Commentary on President Obama's Performance in Budget Deliberations: Protecting the Powerful Over the Poor

And, in case my previous posting about Rick Perry's Response rally has given the impression that I consider President Obama a solution to the problem I discuss there, and not part of the problem--not every bit as much a puppet whose strings are being pulled by the same corporatist taskmasters who pull Perry's strings--I'd like to recommend my friend Wendell Griffen's assessment of Obama's performance in the budget negotiations at Ethics Daily.

Wendell's statement is entitled "Obama Protects the Powerful Over the Poor."  I've blogged several times about Steve's and my experience with the New Millennium Baptist church that Wendell pastors--most recently here.

The problem I discuss in my previous posting--the growing subjugation of American faith communities to the political and economic ideology of the religious and political right--implicates American liberals as much as it does American conservatives.  Without the craven capitulation of liberals in American communities of faith and American culture at large to the same corporatist taskmasters who are gutting the love ethic and its prophetic application by American religious groups, this process of eviscerating the prophetic witness of communities of faith would never have been so conspicuously successful as it has been.

American liberals are as beholden to the corporatist taskmasters as are American conservatives, and as enchained by them.  And, as Clancy Sigal points out recently at Alternet, one of the most lamentable effects of Obama's presidency has been the dismantling of what remained of a progressive (as opposed to liberal) religious and political movement in the U.S.  That movement has now been effectively blocked primarily by liberals who have bought into the centrist mindset, and not by conservatives.  Liberals with the president at their helm . . . . 

The chances are now growing increasingly slim for effective progressive political and religious movements in the U.S., and the economic hardship that we can now expect due to the capitulation of American leaders of both liberal and conservative stripe to the corporatist puppet-masters pulling the strings of our government will only make those chances further diminish, as people turn to the rabid right out of desperation, as their only foreseeable saviors amidst economic chaos.