Dear Mr. President…


There has been a lot of left-wing teeth-gnashing over the policies of the United States’ fake-progressive president Barack Obama. Left-progressives’ anger with the Obama administration is understandable given the new White House’s actions to (for example):

* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.

Link

* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A McChrystal – former chief of the military’s special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged “Af-Pak” war theater. [1]

* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal. [2]

* Increase “defense” (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama’s presidential election victory: “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.”[3]

* Revive military commissions.

* Continue the practice of renditions.

Link

* Maintain secret prisons for persons “held on a short-term, transitory basis.”

* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay. [4]

* Advance the policy of “indefinite detention” (potentially permanent incarceration) for Guantanamo prisoners for whom no legally compelling evidence can be marshaled.

* Intimidate England (with a threat to withhold intelligence data on potential terrorist attacks!) into preventing a Guantanamo victim from having his day in court on the Bush administration’s torture practices. [5]

* Sustain the Bush administration’s abrogation of habeas corpus rights in regard to the roughly 600 “enemy combatants” kept at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan (where people rendered out of other countries like Yemen and England can be considered “war [-zone]” prisoners!. [6]

Link

* Advance nauseatingly specious legal and moral arguments (“better to look forward than backward”) to prevent serious federal investigation of the Bush administration’s human rights crimes.

* Sustain George W. Bush’s domestic wiretapping program.

* Invoke the “state secrets” (akin to the divine right of kings) doctrine to prevent disclosure of evidence in response to lawsuits emerging from Bush era rendition and surveillance policies.

* Suppress photographic evidence of U.S. torture practices.

* Justify all this and more in the name of the supposed “global war on terror” that was supposedly launched in legitimate defense against the supposedly unprovoked jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001.

Link

* Disregard qualified progressive defenders of civil liberties and human rights from consideration for appointment to succeed Supreme Justice David H. Souter and to thereby counter the hard right leanings of the court’s conservative majority. [7]

* Send clear signals of intent to roll back and partially privatize Social Security and Medicare benefits.

* Betray campaign pledges to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to insert stronger labor and environmental protections. [7A]

* Betray campaign pledges of serious intent to advance an elementary and overdue labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act).

* Force and approve an automobile industry re-structuring that drastically cuts domestic autoworkers’ jobs, wages and benefits while subsidizing General Motors’ further shifting of jobs abroad. [8]

Link

* Advance a tepid, business-friendly health care “reform” that leaves the leading parasitic insurance corporations (major campaign sponsors of his) in power.

* “Methodically erase single-payer advocates from the picture” (Glen Ford) of health care reform despite the fact that a majority of Americans have long favored a single-payer (“Medicare for all”) health insurance system. [9]

* Spend trillions of federal dollars on taxpayer handouts to giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the economy over the cliff. Obama’s Wall Street bailout rejects the elementary bank nationalizations and public financial restructuring that are required to put the nation’s credit system on a sound and socially responsible basis, choosing instead to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries’ toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place. It amounts to a giant effort to “keep perpetrators afloat” (liberal economist James Gailbraith) through a scheme in which the government takes more than 90 percent of the risk but private investors reap at least half the reward.

I could go on. It’s not a pretty story. And it’s only going to get worse.

Infuriating as these policy actions (and inactions) and this corporate sponsorship may be to people of the actual Left (a different category than the broad-brush “Left” used in “mainstream” U.S. media), however, serious progressives have no business being surprised or disappointed by Obama’s presidential trajectory. Candidate Obama made his “deeply conservative” [10] corporate-imperial centrism clear to those willing to undertake elementary investigations of his political and ideological record. As Scott Horton noted last March on Antiwar.com, “those who bought into the slogans ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ last fall should have read the fine print. We were warned.”[11]

Link

There’s another and better (or at least more pleasing) reason, moreover, for radicals to temper their angst over the “betrayals” and other transgressions of the new White House. There is something to be gained on the longer path to radical change from experiencing all this terrible if predictable – and in fact predicted – policy under the nation’s new chief executive.

The dawning Age of Obama is potentially a great “teach-able moment” for left thinkers, communicators, activists who are ready and willing to take up the challenges of productive and progressive demystification and rebellion.

As Obama himself (along with John Edwards) repeatedly noted during the presidential campaign, in a comment that has not fallen from Obama’s lips since he reached the White House, “change doesn’t happen from the top down. Change happens from the bottom up.”

