Emperor Obama fails Hero Test

By Dan Hamburg
Almost of a year ago, I wrote an editorial for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat in which I called on Barack Obama to be the hero the country so sorely needed (“We Need a Hero”, SRPD, 1/18/09). I pointed back in time to the flush of hope that greeted Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, hope that was slowly strangulated over eight bumpy years. Would Obama’s tenure follow a similar trajectory?

So far, the trajectory is clear and it is not good. Obama’s first year, and particularly the current health care debacle, has served only to amplify the fact that the government of our country has been wrested out of the peoples’ hands. It is government, as Ralph Nader pointed out over a decade ago, “of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the DuPonts.” Meanwhile, the corporations slyly deflect anger onto the government for the dysfunctional society that has resulted.

This is a society in which the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider and the working class forks it over for the transgressions of the über-class. It’s a society in which health care is considered a privilege, tens of millions of homes are “under water”, millions of well-paying industrial jobs have been outsourced and both public and private debt have spun out of control. It’s a society that condones perpetual war in service to a vast armaments industry hidden from a distracted public. As Michael Lerner points out, it’s a society that “leaves people hungry not only for life’s necessities, but for ethical and spiritual fulfillment as well.”

The failure to reach a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen, whether blamed on the U.S. or China, underscores the seriousness of our predicament as a nation and as a species. The final score showed that the U.S. couldn’t “get an agreement done” and that demonstrated, more than anything, that we are no longer the lone superpower.

The most horrible manifestation of the current moral, ethical and legal vacuum—worse even than the bankster hijacking—is the nearly decade-old wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars demonstrate with crystal clarity that very little remains of the principles upon which this country was theoretically founded. We are reduced to fighting wars that, as even Alan Greenspan acknowledged, can only be accurately described as “resource wars”.

As journalist Pepe Escobar wrote recently in Asia Times regarding the AfPak war, “Once again, since the late 1990s, it all comes back to TAPI – the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India gas pipeline, the key reason Afghanistan (as an energy transit corridor) is of any strategic importance to the US, apart from being deployed as an aircraft carrier stationed right at the borders of geopolitical competitors China and Russia.”

Barack Obama understands this. He also knows that beneath the ground in Afghanistan is a rich store of uranium, tungsten, molybdenum and rare earths (used for everything from TVs to superconductors to Priuses). And the corporations that supply the missiles, the surveillance equipment, the helicopters and the fighter jets know that Obama understands this. Why else would they have made him the most heavily funded presidential candidate in history?

In fulfillment of his backroom pledge to the armchair warriors of the military-industrial complex, President Obama has now signed the largest military budget in the history of the United States, larger than the combined budgets of the rest of the planet. And now this military is being more intensively turned on a semi-literate people who are engaged in a decades-long civil war. Florida Democrat Alan Grayson put it succinctly, “This is an 18th century strategy being employed against a 14th century enemy.”

Military intelligence inside the Obama administration estimates that there are approximately 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country of Afghanistan. This is the “cancer” that the president says justifies sending 30,000 additional troops at a cost of $30 billion a year. Once the latest Obama surge is in place, the US will have nearly twice as many troops and contractors in Afghanistan than the USSR at the height of their south Asian misadventure of the late 1980s.

While the military, political and economic elites belief in American exceptionalism—the unquestioned goodness and correctness of the United States—remain impervious to both reason and morality, there are larger forces at work. Every empire in history that acted with stupidity and impunity has been brought down; this empire will fare no better,

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Dan Hamburg was Second District Mendocino County supervisor from 1981-85 and a District 1 California Congressman from 1993-95. He is currently a candidate for Fifth District supervisor.

OLIGARCHS’ AGENDA THRIVING UNDER OBAMA

Obama: Complicit in Torture, Complicit in Fraud
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
— Thomas Jefferson

