Why Obama's Iran Policy Will Fail Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World

Published on Thursday, October 29, 2009 by TomDispatch.com

Why Obama's Iran Policy Will Fail

Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World

by Dilip Hiro

While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: Whatever the White House perceives as a threat -- whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles -- must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Barack Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor's failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran's recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein's Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington's fresh threats of "crippling sanctions."

Most important, the Obama administration is ignoring the altered international order that has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street's excesses. While its stimulus package, funded by taxpayers and foreign borrowing, has arrested the decline in the nation's gross domestic product, Washington has done little to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. That task -- performed by the U.S. in recent recessions -- has fallen willy-nilly to China. History repeatedly shows that such economic clout sooner or later translates into diplomatic power.

Backed by more than $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, the state-owned Chinese oil corporations have been locking up hydrocarbon resources as far away as Brazil. Not surprisingly, Iran, with the second largest oil as well as gas reserves in the world, looms large in the strategic plans of Beijing. The Chinese want to import Iran's petroleum and natural gas through pipelines across Central Asia, thus circumventing sea routes vulnerable to U.S. naval interdiction. As this is an integral part of China's energy security policy, little wonder that Chinese oil companies have committed an estimated $120 billion dollars -- so far -- to Iran's energy industry.

During a recent meeting with Iran's first vice president, Muhammad Reza Rahimi, in Beijing, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao stressed the importance of cooperation between the two countries when it comes to hydrocarbons and trade (at $29 billion a year, and rising), as well as "greater coordination in international affairs." Little wonder, then, that China has already moved to neutralize any sanctions that the United States -- backed by Britain, France and Germany -- might impose on Iran without United Nations authorization.

Foremost among these would be a ban on the export of gasoline to Iran, whose oil refining capacity falls significantly short of domestic demand. Chinese oil corporations have already started shipping gasoline to Iran to fill the gap caused by a stoppage of supplies from British and Indian companies anticipating Washington's possible move. Between June and August 2009, China signed $8 billion worth of contracts with Iran to help expand two existing Iranian oil refineries to produce more gasoline domestically and to help develop the gigantic South Pars natural gas field. Iran's national oil corporation has also invited its Chinese counterparts to participate in a $42.8 billion project to construct seven oil refineries and a 1,000 mile trans-Iran pipeline that will facilitate pumping petroleum to China.

Tehran and Moscow

When it comes to Russia, Tehran and Moscow have a long history of close relations, going back to Tsarist times. During that period and the subsequent Soviet era, the two states shared the inland Caspian Sea. Now, as two of the five littoral states of the Caspian, Iran and Russia still share a common fluvial border.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between the Islamic Republic and Russia warmed. Defying pressures from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Russia's state-owned nuclear power company continued building a civilian nuclear power plant near the Iranian port city of Bushehr. It is scheduled to begin generating electricity next year.

As for nuclear threats, the Kremlin's perspective varies from Washington's. It is far more concerned with the actual threat posed by some of Pakistan's estimated 75 nuclear weapons falling into militant Islamist hands than with the theoretical one from Tehran. Significantly, it was during his recent trip to Beijing to conclude ambitious hydrocarbon agreements with China that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "If we speak about some kind of sanctions [on Iran] now, before we take concrete steps, we will fail to create favorable conditions for negotiations. That is why we consider such talk premature."

The negotiations that Putin mentioned are now ongoing between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., Britain, China, France, and Russia) as well as Germany. According to Western sources, the agenda of the talks is initially to center on a "freeze for freeze" agreement. Iran would suspend its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for the U.N. Security Council not strengthening its present nominal economic sanctions. If these reports are accurate, then the chances of a major breakthrough may be slim indeed.

At the heart of this issue lies Iran's potential ability to enrich uranium to a level usable as fuel for a nuclear weapon. This, in turn, is linked to the way Iran's leaders view national security. As a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran is, in fact, entitled to enrich uranium. The key point is the degree of enrichment: 5% enriched uranium for use as fuel in an electricity generating plant (called low enriched uranium, LEU); 20% enriched for use as feedstock for producing medical isotopes (categorized as medium enriched uranium, MEU); and 90%-plus for bomb-grade fuel (known as high enriched uranium, HEU).

So far, what Iran has produced at its Natanz nuclear plant is LEU. At the Iran-Six Powers meeting in Geneva on October 1st, Iran agreed in principle to send three-quarters of its present stock of 1,600 kilograms (3,500 pounds) of LEU to Russia to be enriched into MEU and shipped back to its existing Tehran Research Reactor to produce medical isotopes. If this agreement is fleshed out and finalized by all the parties under the aegis of the International Atomic Energy Agency, then the proportion of Iran's LEU with a potential of being turned into HEU would diminish dramatically.

When it comes to the nuclear conundrum, what distinguishes China and Russia from the U.S. is that they have conferred unconditional diplomatic recognition and acceptance on the Islamic Republic of Iran. So their commercial and diplomatic links with Tehran are thriving. Indeed, a sub-structure of pipelines and economic alliances between hydrocarbon-rich Russia, Iran, and energy-hungry China is now being forged. In other words, the foundation is being laid for the emergence of a Russia-Iran-China diplomatic triad in the not-too-distant future, while Washington remains stuck in an old groove of imposing "punishing" sanctions against Tehran for its nuclear program.

