Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His health care bill is a hefty improvement but it still won’t provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies – if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalizing the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US — the single biggest emitter of warming gases — will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush — such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras — many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues — Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties — have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change. continue reading
via Johann Hari: The Real Reason Obama Isn’t Making Much Progress.