By Dan Hamburg and Lewis Seiler
Little has changed since Barack Obama assumed the presidency. The imperial agenda of the United States proceeds unabated with record military spending, expanded wars and prolonged occupations. Backtracking on wiretapping, rendition, and rights to due process, the new administration mirrors the old in its assertion of “state secrets.” Enabled by Obama’s picks of lifetime financial deregulators Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, the banks continue to dominate Washington.
As Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin described recently on a Chicago radio station, “Frankly, the banks run this place.”
Then there is the Bush administration’s legacy of torture, a problem that won’t go away quietly despite Obama’s determination to “look ahead.” Unfortunately for him, the president doesn’t have the right to choose which laws he will enforce, which international treaties he will honor. (Remember how we balked at George W. Bush’s imperious signing statements?) According to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, Obama is placing himself in legal jeopardy by refusing to meet the solemn obligations of the United States of America with respect to the crime of torture. This would be on top of the extreme political jeopardy Obama may encounter now that he has reversed virtually every position with regard the war on terror (other than his pledge to intensify the Afghan war) he advanced during his campaign.
Most recently, the president has broken his promise of transparency by refusing to honor a court-ordered release of photographs that could put the lie to the assertion that the torturers were “a few bad apples.î
According to Major General Antonio Taguba, “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” They are proof of a systematic policy of torture that, according to no less an authority than Dick Cheney, were approved in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama took millions in campaign contribution from Wall Street and the big banks, more than any candidate for office in the history of American politics. He bought the pre-meltdown line that the raft of exotic financial instruments spawned by the Street were evidence of the energy and creativity of the US economy, rather than signs of its corruption. When the crash came, Obama smartly saluted the Bush/Paulson plan to advance an initial $700 billion advance to the scofflaws, a bailout without requirements or controls. The president hasn’t wavered since in his belief that Humpty Dumpty can and must be put back together again.
Under Bush and Obama, 13 trillion dollars have been spent, lent or guaranteed to save the country’s largest (albeit insolvent) banks. But when it came to mustering 51 Senate Democrats to help homeowners avoid foreclosure by the very banks that have been devouring his government’s bailout feast, Obama was mute. Senator Durbin again captured the moment: “The banks that are too big to fail are saying that 8 million Americans facing foreclosure are too little to count.”
At his 100 Days press conference, the president called the ethical meltdown that led Americans to torture a “mistake.” Hauled before Congress to explain the financial meltdown that gathered steam on his watch, Alan Greenspan explained his “mistake”of “presuming that the self-interests of banks were such that they were best capable of protecting their shareholders.” In a similar vein, we’ve heard repeatedly that the Iraq war — with no WMD’s found and no post-shock and awe plan — was another “mistake.”
How come these brilliant, highly educated and compensated people keep making supersized “mistakes?” Perhaps because they aren’t mistakes at all.
What the United States needs more than anything is some full-bore truth-telling before we slip into a fascistic, Orwellian dystopia. We could start by admitting that we preyed upon Iraq not because that country was perceived as a threat but because, after 10 years of sanctions, Iraq was no threat at all. In fact, it was ripe for the picking. Once consumer protection was removed, the banks could freely practice their own brand of predation. Millions of Americans, hoodwinked into signing up for “no-doc”loans with teaser rates, were also ripe for the picking.
Was the financial meltdown a mistake? According to University of Texas Professor James K. Galbraith, “You had fraud in the origination of the mortgages, fraud in the underwriting, fraud in the ratings agencies.” Committing fraud is not the same as making a mistake.
Fraud, according to our dictionary (American Heritage, 2nd ed.), is “deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.” Fraud is not a mistake.
In 2004, the FBI warned that “rampant fraud in the mortgage industry could become an ëepidemic.'” The Bureau was ignored. (Interestingly, the Bureau was also ignored when it tried to sound the alarm that young Saudis with dubious visas had enrolled in US flight training schools.)
Top economists including Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman were also ignored because in fact, there was no mistake being made in this, the largest transfer of wealth from the lowly taxpayers to the lofty oligarchs in the history of the world. As in their preemptory attack on oil-rich and strategically-located Iraq, the elites were simply pursuing their private, or corporate, interests, indistinguishable in their minds from the public interest.
The American people are now suffering from all these “mistakes”and there are plenty of signs that things will not improve soon. In May of this year, we learned that just over half a million people lost their jobs. That was considered good news. Experts predict at least eight million foreclosures in 2009. That translates into about 30 million people without homes. Already tent cities have sprung up in cities and towns around the country. Democrats in Congress are now proposing to construct “emergency centers”on abandoned military installations across the country under the supervision of FEMA.
That’s FEMA as in “Heckuva job, Brownie!” While trillions go to the banks, the only housing to be afforded foreclosed-upon Americans will be the barracks of a detention camp.
We are still waiting to find out what “change”this new president plans to bring. So far, it looks like we the people have done little more than substitute a tarnished Bush brand for a shiny Obama brand. The military-industrial death machine rolls on, the taxpayers keep taking a beating, and our constitutional rights still hang in the balance. The powerful few are stealing our wealth, stealing our future, and stealing our birthright of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”in a democratic society.
Make no mistake, we the people are being taken for a very expensive ride, an unpleasant ride that our children and grandchildren will be forced to take as well. The elites that own the wealth, fund the politicians and control the message are on the verge of stealing our birthright of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”in a democratic society.