Tehran and Washington

There is, of course, a deep and painful legacy of animosity and ill-feeling between the 30-year-old Islamic Republic of Iran and the U.S. Iran was an early victim of Washington's subversive activities when the six-year-old CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadiq in 1953. That scar on Iran's body politic has not healed yet. Half a century later, the Iranians watched the Bush administration invade neighboring Iraq and overthrow its president, Saddam Hussein, on trumped-up charges involving his supposed program to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Iran's leaders know that during his second term in office -- as Seymour Hersh revealed in the New Yorker -- Bush authorized a clandestine CIA program with a budget of $400 million to destabilize the Iranian regime. They are also aware that the CIA has focused on stoking disaffection among Sunni ethnic minorities in Shiite-ruled Iran. These include ethnic Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzistan adjoining Iraq, and ethnic Baluchis in Sistan-Baluchistan Province abutting the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Little wonder that Tehran pointed an accusing finger at the U.S. for the recent assassination of six commanders of its Revolutionary Guard Corps in Sistan-Baluchistan by two suicide bombers belonging to Jundallah (the Army of Allah), an extremist Sunni organization. As yet, there is no sign, overt or covert, that President Obama has canceled or repudiated his predecessor's program to destabilize the Iranian regime.

Insecure regimes seek security in nuclear arms. History shows that joining the nuclear club has, in fact, proven an effective strategy for survival. Israel and North Korea provide striking examples of this.

Unsure of Western military assistance in a conventional war with Arab nations, and of its ability to maintain its traditional armed superiority over its Arab adversaries, Israel's leaders embarked on a nuclear weapons program in the mid-1950s. They succeeded in their project a decade later. Since then Israel has acquired an arsenal of 80 to 200 nuclear weapons.

In the North Korean case, once the country had tested its first atomic bomb in October 2006, the Bush administration softened its stance towards it. In the bargaining that followed, North Korea got its name removed from the State Department's list of nations that support international terrorism. In the on-again-off-again bilateral negotiations that followed, the Pyongyang regime as an official nuclear state has been seeking a guarantee against attack or subversion by the United States.

Without saying so publicly, Iran's leaders want a similar guarantee from the U.S. Conversely, unless Washington ends its clandestine program to destabilize the Iranian state, and caps it with an offer of diplomatic acceptance and normal relations, there is no prospect of Tehran abandoning its right to enrich uranium. On the other hand, the continuation of a policy of destabilization, coupled with ongoing threats of "crippling" sanctions and military strikes (whether by the Pentagon or Israel), can only drive the Iranians toward a nuclear breakout capability.

During George W. Bush's eight-year presidency, the U.S. position in the world underwent a sea change. From the Clinton administration, Bush had inherited a legacy of 92 months of continuous economic prosperity, a budget in surplus, and the transformation of the U.N. Security Council into a handmaiden of the State Department. What he passed on to Barack Obama was the Great Recession in a world where America's popularity had hit rock bottom and its economic strength was visibly ebbing. All this paved the way for the economic and political rise of China, as well as the strengthening of Russia as an energy giant capable of extending its influence in Europe and challenging American dominance in the Middle East.

In this new environment expecting the leaders of Iran, backed by China and Russia, to do the bidding of Washington means placing a bet on the inconceivable.

Copyright 2009 Dilip Hiro

Dilip Hiro is the author of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (Nation Books), among other works. His forthcoming book, After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World, will be published in January 2010, also by Nation Books.

Published on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Toward a Coherent Presidency

by Rick Chamberlin

“We must pursue peace through peaceful means… in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.; The Trumpet of Conscience

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own… structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

Barack Obama; Dreams from My Father

Cohere. It is not a common word, and it’s an uncommon leader who understands the meaning of it.

As a Harvard graduate, former constitutional law professor and civil rights attorney, President Obama may understand what it means better than any president we’ve ever had, perhaps even as well as that other great Nobel Peace Prize winner quoted above, Martin Luther King, Jr.

King spoke so eloquently and coherently about so many things that it’s sometimes hard to remember the real heart of his message. Fortunately, he crystallized that message for the world when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964. The award, he said, represented “a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

In other words, our means and ends should cohere. We should be coherent.

Barack Obama’s verbal and moral coherency became evident to a large segment of the electorate when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. Voters across the political spectrum bought into the “Change We Can Believe In” slogan when he made a bid for the White House because Obama continued to articulate a clear moral framework out of which decisions would be made if he was elected. In his inauguration address, he said that America must not shrink from its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

By pledging to close Guantanamo, eschewing torture and beginning the draw down of troops from Iraq, President Obama has begun to bring means and ends in line again; he has begun to make us a more coherent nation.

This is in stark contrast to the policies and actions of the former administration, which epitomized what sociologist Michael Mann calls incoherent imperialism. George Bush gave lip service to unity and peace but gained office with a strategy of divide-and-conquer. These same three words could be used to sum up his foreign policy during his two terms in office. Bush’s verbal incoherence often amused but his actions, by and large, were anything but funny. I never begrudged him that he often mispronounced nuclear – an easy word to bungle. What mattered most to me were his policies and actions with respect to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise.

Bush was far from our first incoherent president, however. In a 1967 sermon that came to be known as his Christmas Sermon on Peace, King reminded those gathered that most military geniuses throughout history – and most U.S. presidents – have talked of peace while waging war. President Johnson, King said, spoke eloquently of peace even as U.S. jets pummeled North Vietnam with bombs.

King believed lasting peace would only come when the world and its leaders embraced the nonviolent affirmation that ends and means must cohere. Destructive means, King said again and again, cannot bring about constructive ends. It’s a lesson President Obama should heed, especially as he considers a strategy shift in Afghanistan.

“Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force’.” King was not dreaming when he spoke those words, he was reflecting lucidly on how far strategic nonviolence had taken the civil rights movement in America, and before that how it had been used by Gandhi and his followers to expel the most powerful military power at the time, Great Britain, from India without the bloodbath so many expected.