Click the link –> The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left

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    • Edger on June 28, 2009 at 04:07
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  1. I have to occupy space in this location of the world.  The last real president we had here was JFK.  Barry Soetoro, a Kenyan Muslim sits in the whitehouse but is most certainly not my pResident.

    The end of the empire will be violent, as it was socially engineered to be that way.

  2. …and by speaking in vague, uplifting platitudes, and by ommission making class issues non-existent, Obama, with the corporate media at his back, will help the ultra wealthy increase their plunder from the middle calss and poor.

  3. Im way off track, so dont mind me. Ill be this way through August. heh.

    interview Hunter Thompson sometime before Nov 2004.

     JLH: What do you feel would happen if Bush does get re-elected?

    HST: Well, the more of the same that’s happening now, this country has gone from a prosperous nation at peace and now four years later we’re a broken nation at war, that’s a huge turnaround. It’s the effects of a failing economy- although the war making machine- Christ, that’s doing better than ever, corporate profits for companies that make airplanes, security devices, and machine guns. Their profits are up 200 percent over the year before.

    Looking ahead I don’t think he’s going to win, but if he does get re-elected, all the directions they’ve gone in, all the environmental directions… one of them is putting oil rigs all over Colorado now- giving away all the national parks to mining companies and they’re doing that- putting oil derricks and pipelines everywhere. It’s sucking the energy out of the Earth. It’ll run out in about in about 37 years, according the scientists that measure stuff like that. This might be the last gasoline available maybe ever. We’re running out of jobs, all of the premier airlines are filing for bankruptcy because of the price of fuel.

    I think this country is heading into the Dark Ages. I believe George Bush will be seen as the Adolph Hitler of his time. And Dick Cheney will be seen as having committed war crimes worse than Hitler, and they will be put on trial and judged; they’re such religious freaks. What kind of maniac will declare war on the rest of the world? And turn the country into what nazi Germany was…

    He’s not a monster; he’s just a nerd… like a drunken kid. He’s not running the country anyway, Dick Cheney is running it…

    and a different one from Feb 2005, from DemocracyNOW!…

       HUNTER S. THOMPSON: We’re defending freedom? We’ll fight to the death for freedom? That’s absurd. This country is no more a capital or bastion of freedom now than Nazi Germany was in the 1940s. This country is a rogue nation in a way, but worse than a rogue nation. We’re a war-crazy, war-dependent, really, nation and that leads right to the oil industry. It is ridiculous. And particularly in the media; with the media I noticed. To not discuss the connection between oil and bombs in Iraq is disgraceful. Winston Churchill said, “In times of war, the first casualty is always the truth.” Truth is the first casualty of any war.

       MARY SUMA: In lieu of fear.

       HUNTER S. THOMPSON: You see, I’m a little bit cranked up and fanatical about it.

       MARY SUMA: That’s the age group, isn’t it, Hunter, that we want to really-

       HUNTER S. THOMPSON: Yeah. This is-I mean, if you want to live in a Nazi nation, I wouldn’t want to be 20 years old now.

       MARY SUMA: I wouldn’t either.

       HUNTER S. THOMPSON: I fear for what’s coming and for the welcoming committee of kids that’s going to meet it, saying come on in. No, it’s just ignorance, and well, the media, we’re being deprived of the real news. I’m not going to try to say I have the real news, but just what you said. That’s exactly right.

       MARY SUMA: Again, you’re going to be at Pepkey Park on Saturday afternoon. Do you know what your topic is yet? We know the topic, but do you know what-can you give us any preview of what’s going to be said, or do you just stand up there and let it-

       HUNTER S. THOMPSON: Yeah. I usually just take a-just wing it, freefall, just like I did today. I had no idea what I was going to say today. This is really a disgraceful moment in history and just thinking about the war, or attending the peace rallies, going out in the street, voting with your feet, as they say.

  4. It seems one policy has been being pursued for 19 years now, since Reagan.  It is a master plan designed by those who own and control the society.  This is why Obama policies are carbon copies of Bush policies, just done with greater finesse.

    Five Presidents — Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama — implementing One Policy!

    It seems we’ve been suckered again, audaciously suckered with a false prophesy of hope, a gossamer lie hiding the same dictatorial control and genetic weeding of surplus population.

    Let us never, never be fooled again.  This Empire must end.

  5. that is all.

    🙂

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