September 24, 2011 at 07:53:55 By Eugene Elander (about the author)
The Obama White House has once again come up with more smoke and mirrors to seem to deal with the many problems of America and Americans, while actually doing little or nothing on our behalf. Recently, The White House announced a new pseudo-program titled WE THE PEOPLE which appears to encourage all of us to share our concerns with the President and his staff. There is a three-step process to do this: after going to a new WE THE PEOPLE link on WhiteHouse.gov, we can initiate a petition, get others to sign it, and submit it back to the White House for their review.
Sounds good, if the present people in charge of our nation were trustworthy and really intended to carry out the many promises to the American people which got Barack Obama elected in 2008. But the WE THE PEOPLE fine print makes clear that all the work must be done by the petition submitter, and all the necessary "votes" must be secured before White House staff will even bother to look at any petition, let alone take action on it. Meanwhile, great pains are taken to avoid telling WE THE PEOPLE anything about how many signatures are required on each and every petition to get the attention of the White House -- that vital fact seems to be highly-classified information, which even Wikileaks probably could not dig out. It seems WE THE PEOPLE do not deserve the common courtesy of being told the "rules of the game."
This White House has the worst response record of any with which I have ever dealt, going back to Richard Nixon's term of office. It is highly doubtful that WE THE PEOPLE is really a sincere and serious effort to hear from the PEOPLE and take action on our concerns. No, this is just more smoke and mirrors, to give the appearance of not only caring about those concerns, but being serious about really doing something about them.
Hiding the number of petition signatures which is required to
actually do anything is more than just a violation of the transparency in government which Candidate Barack Obama promised; it is a clear statement to all of WE THE PEOPLE that communications to the Obama White House, including our petitions, are in truth written in invisible ink as far as that White House is concerned. This new thrust would be better named: SEE NO EVIL -- HEAR NO EVIL -- ACT ON NO EVIL. But we should not be surprised -- the champions of low taxes on multi-millionnaires, the continuation of really bad health care, the appeasement of the worst of the Tea Party ideologues, and the wheeling and dealing to get the Federal debt limit extended (as required by the 14th Amendment to our Constitution) are dominated by another slogan: NO GUTS, NO GLORY!
Author's Biography Eugene Elander has been a progressive social and political activist for decades. As an author, he won the Young Poets Award at 16 from the Dayton Poets Guild for his poem, The Vision. He was chosen Poet Laureate of Pownal, (
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