rights of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at stake.
Mr. Obama, I sure hope you prove me wrong. About all of it, but you can start with the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Copyright (c)2014 Todd Grigsby, all rights reserved