At his inauguration in January, President Obama seemed to echo King’s famous sermon when he said, “…our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint….”

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new,” said Obama. Is strategic nonviolence of the type wielded so successfully by the Indian people against the British, the Poles and Czechs against their Soviet overlords, the Filipinos against the Marcos regime, South African blacks against the brutal apartheid government, and Serbian students against Milosevic one of the instruments to which the president referred?

The instrument is really only new in the hands of American presidents, though a few have understood the principle behind it. President Lincoln, whom Obama says he seeks to emulate, did not have the examples of Gandhi and King to follow, but the words of those great men would have rung true to him. By ignoring the loud calls to punish the Southern states after the Confederacy’s surrender, Lincoln probably saved our nation from a second civil war. “I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice,” he once told a friend.

Without such understanding, redemptive and creative goodwill toward all people – the nucleus of nonviolence – government of the people, by the people and for the people would have long ago perished from the earth. It remains the only means by which we will ensure that such government continues, spreads and endures, and the only means by which we will win the hearts and minds of our enemies and short-circuit the cycle of violence. Nonviolence, King said in his Nobel acceptance speech, was not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force.

All other means will ultimately backfire. We claimed victory in the “war to end all wars,” but that victory gave rise to Hitler and fascism. Even our military triumph in the so-called good war, World War II, spawned the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and many other bloody conflicts. Indeed, al Qaida and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sprang in large part from the fears, divisions and resentments resulting from WWII.

If the United States is to lead the world again, we must do it with soul force, not military force. The real emperor with no clothes was not, as some think, George Bush, but the myth at the heart of his presidency and so many other presidencies – the myth that might makes right and that violence is somehow redemptive. The opposite is true: right makes might. America’s greatness has always been rooted in its moral power.

By following King’s example, by ensuring that his actions cohere with his words, by trying wherever humanly possible to make means and ends cohere, and with a little creative translation on his part, President Obama could indeed help the U.S. lead the world into the new era of peace of which he spoke at his inauguration. Not only would that make him the most coherent president the United States has ever had, it would make him fully worthy of the peace prize that even he thinks he doesn’t yet deserve.

Or Obama could turn out to be like most presidents, viewing peace as a distant goal instead of the only means by which we can arrive at that goal. If so, his presidency will fall far short of its promise – and far short of the hopes the Nobel committee and billions of people around the world have placed in him.

As we face two wars, nuclear proliferation, global warming, global terrorism and global pandemics, the world needs a coherent American presidency like never before. But the fulfillment of King’s full dream of a world at peace with itself is not up to one person. We are all heirs to King and Gandhi’s legacy of nonviolent change. As President-elect Obama reminded us shortly before he took office, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, he can’t do it alone. We the people must co-lead.

So let us all commit today to make means and ends cohere in our own lives. And let us make it clear to all our leaders – including President Obama – that we expect the same from them. We expect coherency.

Rick Chamberlin is a freelance writer living in Wisconsin. Contact him at rickertel@hotmail.com.

Published on Thursday, October 22, 2009 by TomDispatch.com

Obama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?

by Nick Turse

When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S. military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.

While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has generally escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory. This might have been driven home recently -- had anyone noticed -- when, in the midst of the Washington debate over the Afghan War, a forgotten front in President Bush's Global War on Terror, the Philippines, popped back into the news. On September 25th, New York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi wrote:

"Early this decade, American soldiers landed on the island of Basilan, here in the southern Philippines, to help root out the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Now, Basilan's biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups, have become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and American development projects, much of the island outside main towns like Lamitan remains unsafe."

In attempting to explain the uneven progress of U.S. counterinsurgency operations against Muslim guerillas in the region after the better part of a decade, Onishi also noted, "Basilan, like many other Muslim and Christian areas in the southern Philippines, has a long history of political violence, clan warfare and corruption." While he remained silent about events prior to the 1990s, his newspaper had offered this reasonably rosy assessment of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts against Muslim guerrillas on the same island -- 100 years earlier:

"Detachments of the Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth Infantry, with constabulary and armed launches assisting, are engaged in disarming the Moros on Basilan Island. The troops are distributed around the coast and are co-operating in a series of closing-in movements."

Days after Onishi's report appeared, two American soldiers were killed on nearby Jolo Island. As a Reuters story noted, it "was the first deadly strike against U.S. forces deployed in the southern Philippines since a soldier in a restaurant was killed in 2002..." As in Basilan, however, the U.S. counterinsurgency story in Jolo actually goes back a long way. In early January 1905, to cite just one example, two members of the U.S. military -- the 14th Cavalry to be exact -- were killed during pacification operations on that same island.

That U.S. forces are attempting to defeat Muslim guerrillas on the same two tiny islands a century later should perhaps give President Obama pause as he weighs his options in Afghanistan and considers his recent award. It might also be worth his time to assess the military's record of success in conflicts since World War II, starting with the stalemate war in Korea that began in June 1950 and has yet to end in peace, let alone victory. That quiescent but unsettled conflict provides a ready-made opportunity for the president to achieve a triumph that has long escaped the U.S. military. He could help make a lasting peace on a de-nuclearized Korean peninsula and so begin earning his recent award.

Vietnam and Beyond

At the moment, Obama and his fellow Washington power-players are reportedly immersed in the literature of the Vietnam War in an attempt to use history as a divining rod for discovering a path forward in Afghanistan. At the Pentagon, many evidently still cling to the notion that the conflict was lost thanks to the weakness of public support in the U.S., pessimistic reporting by the media, and politicians without backbones.

