Glenn Greenwald sums up the problem at the U.K. Guardian:

The same Democratic president who supported the transfer of $700bn to bail out Wall Street banks, who earlier this year signed an extension of Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and who has escalated America's bankruptcy-inducing posture of Endless War, is now trying to reduce the debt by cutting benefits for America's most vulnerable – at the exact time that economic insecurity and income inequality are at all-time highs. Where is the "epic shitstorm" from the left which Black predicted? With a few exceptions – the liberal blog FiredogLake has assembled 50,000 Obama supporters vowing to withhold re-election support if he follows through, and a few other groups have begun organising as well – it's nowhere to be found. Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.

And that's just the beginning of the problem with Obama. Consider the damage he has done on other issues.

Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies – once viciously denounced by Democrats – of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.

Greenwald's article contains many links documenting Obama's abysmal record. Obama has destroyed the modicum of "hope" that I still had. I am now convinced that there is no solution to our biggest problems by using the system. On the national level, voting is a charade to trick ordinary folks into thinking that they have a voice in their government--they've been tricked into thinking that voting is adequate and responsible citizen participation. What we need, more than ever, is for people to turn off their TVs and to stop living in the fantasy world of sports teams and movie stars. We have a country to run, and we have President who does what loud and obnoxious people tell him to do. We need to become loud and obnoxious if we are to get Barack Obama to do the right thing, because he has proven himself to be, at best, a channeler, not a leader. We need to challenge him by calling him out and labeling him for what he is: Not-Leader! I write this as a person who financially supported Obama and voted for him. And I would still support him over McCain/Palin or any modern-day equivalents. The big question, then is how we get the voters to wake up from their fantasies, to become well-informed and to loudly demand that our elected representatives run the country in a responsible and sustainable way. How do we get citizens to express unrelenting outrage at the corrupting influence of the current system of financing campaigns with huge sums of private (mostly corporate) money? Anything less is nihilism. Perhaps that is what we need to start calling Americans who think that the mere act of reading their crappy local newspapers, watching the most popular versions of TV "news" and voting makes them responsible citizens: Nihilists! Perhaps I am able to see Obama for what he is because I am not very "tribal." I agree with Glenn Greenwald that "tribalism" is why progressives are not speaking out against the man they supported for President. It's time to stop being tribal. That would be the start of a solution.

Matt Taibbi thinks we should all be outraged about the growing talk about a corporate tax holiday. He's right.

What is the purpose of the federal "farm bill"? It's for the benefit of America's farm families and it ultimately benefits all Americans, right? Guess again. It's loaded with pork and corporate welfare. The Environmental Working Group has set the record straight, in this list of 10 points you need to know about America's "farm bill." These are real eye-openers, good reasons for you to condemn many parts of the most recent farm bill and to demand reform in the upcoming version of the "farm bill."

The Environmental Working Group knows that you care about the affordability and availability of healthy food and clean drinking water. So we wanted to make sure you know as much as you can about the massive piece of legislation that guides federal agriculture policy. Congress rewrites the farm bill every five years or so. It drives federal spending for farm, nutrition and conservation programs and is the only important piece of environmental legislation that Congress is almost certain to enact over the next 18 months. In just a single year – 2010 – farm bill programs spent $96.3 billion. With so much on the table, here’s our list of the 10 most important things you should know about the farm bill: 1) The farm bill doles out billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to the largest five commodity crops: corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans. Those payments go out, regardless of need, and they mostly fail to help the nation’s real working farm and ranch families. In fact, since 1995, just 10 percent of subsidized farms – the largest and wealthiest operations – have raked in 74 percent of all subsidy payments. 62 percent of farmers in the United States did not collect subsidy payments, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2) The Obama Administration says fruits and vegetables should fill about half of our plates during meal times. Yet, only a tiny fraction of the farm bill funding goes to programs that support healthy fruits and vegetables, and many of these programs have no budget going into the next farm bill, which is up for renewal in 2012. 3) Some 90,000 checks went out to wealthy investors and absentee land owners in more than 350 American cities in 2010, despite the so-called “actively engaged” rule adopted in the 2008 farm bill. This rule was designed to ensure that federal payments go only to those who are truly working the land. It hasn’t worked. 4) A handful of other commodities also qualify for government support, including peanuts, sorghum and mohair. Dairy and sugar producers have separate price and market controls that are highly regulated and can be costly to the government. 5) The flawed subsidy system creates perverse incentives for farmers to grow as much industrial-scale, fertilizer- and pesticide-intensive crops as possible, with harmful effects on our environment and drinking water – and the availability of organic food in your grocery store. [More . . . ]