That’s what I’m saying! Remember the exclusion of Kucinich and Gravel by the networks and DNC at the debates? Our candidates were selected for us well in advance. It’s the ol’ fake election / regime change ploy, right here at home.

Looks to me like Obama has been a stalking horse for Wall Street, the MIC, and the networks/telecoms/NSA wire-tappers, all this time. Keeping the torturers and thieves in charge says it all.

Let’s face it: We were sold a brand, we didn’t select our best possible public servant.

Is it regulatory capture, or straight up control fraud? Is he controlled and compromised by TPTB, or some sort of Perkinsian economic hit man?

I like the way John Pilger puts it in this video of his presentation of his article, Mourn on the Fourth of July.

Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. “Free enterprise” became a divinity. “By the early 1950s,” wrote Noam Chomsky, “20 million people a week were watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider disrupting the ‘harmony’ of the ‘American way of life’ . . . Every aspect of social life was targeted and permeated–schools and universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on textbooks.”

The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology. Recently, I saw the 1957 musical Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Between the scenes of wonderful dancing to a score by Cole Porter was a series of loyalty statements that the colonel in Vietnam might well have written. I had forgotten how crude and pervasive the propaganda was; the Soviets could never compete. An oath of loyalty to all things American became an ideological commitment to the leviathan of business: from the business of armaments and war (which consumes 42 cents in every tax dollar today) to the business of food, known as “agripower” (which receives $157bn a year in government subsidies).

Barack Obama is the embodiment of the “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good . . . We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories).

PR, propaganda, advertising–they all make use of the power of our own dreams, terrors, and aspirations, using symbols and narratives that speak directly to the psyche–that literally push our buttons–to somehow make us feel good about getting jacked. And there’s no doubt about it anymore: we got jacked by master myth-makers.

They used the power of our dreams of a better America, to jack us into this Waste Land, and stick us with the bill.