By Jules Siegel The angry left is angry with Barack Obama. It’s lying on the floor kick­ing and scream­ing and hold­ing its breath. Good­ness is not being accom­plished. Injus­tice con­tin­ues sort of unabated. Bad peo­ple are doing bad things. This is obvi­ously all the president’s fault. I wish. The angry left pre­sumes that the pres­i­dent is in full con­trol of the gov­ern­ment, when he’s obvi­ously not. Even George W. Bush learned that and he was a Republican.

Obama won the elec­tion. Lin­coln won the Civil War. But the South won the peace because the North was unable to con­sol­i­date its vic­tory. Recon­struc­tion was a fail­ure. Yes, slav­ery was gone, but the rest of the Jim Crow way of life remained, and in some ways got worse. The red states are an almost per­fect match for the slave states and ter­ri­to­ries. The gov­ern­ment and media are infested with unre­con­structed rebels who faith­fully rep­re­sent the inter­ests of their cor­po­rate mas­ters. The rats haven’t aban­doned ship. To the con­trary they are mutat­ing so des­per­ately they will soon have fangs like tigers.

All gov­ern­ment serves the inter­ests of the own­ing class to the detri­ment of the peo­ple. Rev­o­lu­tions occa­sion­ally occur and just plain folks soon become the new weaponized rul­ing class. All gov­ern­ments use repres­sion, tor­ture, injus­tice as a means of main­tain­ing power. A reporter asked for­mer Mex­i­can pres­i­dent Car­los Sali­nas de Gor­tari why he made a cer­tain annoy­ing pol­icy deci­sion. “Because you gov­ern by gov­ern­ing,” he answered.

The United States has gone off the deep end and cre­ated a state of per­ma­nent war in order to increase the wealth of the rul­ing class. It isn’t some­thing that can be cor­rected easily.

Imag­ine that you are a busi­ness­man instead of a social activist. You dis­cover that key employ­ees have abused your trust and run the ship on the rocks behind your back, ruined your credit, stolen your trade secrets, changed the locks and pass­words. They are so deeply embed­ded in your infra­struc­ture that some of your own board is in on the scam and oth­ers are so deluded that they think you’re a bit daft. The stock­hold­ers are being enriched through some kind of Ponzi scheme, so they don’t want to know what’s going on as long as those div­i­dends keep on trucking.

Now let us sup­pose that your employ­ees are armed and dan­ger­ous and have a lot more fire­power than you do. Do your crim­i­nal employ­ees sim­ply hand over the new pass­words on being noti­fied that the jig’s up? What if the only way you can get them out is with flamethrow­ers, thereby destroy­ing whatever’s left.

The United States is a plu­toc­racy. This is frankly acknowl­edged by the busi­ness sec­tor, as in the Citibank report on plu­ton­omy .

In “The Rich and the Super-​​Rich,” (New York: Lyle Stu­art, 1968) Fer­di­nand Lund­berg argued very con­vinc­ingly that that one-​​half of one per­cent of the United States pop­u­la­tion then owned or con­trolled 95% of its assets. Since then, things have got­ten much worse. The more char­i­ta­ble — but grotesquely skewed — bench­marks con­ceal the real ratio by omit­ting con­trol of cap­i­tal and only con­sid­er­ing income (totally fake fig­ures from known tax evaders) and directly owned assets. The United States gov­ern­ment is their admin­is­tra­tive agency. The pres­i­dent is CEO. Although he has a big role in shap­ing the agenda, he ulti­mately car­ries out the orders of this inner ring of power. How could it be any other way?

Now this plu­toc­racy selects a new busi­ness man­ager to replace a total frat boy goon­ball with the reverse Midas touch. The new busi­ness man­ager attempts to steer the brand away from a gen­er­al­ized eco­nomic and social Kristall­nacht. He does not imme­di­ately reform the secu­rity sec­tor because they have guns (read that in the broad­est sense of weapons while repeat­ing after me “JFK, RFK, MLK”) and they do not espe­cially want to be reformed by out­siders, thank you. Despite this, he does make sig­nif­i­cant progress in other areas.

“This is harder than it looks,” Van Jones (who resigned from the White House after being linked with 9/​11 doubts) told Net­roots Nation.

“Pres­i­dent Obama vol­un­teered to be the cap­tain of the Titanic after it hit the ice­berg,” Jones reminded his pro­gres­sive audi­ence. He might have also pointed out that the Titanic sank because the own­ers changed the safety spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the steel and riv­ets in order to make the ship go faster. That’s exactly what’s going on now.

Whether you are pas­sen­ger or crew, you bet­ter hope it gets fixed, because they also reduced the rec­om­mended num­ber of lifeboats (chill­ing fact, but true in both the Titanic and the ship of state). Democ­rats want to lay on more lifeboats by strip­ping some of the mate­ri­als from the lounges. Repub­li­cans are block­ing that because they think that the worse it gets, the bet­ter for them. What?

I’m not dis­ap­pointed in Pres­i­dent Obama in terms of what he’s accom­plished, but in his utter lack of polit­i­cal good sense in allow­ing Rahm Emanuel to purge Howard Dean and then to insult the lib­er­als who worked so hard and con­tributed so much money to assure the 2008 victory.

Although I’m known as a writer, most of my income comes from graphic design, giv­ing me the free­dom to write what­ever I please instead of what­ever some pub­lisher pleases. I once had a client in a cor­ner. I set a price that made the color drain from his face. I was the only one who could deliver the job. He said, “Jeez, if you’re going to fuck me, could you at least give me a kiss first.” I said, “The kiss is that I am not going to dou­ble it because you are being inso­lent. Just make out the check.” And I laughed. And he laughed, too. He also increased his for­tune con­sid­er­ably as a result of my work, so I’m sure he laughed all the way to the bank, too.

Pres­i­dent Obama needs to hand out some real kisses between now and Novem­ber. Address­ing the Net­roots Nation is not enough. He won’t get rid of Rahm Emanuel (who is surely too use­ful in cru­cial ways), but he can reha­bil­i­tate Howard Dean and use his exec­u­tive pow­ers to make highly vis­i­ble moves that will re-​​energize the lib­er­als. I do not rec­om­mend total fast­ing while pray­ing for that. Let’s just hope he orders Tim­o­thy Gei­th­ner to endorse Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion Agency nom­i­nee Eliz­a­beth War­ren enthu­si­as­ti­cally with a big smile and a hug so hearty it will make his spe­cial other jeal­ous. The pres­i­dent can then do what­ever is nec­es­sary to make sure she’s imme­di­ately dis­patch­ing highly vis­i­ble orders smit­ing those who would do evil to con­sumers. If a recess appoint­ment enrages the angry right, so much the bet­ter. They aren’t going to vote for Democ­rats, are they?

I’m not angry, so I won’t need any kisses from the pres­i­dent, which will surely be in very short sup­ply. But I’ve always been a sucker for blondes, so if Eliz­a­beth War­ren is going to be hand­ing out any kisses, you can be sure that I will be first in line.