Obama would do well to ignore their revisionist reading list for a simple reason: bluntly put, the U.S.-funded French military effort to defeat Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s failed dismally; then, a U.S.-funded effort to set up and arm a viable government in South Vietnam failed dismally; and finally, the U.S. military's full-scale, years' long effort to destroy the Vietnamese forces arrayed against it failed even more dismally -- and not in the cities and towns of the United States, nor even in the halls of power in Washington, but in the hamlets of South Vietnam. U.S. efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos similarly crashed and burned.

Victory aside, the U.S. military proved capable during the Vietnam War of accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the merciless pummeling it gave the people of Southeast Asia, leaving the region blood-soaked, heavily cratered, significantly poisoned, and littered with explosives, which kill and maim villagers to this day.

In the wake of out-and-out defeat in Indochina, Americans diagnosed themselves as suffering from a "Vietnam Syndrome" (resulting in a less muscular foreign policy -- embarrassing for a global superpower) and in need of a victory cure. In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to "triumphs" over such powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and Panama, a country whose "defense forces," in total, numbered just 12,000 (about half the size of the U.S. ground troops in the invading force) -- and cut-and-run flops in Lebanon and Somalia.

The "lessons" of Vietnam were declared officially buried forever in the scorching deserts of the Middle East in March 1991. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" President George H.W. Bush triumphantly exclaimed at the end of the First Gulf War -- and yet Saddam Hussein, the enemy autocrat, remained firmly ensconced in power in Baghdad and the conflict continued at a less than triumphant simmer for over a decade until his son, George W. Bush, again took the country to war against the same Iraqi leader his father had fought and again declared the mission accomplished.

Following a lightning-fast march on Baghdad in 2003, much like the speedy pseudo-victory in Kuwait in Gulf War I, U.S. forces again proved unable to seal the deal. Bush administration efforts to dominate the country politically by writing Iraq's constitution, while circumventing real elections, were quickly laid low by Iraq's most powerful religious leader, the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Then, the U.S. military was sent reeling for years by a Sunni insurgency. Though violence is currently tamped down to what is often called "an acceptable level," Iraq remains a war zone and Barack Obama is the fourth president to preside over a seemingly never-ending, irresolvable set of conflicts in that country. (The U.S.-allied Iraqi government has already proclaimed the U.S. a loser, announcing a "great victory" over the U.S. occupation in June 2009 and comparing the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the country's cities to a historic 1920 Iraqi revolt against British forces. American officials have not disagreed.)

During the 1980s, U.S. proxies in Afghanistan, Muslim mujahideen guerrillas, fought the Soviet occupation. Today, U.S. troops are the occupiers, fighting some of those same mujahidin and in the ninth year of this latest war in Afghanistan, victory still appears to be nowhere on the mountainous horizon, while failure, according to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal, is once again a possibility.

Late last year, at the 26th Army Science Conference, I listened to one of the top-ranking enlisted men in the Army, a highly decorated veteran of the Global War on Terror, and a draftee during America's losing war in Vietnam, candidly admit that U.S. troops in Afghanistan simply could not keep up with enemy forces. The lightly-armed, body-armor-less guerrillas were too mobile and too agile, he said, for up-armored, heavily weighed-down American troops. When I asked him about the comment later, a colleague of the same rank and fellow Global War on Terror veteran quickly jumped to his defense, declaring, "Yeah, I can't run the mountain with them, but I'll still get them -- eventually." Almost a year later, the better part of a decade into the fight, the unanswered question remains, "When?"

Peace President

The U.S. military is unquestionably powerful and has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to mete out tremendous amounts of destruction and death. From Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan, enemy fighters and unfortunate civilians, military base camps and people's homes have been laid waste by U.S. forces in decade after decade of conflict. Yet sealing the deal has been another matter entirely. Victory has repeatedly slipped through the fingers of American presidents, no matter how much technology and ordnance has been unleashed on the poor, sometimes pre-industrial populations of America's war zones.

Now, the Nobel Committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer Barack Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the U.S. bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and consider the history of American war-making and what the U.S. military is really capable of doing thousands of miles from home. It's an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly demonstrated limits of American military power. It's also the president's chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of peace-maker, and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and foreign, on his -- and all Americans' -- hands.

More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?

The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences of U.S. wars.

Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations beckon: peace or failure.

Copyright 2009 Nick Turse

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. A paperback edition of his book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books), an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, has recently been published. His website is NickTurse.com.

The Invisible, Immoral War Expands Under Obama

This is barely the tip of the ugly iceberg the neither Congress nor the media has the guts to acknowledge. There is a fix for all of this: face and address these ugly truths... ~Bear.

Adapted from

The Invisible War

Timothy Egan

Landing in Seattle after a long flight from Texas, I was about to join the exit scrum when the pilot informed us there were five soldiers on board, ending a three-day odyssey home from Iraq. Could we let them pass?

What followed was prolonged applause by all, and a startling reminder to some – oh, are we still at war?

Not only still at war, but deeper than ever. It was one thing for the Iraq war to pass an inglorious five-year landmark in March, longer than any other American conflict except the Vietnam War. But the cost now looks like it will exceed all wars except World War II — with a price tag that could near $3 trillion.

The Iraq war has already cost twice as much, in inflation-adjusted dollars, as World War I, and 10 times as much as the Persian Gulf war, according to a new book by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes. This is in addition, of course, to the more than 4,000 American lives lost, 30,000 wounded and the psychic blows that will ripple through every town that sent a young person off to fight.

Yet, for its prolonged clutch on our treasury and blood, no war as been so out-of-sight, so stage-managed to be painless and invisible. We’re supposed to shop, to spend our stimulus checks, to carry on as if nothing has happened — or is happening. Every now and then we get to rise at a stadium or pause on an airplane. Some sacrifice.

