Obama's election campaign was funded overwhelmingly by individuals making small donations. Why, then, is he bending over backwards to please the corporate sponsors now he is elected?

Do Corporate interests really own the federal government? (and by extension, us, since we ARE the government?).

I don't see much of a solution other than breaking the corporations by voluntary poverty and no longer buying their shit.

Oh yes - isn't the millenial JUBILEE overdue by 8 years, hijacked by the greediest most corrupt evil crew of criminals ever to besmirch the Republic? (and that's saying a lot).

Jubilee! All debts forgiven!

Jubilee! We're the ones living!

Jubilee! Dancing in the streets!

(The Icelanders did it!)

Jubilee! Sink the greedy thieves!

It seems to me that this is the root of the problem: corporatists want a predictable environment. They are at the center - and how much innovation, how many new ideas, come from the center?

All action happens at the margins - market pricing, new ideas, unemployment, artistic creation - and the dominant center is devoted to crushing, or at least marginalizing it.

Obama has a very big problem - he is by definition at the center. And all the entrenched forces are arrayed to co-opt him. I don't see this changing much until there is a lot more unrest - like when unemployment reaches 15%, which it will, IMHO.

Fuck the center - let it destroy itself through hubristic overreach. Tinkering with the machine's rules is doomed to failure.

And be ready to prosper picking up the pieces.

requires an empty stomach and little to lose. The resultant action is the only way, IMHO, to force institutional change.

But first we need to overcome our addiction to false dichotomies (left-right wing, good-evil, good guy-bad guy, clean-dirty, and so on...). It's hard to break a 2000 year-old pathology.

It's a very big job just to purge the "Justice" Department of all the Bush authoritarian christianist partisans. And I have no great confidence that it will happen anyway, considering all the lobbyists that have been hired in other areas, despite Mr. Obama's pledge not to hire them.

The "Republicans" have signalled that they will not be appeased or placated, and put partisan victory ahead of the Republic. I fear that American don't have the guts to take the steps necessary to overcome the entrenched corruption of the US Federal Government.

However, a depression may cure many of these ills, as it did in the 30's, by revealing the man behind the curtain to the bread and circuses crowd.

If there's no money in the Treasury to loot, the looters are out of business.

Is there some institutional impediment to this? Can only the Federal Justice department lay federal charges?

The Constitution doesn't seem to have been an impediment to the federalization of local and State police forces. Why should it be an impediment to local DA's laying federal charges?

"a depression cures nothing, has there ever been a more power happy president than FDR?"

The depression broke much of the oligarchy's hold on the country by destroying their fortunes.

"How about during the war?"

Actually restored the fortunes of the oligarchies.

"Ask some Japanese-Amercans from the 1940s. Did anyone in FDR's adminstration ever get prosecuted for authorizing those camps?"

This was a real war, with real threats and real risk of loss. It took the combined efforts of all the world's democracies to overcome the nationalist/fascist aggressions. It was Not a fake war like this "war on terror". In a real war, everyone is involved. People kicked dachshunds in the street because they were German. Highway billboards had headings like "the only good Jap is a dead Jap", complete with picture of a leering monkey-faced Japanese soldier bayoneting a nurse.

"Was anyone ever prosecuted for droping atomic bombs on cities in Japan? Clearly a war crime."

Yes - by the victors. And widely regarded as necessary to end a war against fanatical people who would not have surrendered otherwise. The Bush Gang lost the "war on terror" because a fake war is by definition unwinnable. Victory? What does it look like in a fake war?

Rush Limbaugh and his ilk (sponsored by General Motors and Coors beer) preach their hatred to divide the American people against themselves. But perhaps people are finally figuring this out, as a previous poster noted.

I'm not sure how the "tyrannical federal government" (I'd describe it more as a greedy parasitic/predatory corporatist death star) will be reformed. But the reform process will probably get ugly. And there is a solid chance that the fascist movement represented by Faux News will win, and the police state which already is in place will be strengthened.

Obama's recent continuation of the Bush junta's legal intervention in the Email and State's secrets lawsuits is not encouraging.

As long as the "right" is divided from the "left", corporatist police state control will continue. Tim McVeigh's beefs were essentially the same as the Weathermen's, IMHO - a federal government run of by and for corporatists and their hired guns. Ruby Ridge? Kent State? What's the diff?

"As far as who the Army will side with, I am not sure. Whoever it is will become America's Caesar."

I was kind of hoping for an end to the rule of the generals (General Motors, General Electric, and General 3-Star all).

I'm not sure people will accept a Caesar for long. GW tried, successfully for a while, but ended up as a joke. Obama certainly has the required uncritical adulatory support now - but for how long?

And the bankruptcy of the generals is plain for all to see in the wreckage of their financial system, their crappy car manufacturing, and their adventure in Iraq.

People aren't buying their shit anymore, despite the best efforts of their TV shills.