The Global Warfare and Corporate Welfare State

Because the Obama presidential campaign was run on a platform of change, the continuity of Bush-era policies under the Obama administration are all the more disheartening and disappointing to the new president's liberal and left-leaning supporters, who hoped, against all odds, that the change they desired was achievable within the confines of the two-party state. Their sense of regret is palpable, and warranted in terms of both foreign and domestic policy.

Cup O' Joel focuses in on the administration's invocation of the state secrets privilege to continue to squash lawsuits aimed at revealing government abuses of the fourth amendment in its warantless wiretapping program, as well as the transferral of the Guantanamo Bay prison system to Bagram, Afghanistan, in order to elude due process, and concludes:

Since 2000, many liberals repented that they cast votes for Ralph Nader and (perhaps) accidentally gave the presidency to Bush. The lesser of two evils they (and I) came to believe might be evil, but it is still less evil. Right? Perhaps. But it seems that partisans on both sides of America’s political divide ought to uphold minimal standards of not-evil-at-all.

Anarchy Jack at Manifestos from the Decline, on the other hand, fixes upon the continuity of policy in the harboring of war criminals and the kleptocratic bipoligarchy centered on Wall St., and admits:

I’ve given my support, not only in money but in hope to the idea that this time, it could be different. But it can’t, because this time, like last time and the time before that, the moneyed and the well-connected did what they do best: they used our hopes and desperation to steal what little we had left. I didn’t come to this conclusion via the endless right-wing or left-wing demagoguery that fouls the airwaves. I just looked outside after hearing there was a new sheriff in town, and saw for myself that America was still a kleptocracy.

The contruction of the surveillance society within the context of the national security state will continue unabated so long as the duopoly party for global warfare and corporate welfare is allowed to remain in power.