There were also the little things the EPA did that the Republican Congress didn't make them do, such as bury scientific memos from staff so it could approve the pesticide clothianidin -- incandescently toxic to bees that is banned in most of the rest of the civilized world.  It's so toxic it gets taken up into plants making their pollen deadly to bees.

What has been truly shocking is the failure to support Social Security in an open and forceful manner. I never expected that from a Democrat (along with possible attempt to cut SS, which for me is the bottom line; I won't vote for, let alone donate money or time, a politician who attempts to cut Social Security).

It's change, alright, but in the wrong direction, and desperately sad for those who believed in Obama and the Democratic Party's intent to 'turn things around.'

• caving to the drill baby drill rhetoric
  
• tax policy
  
• inadequate stimulus
  
• lack of a fight on the public option
  
• handling of the forclosure debacle
  
• lack of teeth in financial reform
  
• failure to close guantanamo
  
• expanding the Bush invasion of privacy
  
• uptick in war on drugs, and war on immigration

so things I liked were

• There are some good things in the health insurance bill.  Not going to get into it now, been into it at length on this blog, but overall, I support most of it.
  
• There was some good stuff in the stimulus. Especially for my industry.  Gotta say thanks for my job!
  
• DADT repeal.  Finally.
  
• EPA seems to actually have a job again.
  
• Umm, I guess it's a good thing that they keep extending unemployment benefits.  It's certainly not a bad thing.  And I'll give it to him since republicans for the most part keep voting against it.

There are a few things in the HCR bill that are good like pre-existing conditions clauses being changed but largely Obama screwed up on that one because he could have just passed that and several other things and been more successful than he was with the omnibus failure.

But the largest failure of Obama has been on the economy. If you fix the economy, then you can be forgiven for a lot of other things but it's not going to be fixed with Obama.

It was a huge permission in an unpleasant, unpermissive time.

Looking back after two years it's time to ask Obama how he expects to accomplish progressive goals while Republicans hold the House.  How does he expect to organize Democrats so they are behind his policies?  Why does he refuse to reexamine his approach to the economy?

I think he's a lot happier than even he lets on - and I think the only Dems he has any interest in organizing are those who share his views: the rest of us will be told to get with the program, quit whining, or take a hike - if we haven't already.

Obama, who made this Faustian bargain with corporate interests in order to gain power, has now been crumpled up and thrown away by these interests. They don't need him anymore. He functioned as a brand after the disastrous eight years of George Bush.

And what we are watching is an even more craven attempt on the part of the White House to cater to the forces that are literally destroying the United States, have reconfigured, are reconfiguring this country into a form of neofeudalism.

Hedges also characterizes Obama as

somebody who, like Clinton, is a self-identified liberal, who speaks in the traditional language of liberalism but has made war against the core values of liberalism, which is a concern for those people outside the narrow power elite.

& i have to concur even though that will offend the self-identified centrist BTD, & even though i do not now suffer & have never suffered from CDS

the interview concludes w/this exchange:

AMY GOODMAN: . . . outside in the snow, outside the gates of the White House, [you said, during a demonstration on Thursday], "Hope, from now on, will look like this."

CHRIS HEDGES: That's right. All we have left are acts of physical resistance. . . . And if we don't get out, then we're finished. To trust in the normal mechanisms of power and those normal liberal institutions that once . . . gave voice and a place to working men [sic] in this country is to be very naïve and essentially acquiesce to our own bondage.