It would have been more fitting for us on that plane to stand aside while a flag-draped coffin was unloaded. At least then, we would get a moment to wonder what it’s like to put a 19-year-old son in a grave, to lose a sister, a spouse, to see war as something more than a parlor game of neo-cons.

In a democracy, wars should be felt by the decision makers — all of us. It starts at the top.

So, in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt said, “This will require, of course, the abandonment not only of luxuries but of many other creature comforts.” President Bush made a sacrifice – he gave up golf as an act of solidarity with families at war. The man who has probably taken more vacations than any other American president, who goes on showy mountain bike rides while his Veterans Administration shamefully mistreats broken warriors, who cut taxes while burdening a generation with this overseas cancer, is at ease with his conscience.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said in a bizarre interview with Politico last week. “And I think playing golf during a war sends the wrong signal.”

He then went on, in the same interview, to do his imitation of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. No wrong signal there.

In every way, this president has tried to hide the war. The press chafes because photos of flag-draped coffins are forbidden. But that’s nothing compared to how this administration is trying to turn the public’s eyes away from the pain of the people who feel it most directly, the soldiers and their families.

Suicide rates among returning veterans are soaring. And the administration’s response? Cover up the data. An e-mail titled “Shh!” surfaced earlier this month from Dr. Ira Katz, a top official at the V.A. The note indicated that far more veterans were trying to kill themselves than the administration had let on. It speaks for itself.

“Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see,” Katz wrote, in a note not meant for the general public. “Is this something we should address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles upon it?”

Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, who has made veterans affairs her specialty, was furious. “They lied about these numbers,” Murray told me. “It breaks my heart. Soldiers tell us that they were taught how to go to war, but not how to come home. You hear about divorces, binge-drinking, post-traumatic stress, suicide. And the reaction from the president is part of a pattern from the very beginning to show that this war is not costly or consequential.”

Murray is the daughter of a disabled World War II veteran. During her college years, while other students were protesting, she volunteered at a veterans hospital. The odds are, she said, at least one of those five soldiers we applauded on my return plane will suffer severe mental trauma from the war. A recent Rand Corporation study said as much, noting that that 300,000 veterans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan are plagued by major depression or stress disorder.

“Look what we do when there’s a natural disaster — we show the pictures of the victims and open our hearts,” said Murray. “President Obama should do the same thing with the war.”

But that would require bringing out in the open something that has been hidden since the start of this long war — the truth.

What Obama Should Tell Wall Street

by Charlie Gasparino

Henny Ray Abrams / AP Photo The president comes to New York for a fundraiser tonight, and Charlie Gasparino says it’s time for him to give the bonus billionaires tough love and end bailouts.

By most press accounts, President Obama’s friends on Wall Street— those brilliant minds who helped him get elected by funneling millions of dollars to his campaign while they were setting the stage for last year’s financial meltdown—are boycotting tonight’s fundraiser in Manhattan.

And who can blame them? It’s not that they don’t have the $30,000 to purchase a table given all the bonus money sloshing around Goldman Sachs and the other big banks this year. But why bother throwing away good money when your guy has already delivered as much as he can anyway?

Our financial titans don't need to give more money to Obama because they already have their man locked down.

After all, Wall Street is Wall Street again. The banks are making money; the bonuses are in the billions.

Amid all of this, why would anyone on Wall Street, except those few brave souls still on the Obama bandwagon, want to listen to what’s destined to be a boring speech about the need for responsibility and restraint in risk taking to prevent another meltdown? That was so yesterday; risk taking is allowing Wall Street to recover.

More than that, our financial titans don't need to give more money to Obama because they already have their man locked down, proof being that amid all the hoopla about those unseemly bonuses at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere, there was barely a peep from the White House about all those subsidies being in danger of disappearing anytime soon.

• Read an exclusive excerpt from Charlie Gasparino’s new book

It’s a simple fact of life on Wall Street that perhaps Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner or his chief economic policy adviser Larry Summers, who know the Wall Street crowd well, should have explained to their boss early on: When the Street doesn’t need you anymore, or they think they don’t need you anymore, they just ignore you. You become like an old investment banker who loses the perks of his job the minute his best clients go somewhere else.

But alas there's hope for Obama. One of the hallmarks of being a Wall Street executive—or a president, for that matter—is harboring a certain degree of arrogance. Some of these guys have it more than others, but they all have it. And why not? Their arrogance made them think their risk came at no cost—and in the end, they were right.

So here's a way to tell Wall Street there's a cost to being arrogant by putting these guys on notice and feeding following points tonight into his teleprompter and letting it rip as only he know how:

“To my former friends on Wall Street, who somehow forgot that Hope and Change are worthy attributes, I say the following: The bailout days are over. Pay yourself whatever you want; take as much risk as you want, but don’t expect the Federal government to pay for your sins. We’ve been doing that for the last 30 years; each and every time you’ve embraced risk, you expected the government to bail you out, and you were right.

“It began slowly at first—you didn’t lose really big money back 25 years ago when mortgage bonds and other risky debt first blew up. But each time the market cratered your losses got larger and larger until your risk taking was so huge, were it not for the mother of all bailouts last year, your recklessness would have caused financial Armageddon.

“I would like to lay the blame for last year's mess on your greed and arrogance, but I really can’t. The government allowed you to act like idiots; we supported you’re risk taking, and it was a bipartisan effort that spanned three decades, and included some very smart people—from Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton and later a top executive at banking basket case Citigroup, to alleged free-market Republicans, like our former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.

