ABSTRACT
The corporate and imperial ruling class that backed Obama's campaign and staffed many of key cabinet and other policymaking positions had different priorities for America. Kramer desired public relations along with improved governance for American Empire and Inequality in wake of grossly incompetent and messianic-militarist Bush-Cheney administration. Black poverty and class oppression in the liberal urban North and shock at the horrors of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, King had come to radical-democratic conclusions. The demand for radical, even revolutionary change naturally strikes many, probably most, of Obama's more intellectually inclined liberal and progressive supporters as hopelessly "utopian" and "unrealistic" as off the charts of serious consideration. Pragmatists say that the things are utopian, that people have to work within the system and achieve what can, gradually and in a piecemeal fashion. Increasingly grave ecological issues, particularly those connected with the largely profits-driven problem of global warming, call into question pragmatic wisdom of pursuing nothing more than the incremental change.
