Sounding Off:

On the Fourth of July, President Obama’s campaign words of promise echoed in my ears: “breaking the power of the lobbyists, providing affordable health care for all, cutting middle-class taxes, ending both the Iraqi war and our dependence on foreign oil, and uniting us.”

Like many, I wanted to believe, and our critical times seemed to provide more surety. At any rate, I thought that these herculean tasks could be completed by the man from the planet Krypton — incidentally, that is why unimaginative neocons can’t find his birth record.

But we are finding that Bush policies and Bush words of the past eight years still bring command and privilege to the business elite.

Bush’s “us and them” chant, the Bush cowboy embrace of the corporate elite, and his hardy litany of “fighting for freedom” are big items in the neo-conservative culture. The money and resource commitment for these ideals are still embodied in a monolithic corporate plan, and thus a still-not-dead right-wing ideology continues to guide government decision-making.

Obama has spoken against the polarity of “us or them” in offshore forums, but evidence shows that he too embraces at least the Wall Street elite. And we are still fighting — and dying — in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Accordingly, I contend that the overwhelming power of huge corporations and their financial stake in the current economic and political endeavors still stymies Obama, and certainly curtails the willingness of Congress, to move ahead progressively.

In spite of the Obama promise of change, we are still in Iraq for at least two more years; he has seemingly caved in to Wall Street; health care reform will probably go down the familiar yellow brick road of heartless, for-profit health care; and we still have Guantanamo, the symbol of torture.

Obama’s stimulus package (indulged with much pork) did provide a modicum of economic forward thrust. His budget is greener but it funds an even fatter military. What does it mean? It means that our children and our grandchildren will continue to pay for unneeded spending.

There is still the Iraqi war at $9 billion a month, and we still have unneeded military spending — even some unwanted by the Pentagon. One unneeded, and still unworkable, program is the missile defense system ($63 billion during the last seven years). We still have huge subsidies for business.

When I last looked, tax breaks for the rich are still with us. We continue to hire mercenaries for military and government service. And never was KMR held accountable for its faulty work in Iraq, some of which electrocuted American servicemen — 13 dead since 2003.

Normally, we might say change doesn’t come overnight and that we should have patience. But I’m not so sure we have time to be patient, especially with early indications that Obama’s actions — or maybe, inactions — are not allaying critical needs, and that his stimulus package is not enough.

The wolf is at our doorstep! Unemployment is rising. Americans are starting to lose faith. Furthermore, foreign creditors are worried about the dollar. While compromised Democrats deliberate, Republican mongrels, like neocon stooges, are nipping at their heels.

The conditions that are with us today began five decades ago. In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned us about the power of the “military-industrial complex,” a dominant combination of industrial giants and military institutions that benefit from war.

At the time, the U.S. accounted for 47% of the world’s arms expenditure. It was after a world war and at the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In spite of the end of the Cold War, in 2009, America still accounts for almost 50% of global military expenditures, and we can less afford it today.

After World War II, Americans were saving at an 8% to 10% clip. By 1985, it began declining, until by 2000, savings was negative. Actually, in the 1980s, Americans started consuming with abandon, discarding age-old values of thrift. By the 1950s, we had begun to adopt a “continuous war” footing, starting with the dawn of what we called the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Later, Reagan policies promoted uncontrolled military spending and at the same time, hypocritically derided big government; this while he used government for huge deficit spending, deficits augmented by Reagan’s $200-billion tax cut for the rich. It was said that there wasn’t a weapon system he didn’t like.

He was one of the first Republican presidents to abandon thrift, hiking military spending till the Soviet Union cried uncle. With a short respite from Clinton’s balanced budget, our cry for Uncle Sam to stop the spending was profligately ignored by another Republican, George W. Bush.

We have no time left to placate the members of the plutocracy that a compromised Congress and misguided administrations helped to build over the years and to whom George W. Bush gave the keys to the national vault. We must spend only for investments — capital and human.

Only this spending will make us strong again: more productive workers and more vital industries for a future most of us won’t see under our current culture.

The unfortunate truth is that Obama and our Democrats in Congress don’t have time to balance their political needs against real national needs. Though many Democrats are thick with self-interest, Republicans seem to show no glimmer of recognizing a national need.

The world is in deep recession, the dollar is beleaguered, and our way of life could easily crumble. As Obama once said, we need to put away childish things — in essence, get serious about our country. He could heed his own advice.

JIM HOOVER is a Huntington Beach resident.