“But those days are over; Being Too Big To Fail is a thing of the past. With that in mind, by Presidential decree, I’m enacting the following:

“Citigroup must once and for all sell its various businesses and no longer remain a functioning company because its management has proven itself to be too dysfunctional to be trusted in the event that my stimulus package doesn’t work, unemployment shoots to 11 percent, and consumer loans begin to sour at a faster rate. The last thing I want to do is put another taxpayer dime into this money pit.

“Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have no reason being considered commercial banks and protected by the Federal Reserve, so I am hereby revoking their charter. Do all the high frequency trading you want, fellas, but do it with your shareholders’ money, not America’s.

“A message to my friend Jamie Dimon: You dodged all the bullets so far and you've been brilliant, but If this economy tanks further you’re going to be in a world of hurt as well since JP Morgan holds so much consumer related debt on its balance sheet. If that happens, you’re going to be treated no differently than Citigroup going forward, which means don't come crying to me for help.

“Bank of America. To be honest, I don’t know where to begin with you guys. But I am giving you just a few more days to replace your CEO Ken Lewis with someone with half a brain. I am also using all my pull in Democratic party circles to let New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo know that his investigation into Lewis better come up with something more than a few emails showing that he was asleep when he purchased Merrill last year or else I’m going to throw my support to David Paterson in next year’s gubernatorial election.

“Oh…and one more thing—no more bailouts!”

Mr. President, make those points, and watch Wall Street embrace Hope and Change in ways you never dreamed.

Charles Gasparino is CNBC's On-Air Editor and appears as a daily member of CNBC's ensemble. He is a columnist for the Daily Beast and a frequent contributor to the New York Post, Forbes, and other publications. His forthcoming book about the financial crisis, The Sellout, is scheduled to be published later in 2009.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

White House "Ordered" Lawmakers to Amend FOIA in Order to Conceal Torture Photos

White House "Ordered" Lawmakers to Amend FOIA in Order to Conceal Torture Photos

Saturday 17 October 2009

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

(Photo Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t, Adapted From: bright-political / flickr)

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-New York) said in a floor statement that the provision to amend the Freedom of Information Act was stripped from an earlier version of the bill, but the language was quietly reinserted in recent weeks, "apparently under direct orders from the administration."

The Obama administration will likely drop its Supreme Court petition challenging the release of photographs showing US soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan now that lawmakers are set to pass legislation authorizing the government to continue to keep the images under wraps.

On Thursday, the House approved a Department of Homeland Security spending bill that included a provisionto amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and grant Defense Secretary Robert Gates the authority to withhold "protected documents" that, if released, would endanger the lives of US soldiers or government employees deployed outside of the country.

According to the bill, the phrase "protected documents" refers to photographs taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009, and involves "the treatment of individuals engaged, captured or detained" in the so-called "war on terror." Photographs that Gates determines would endanger troops and government employees could be withheld for three years.

The legislation now heads to the Senate for a vote, which is expected to take place as early as Thursday. Obama indicated he would swiftly sign the bill into law when it passes.

Most notably, the $42.8 billion spending bill gave President Obama the authority to transfer detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to the United States to stand trial in federal courts, a measure that Republicans tried to derail before the vote and one easily defeated by Democrats.

The bill, approved in the House by a vote of 307-114, states that detainees may be brought to the US for trial "only after Congress receives a plan detailing: risks involved and a plan for mitigating such risk; cost of the transfer; legal rationale and court demands; and a copy of the notification provided to the governor of the receiving state 14 days before a transfer with a certification by the Attorney General that the individual poses little or no security risk."

Civil libertarians and advocates of open government, however, were sharply critical of lawmakers - and the Obama administration - for covering up what they said were serious crimes by allowing the provision, the Protected National Security Documents Act of 2009, to be included in the bill.

"It is disturbing that the House would pass legislation that so blatantly undermines the Freedom of Information Act," said Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office. "Authorizing the suppression of evidence of human rights abuses perpetrated by government personnel directly contradicts Congress's oversight obligations. We urge the Senate to stop this provision from being enacted, and urge Defense Secretary Robert Gates not to use this provision if enacted."

The ACLU sued the government in 2003 to gain access to photographs and videos related to the treatment of "war on terror" prisoners in US custody. The US District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the release of the photos in a June 2005 ruling that was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2008.

The appeals court shot down the Bush administration's attempt to radically expand FOIA exemptions for withholding the photos, stating that the Bush administration had attempted to use the FOIA exemptions as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy" and "an alternative classification mechanism," which is exactly what the Obama administration, working closely with Congress, has done.

Steve Aftergood of Secrecy News said, "it is dismaying that Congress would intervene to alter the outcome of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act proceeding.

"The move demonstrates a lack of confidence in the Act, and in the ability of the courts to correctly interpret its provisions. The legislation elevates a speculative danger to forces who are already in battle above demands for public accountability concerning controversial government policies, while offering no alternative avenue to meet such demands."

The Obama administration indicated earlier this year it would abide by a court order and release at least 44 of the photographs in question, but President Obama backtracked, saying he had conferred with high-ranking military officials who advised him that releasing the images would stoke anti-American sentiment and would endanger the lives of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As Truthout previously reported, the Obama administration petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case at the same time that the president privately told Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) he would work with Congress to help pass a measure to ensure the photographs could be withheld. Lieberman and Graham introduced the amendment to conceal the photos earlier this year.

That revelation was made in a footnote contained in a 33-page petition the Obama administration filed with the high court in August.

According to the petition and other documents, the photographs at issue include one in which a female solider is pointing a broom at a detainee "as if [she were] sticking the end of a broomstick into [his] rectum."

