In just a little bit President Barack Hussein Obama is going to be inaugurated for a second time. This time there will not be high hopes and a belief that change is coming. This time no one who has been paying attention believes that this man is going to lift a finger in regards to human, civil, labor or human rights; environmental justice or economic inequality.

We know he isn’t going to depoliticize the State or Justice Departments and he is not going to fight media consolidation, seriously address unemployment, hold a bank accountable, close GITMO or stop prosecuting whistle-blowers while letting powerful corporate entities off every hook they put themselves on at our expense. I say all this because I’ve been watching him pick his cabinet and at every step along the way the need to be worried cannot be understated.

There are countless nominations that we will likely never hear about but just like a budget is a moral document a cabinet is a moral compass. It tells us what kind of worldview the President falls back on out of reflex. When moral documents, like budgets and negotiations on the morality of any action take place the cabinet sets the range of what is considered both practicable and ethical that the President is willing to entertain.

The four most notable nominations at this point tell us that what our President will be willing to do and who he will be willing to disregard and punish. The good news is that we do not look likely to invade Mexico or Venezuela. That bad news is that this is the good news.

John Brennan has been nominated to run the Central Intelligence Agency. I could think of worse candidates for this post but I’m not certain if there are any who don’t bear the tag unindicted co-conspirator, a tag that Brennan himself could be sporting if we took the time to look back not just barrel forward. By nominating him Obama is telling you that we will continue to have kill lists, the CIA is about to get more paramilitary and unaccountable, spying on Americans is permissible and that torture is on the table for the future. I guess it takes a Nobel Prize winner to bring Torquemada to the village.

Jack Lew has been tapped to be Secretary of the Treasury. In fairness he is at least more honestly venal and evil/incompetent as his predecessor Timothy Geithner who didn’t personally profit from being a terrible regulator. (Timmy’s sugar is coming when he steps away from government. It’s not a bribe if it happens later it’s a thank you note.) Putting this fellow in charge of the Treasury is on par with releasing a few thousand rattle snakes into a nursery school and then being surprised at the less than positive outcome. For anyone who thought Obama was going to be more liberal in his second term I have a credit default swap to sell you that Standard and Poor, Moody’s and Fitch say are Triple AAA. This SHOULD be a joke… it is not.

Former Sen. Chuck Hegel as Secretary of Defense is a pick that on the surface is just “bi-partisan” pandering of the highest and most rank level imaginable. But the bi-partisan thing should not upset you, Hegel should and it’s not that he’s possibly a homophobe. People change all the time for the better. It’s that he’s a nut-bag conservative whose voting record and views would make him an ideal Romney cabinet member. Chuck Hegel's voting record tells us that he has the compassion/enlightened sensibilities of the average denizen from the 9th Ring of Helll. This guy does not belong in any Democratic Administration that has a moral center… but we are talking about Barack Obama so it just makes sense.

Sen. John Kerry as Secretary of State, the pick that puts Scott Brown back in play for a Senate seat as the prohibitive favorite, is a bad pick on political grounds if the President was interested in anything like the “traditional” Democratic Party platform. Since our President is more like a Reagan Democrat than an actual Democrat this pick makes a great deal of sense because it potentially makes the Senate less progressive, which I am certain warms the President’s heart as it means less flak from the left. This is not to say that Sen. Kerry is a lefty because to get a sense of how screwed up our politics are he will sail right through the process because he will for sure protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

One inauguration, four nominations and a funeral… that’s what I called this post. So you are right to ask, what’s being buried? There used to be the sense that the American political system would and could respond to corruptions of its core values and systems. People even referred to it as a pendulum but these people were/are idiots. I think Obama’s Administration proves this is the case.

To paraphrase someone smarter than I am; corruption isn’t just rewarding people who profit from stealing from the public interest and destroying the general welfare. It’s also about punishing those who try and defend it with insecurity, poverty, physical and economic violence, incarceration and personal eradication of everything but their ideas. When the pendulum swings right we used to get Reagan now we get Bush and likely something far worse soon. When it swings left... now we still get Reagan... Jesus.

I remember the first inauguration that was supposed to set things to right like it was yesterday. There had been over a decade of the prior administration treating the Constitution like a doormat. High-ranking officials had politicized the Justice and State departments as well as the federal judiciary. Our government and its agents had secretly sold weapons to our avowed enemies, bankrolled and allowed drug cartels and terrorist cabals to operate with various levels of impunity in order to carry out shady, shaky and deeply unpopular foreign policy goals in demonstrably illegal ways.

The United States government had funded death squads, slaughtered civilians and here at home our social policies resembled the handiwork of demons. Taxes had been cut, debt had been run up, corporations had been unleashed as social programs, aid to states and infrastructure spending had been cut. But Bill Clinton was going to fix all of that and he didn’t. The irony that it took two Democratic Presidents to bury faith in a system the Republicans have spent every ounce of their soulless psyches fighting since before the New Deal should not be lost on anyone.