I and millions of other supporters of this Obama moment in history have been puzzling over the strange events of the last few months. We’ve seen health care reform abandoned by a party and president both elected with a clear mandate to pass it.

As I wrote last time, William Greider explained early in the game that Democrats were probably too bought, with too much money, for them to embrace their classical values.

Now Glenn Greenwald takes this to its obvious conclusion, and nails the Democrats – both party and president – as playing a deliberate game of deception.

See if this dynamic introduced by Greenwald resonates with your experience of the last few months:

The primary tactic in this game is Villain Rotation.  They always have a handful of Democratic Senators announce that they will be the ones to deviate this time from the ostensible party position and impede success, but the designated Villain constantly shifts, so the Party itself can claim it supports these measures while an always-changing handful of their members invariably prevent it.
- The Democratic Party’s deceitful game

Greenwald’s analysis is devastating and final. You should read it, and click some links. He cites many commentaries, and several previous of his own. I especially recommend his linked post from December 16 which summarized several months of his analysis of the White House’s own deceitful strategy: White House as helpless victim on healthcare

Greenwald’s analysis explains why we didn’t see a rush of “liberal revenge” with the change in administration. I don’t believe the country really made a sharp turn left, but it seems clear enough to me that the nation as a majority wanted to see some leftish extremism in action for a period of time simply to redress some of the rightish extremism of the previous administration. But it never happened.

I had started to understand that the Democrats will actually be relieved to lose badly in the 2010 elections, so they no longer feel pressured to perform to an agenda they no longer support. But Greenwald’s work now makes it crystal clear to me that this has been the case since the 2008 landslide.

Damn.

We’ve been gamed. We voted these people into office, trusting them to deliver on one last hopeful throw of the political dice. They’ve thrown away the entire possibility of our ever believing in trustworthy representation again. This fine moment in history that could have shone so brightly is dulled and smeared, ultimately cast away in betrayal, sold for pieces of silver.

And the Democrats seem so insulated in their political compromise that they fail even to understand how badly they themselves are about to be abandoned for their treachery.

Because none of this means that the Republicans are fit to govern this country. It just means the answer to the troubles of America and the world cannot be addressed by any of the commonplace political members. It means the answer lies outside of the business-as-usual machinery.

The answer must lie with individual representatives who will cleave to an agenda more powerful than their party affiliation, and more powerful than the ocean of money existing to defeat it.

It would be naive to expect this kind of strength in representation to come from any individual’s character, the forces of corruption are far too strong. Undeviating representation can only come from a compact made with the agenda itself. It’s time to elect people who swear to follow a path laid down clearly in advance.

We’re not going to be able to root out this corrupted nest of politicians for any cause less than sustainable world. If the inhabitable biological world were not dying, none of this would matter much. As things stand however, political corruption is in the way, and has to go. Nothing less than excellent accountability will suffice now. The crisis itself forms the agenda and lends strength to its executives.

A year ago William Greider spelled out very clearly the dilemma faced by the Democrats, namely: can they return to their historic values against the corruption of money that has saturated them in the last three decades?

We saw in 2009 that so far they are unable. Instead of watching the Democrats fail all through that year, I wish I’d paid more attention to Greider and spent more energy working towards the new economy. Lesson learned.

I like Greider. As a fervent Fed-watcher I read his 1987 book, Secrets of the Temple, back in that time, and learned for the rest of my life what to expect from recessions.

What to expect from recessions you ask? Well, the productive, wealth-creating economy, and the workers and business leaders dependent on that economy, will endure the wait of attrition – with help from nobody – until the economy begins to gather force again from the new productivity created largely by productive workers and leaders, usually in new margins and areas of effort.

Then the thieves will come back into the daylight and begin to rip off the economy again, taking as much in unfair economic rents, and by actual fraud and theft, as government imperfection and corruption will allow, and distorting the economy by degrees towards its next collapse.

These processes go by different names as the fashions change.

I have been a great supporter of Barack Obama. But I watched the Democrats blink after Massachusetts and walk away from health care with their nerve shattered, and the White House was nowhere to be seen or heard. Exactly when a rallying cry could have shored up the crumbling spine of an entire political party and carried the field of battle, Obama held his silence.

It was then I realized his strategy wasn’t good enough for these times, and would fail to create for us what we must actually create ourselves.

Take a look at my bookmarks archive to see reactions in those fateful days. Here’s how three people in a row felt in the comments thread of Ezra Klein’s blog as we watched health care reform vanish. The third one is me.

I walked away on that day from a year’s worth of fascination with our broken, decayed and ghostlike democratic process, and turned back to the task at hand, which is to help create sustainable world.

Reversing climate damage and restoring the biosphere will not happen from the greatness of governments, but from the persistence of people.

I think this excerpt from Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2007 film The 11th Hour says more eloquently than I could ever write what’s wrong with our nation’s great institutions, and the direction we must point our efforts in now.

The 11th Hour: The forces blocking change

And since I hate it when people provide links and don’t say what’s in them, let me throw a bit of transcript your way.

Around 1:50 Michel Gelobter explains that despite appearances, in reality we have very responsive political leaders, it’s just that they’re responsive to wealth, and to money, and to corporate power.

And the reason our politicians aren’t responding to global warming is that their response is to a higher power. It’s to the fossil fuel industry.

Starting at 3:15 listen to David Orr describe how our political system has failed us with climate change. The general public wants a green world of renewables and clean air, but this fails to materialize. In a beautiful piece of imagery, Orr cites “the chasm between public opinion and public policy,” and the bridge across that chasm which we call “government.”

The bridge is broken, he explains.