Other photos are said to show US soldiers pointing guns at the heads of hooded and bound detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. The filing also notes that the detainee abuse was investigated by the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division. It states that "three of the six investigations led to criminal charges and in two of those cases, the accused were found guilty and punished."

Supreme Court Justices were set to meet October 9 to discuss whether they intended to take up the case. However, Solicitor General Elena Kagan requested that the high court delay its decision until after the House and Senate vote on the measure. Kagan informed the high court of the latest developments in a letter sent Friday to Supreme Court Clerk William K. Suter.

"The House of Representatives voted to agree to the [appropriations bill].... We expect that the Senate will consider the [legislation next week," Kagan wrote. "If the Senate agrees to the [bill] it will be presented to the President for his approval. In light of these additional legislative developments, the Court may conclude that it would be appropriate to reschedule its consideration of the government's petition for a writ of certiorari for a subsequent conference to await further developments that may affect the appropriate disposition of this case."

Obama's decision to conceal the photos marks an about-face on the open-government policies that he proclaimed during his first days in office.

On January 21, Obama signed an executive order instructing all federal agencies and departments to "adopt a presumption in favor" of Freedom of Information Act requests, and promised to make the federal government more transparent.

"The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears," Obama's order said. "In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."

During a speech on the House floor Thursday, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-New York) criticized the Obama administration for failing to fully live up to its promises of "openness" and "transparency."

"I believe that we had turned a page from the cloud of suspicion and secrecy that marked the previous administration," Slaughter said. "It runs so counter to our principals and stated desire to reject the abuses of the past. The FOIA laws in this country form a pillar of our First Amendment principles."

Slaughter said in her floor statement that the provision to amend FOIA was stripped from an earlier version of the bill, but the language was quietly reinserted in recent weeks "apparently under direct orders from the administration."

"We should never do anything to circumvent FOIA, and I believe that our country would gain more by coming to terms with the past than we would by covering it up," Slaughter said. "I hope that the president will follow judicial rulings and consider voluntarily releasing these photos so we can put this chapter in history behind us."

»

---

Jason Leopold is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visitwww.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview.

Obama's Dubious Economics: Obama's Recovery Plan and the Median Wage Earner

Published on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Dubious Economics: Obama's Recovery Plan and the Median Wage Earner

by Alan Nasser

It's time to identify and evaluate the basic assumptions and strategy of President Obama's recovery plan. Such an assessment suggests that if present economic strategy continues, in the end the "new normal" will be a chronically indebted low-wage American worker. Let's look first at Obama's fundamental justification for bailing out the financial elite rather than the working majority, and then at the economic situation of the median worker, who will bear the burden of the consequences of this policy. Along the way, we will identify a few widespread misconceptions about the workings of the banking system. We'll conclude with a look at the "new normal" promised by the prevailing elite consensus.

Obama's Rationale for the Recovery Program

Many Americans resent that Obama's rescue plan bails out the perps while leaving the rest twisting in the wind. In an April speech at Georgetown University, he addresses this very issue:

"And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks- ‘Where's our bailout?,' they ask -the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to famiies and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth." (The New York Times, April 14, 2009 "Obama Stands Firm on a Sweeping Agenda", by Peter Baker)

Obama's reference to the "multiplier effect" is straight out of Economics 101: a dollar injected into the income stream generates more than a dollar's worth of spending power, because when that dollar is spent it becomes someone else's income. It is then spent again, becoming a new recipient's income and is spent yet again. and then again, and ... Here's an example of Obama's Georgetown scenario, in which banks extend "loans to families and businesses" : a bank lends $5 million to build a factory. Out of this sum, the factory owner pays suppliers for, say, steel and concrete, and pays wages to builders. The suppliers and builders will spend (consume) their new incomes, which thereby creates new purchasing power for the recipients. And on it goes. The same kind of income chain is created when banks lend to "families": household spending becomes income to owners and employees of retail outlets, whose investment (by owners) and consumption (by employees) constitute further expenditures, which in turn... You get the picture.

All this additional spending triggered by the initial injection, Obama claims, "can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth," i.e. an increase in employment-generating investment, growth in wages and spending, increased output and higher profits - in short a resumption of the economic growth that is supposed to have graced the economy from the end of World War II until just a few years ago.

Obama's reasoning contains factual inaccuracies, misconceptions and strategic omissions. Among these is a seriously flawed conception of how the banking system works.

Misconceptions About What Banks Do

School kids are taught that banks lend from their reserves, which consist in John's deposit, which is then lent to Mary. The interest paid to depositor John is less than the interest charged to borrower Mary, and the difference is what constitutes the bank's profit. This is said to be how banks make money. Later on we are told that government infusions of money are added to consumer deposits to make up banks' total reserves. By the time the kids get to college, there is scarce talk of consumer deposits. Now the financial equivalent of Let There Be Light is the decision by the central bank to create money. The Obama administration plans and executes its economic policy within this fictitious framework.

The story hooks you by starting with the truism that banks lend at interest rates greater than the rates paid to depositors. Fine. But what makes the textbook story social-science fiction is the imagined relation between credit money and debt money: first, government creates credit money, which is then distributed as reserves to local banks, which proceed to issue it as debt money to borrowers. This creates a significant source of household spending power. The economic catechisms stipulate that it is the central bank which creates money from nothing, thereby making possible the world of various and sundry banking activities with which we are all more or less familiar.

Except that isn't what happens. The monetary primacy of the central bank was never established by empirical research. It is an axiom of "static equilibrium" theoretical models of how the economy works.

The first economists to actually test the claim that it is the central bank that originates money were late-1970s post-Keynesians, of whom the US economist Basil Moore is credited with establishing that it is simply not the case that increased lending by banks is enabled by their prior accumulation of excess reserves created by government infusions of liquidity.

Money is indeed created from nothing, but it is in fact the lowly banks themselves that initiate the process.

The implications are important for our grasp not only of the terminal flaws in current theory and policy, but also of the only alternatives promising the slightest chance of heading off an emerging era of long-term austerity for working people.

So how exactly do banks work, and why is the answer important?

What Banks Actually Do

More than 10 years after the post-Keynesian revelation, Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott, two Nobel Prize winners at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, published "Business Cycles: Real Facts and a Monetary Myth" in the Bank's Spring 1990 Quarterly Review. They found that credit money was created by ordinary banks well before the creation of central bank money. And even before that, less-widely-read experts in the field were telling it like it is.

In a booklet titled "Modern Money Mechanics", released in 1961 by the Public information Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, we find:

"[Banks] do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to borrowers' transaction [checking: AN] accounts."

And here is Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada, 1935-1955:

"Banks create money. That is what they are for. .. [Making] money consists of making an entry in a book [computer: AN]. That is all...Each and every time a bank makes a loan, new bank money is created - brand new money."

When a bank extends a loan, it merely credits the borrower's checking account in the amount of the loan. No money was previously paid in to the bank, neither by household depositors, nor by the central bank.

Why Does It Matter?

What is striking is that the ultimate instigators of money creation are the household and the (usually small) business owner. (My focus here is on the consumer, whose spending accounts for 66-73% of GDP.) It is in response to events set in motion by the initial loan request that banks petition the central bank for reserves, to cover losses, defaults and the like. If the consumer is willing and able to spend, (s)he seeks a loan from the bank, and the stream of spending begins. The lower the level of consumption demand, the less the need for infusions from the central bank. We should expect, then, that should the central bank flood banks with liquidity in the face of low consumer demand, these reserves will either be used, say, to further consolidate the industry by buying weaker banks, to pay bank managers obscene bonuses, to goose the stock market to produce a speculative asset rally or to function as a cover for underlying insolvency. These liquidity infusions contribute nothing to their stated aim, which is, in Obama's words, "to lead to a faster pace of economic growth."

Obama chooses his words with care. He tells us that "a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to famiies and businesses." "can" Sure it can, but only if consumers / households are perceived by banks as credit worthy and households are in fact inclined to borrow.

But the dire circumstances of households originated well before September 2008. 1973 was the peak postwar year for the median wage, which has been in secular decline for 36 years, even as the costs of health care, child care and education have risen at a quicker pace than inflation. Households have continually tried to adapt to this crunch, by sending more household members into the labor force, by taking on multiple jobs, and finally by leaning more heavily on the credit crutch. This overall circumstance has been dramatically magnified by the current crisis, during which $2 trillion of retirement savings has been lost. Recent surveys find that 70% of workers intend to work during their retirement years. None of this has been taken into account in the recovery plan. As in the textbooks, the consumer is assumed to be unencumbered and ready and able to spend and to incur debt.

In this context Obama's invocation of the multiplier misses the point: "a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to famiies and businesses." In order for the $1 trillion that the Fed has lavished on banks to produce " a faster pace of economic growth" , unprecedentedly indebted households and businesses would have to take on an additional $8-10 trillion in debt. Indebtedness would become a way of life. More on this below.

An economic profile of the median wage earner paints a more vivid picture of the Obama policy's impact on real people.

The Personal Finances of the Median Wage Earner

Let's look at the US Census Bureau's Consumer Income Report issued in August 2008, immediately before the eruption of the crisis. Calculations from these data will err on the side of optimism. The figures were compiled before a marked decline in the income and employment picture, and the figures for households are less alarming, for obvious reasons, than are the data for individuals.

According to the Report, real median household income is $50,233. Half of the households make more, and half make less. But let's look also at a fatter figure, for households headed by married couples. These have a median income of $72,785.

We'll focus on the household's biggest economic decision, the choice to purchase a home. The median price of a single family home in the first quarter of 2009 was $169,000. It would cost the $50,233 household almost 3.5 times their annual income to buy the median-priced house. The median-priced home would seem to be more affordable for the headed-by-a-married-couple family taking in $72,785 a year. The price/income ratio for this family is 2.35. But not so fast. What do the family's actual monthly expenditures look like?

We'll retain optimistic assumptions. Assume the couple puts down 20% on the new house, and takes a loan of $135,200. The current 30-year fixed mortgage stands at 5.75%, which will cost them $788.99 a month for the loan. Our couple is taking in $6,000.00 a month before taxes, so let's do the tax numbers.

With their employers covering half of their Social Security and Medicare taxes, they are down 7.65% of the $72,000, or $5,508. Uncle Sam's 20% cut chops off another $14,400. Average state and local taxes come to about 3%, so we deduct another $2,160.

Our median couple is now taking in $4,161 a month. Assume they have health insurance, which we'll figure at about $500.00 a month. Car payments and insurance will cost them somewhere between $500.00-$1,000.00, and gas at least $100.00-$200.00. Groceries for a family of 3 or 4 will cost an additional $600.00 a month. The median family uses cell phones, cable and the web, which we'll generously price at $150.00 a month.

With monthly bills in the vicinity of $2,000, they've still not paid their housing costs. These include more than the mortgage payment of $788.99. They're shelling out around $1,700 at a low property tax rate of 1%, roughly $1,000.00 for insurance and about $300.00 a month for utilities.

This leaves the Medians with a disposable income of $872.00 a month. But not really. There are additional costs which are not as easily calculable as the more or less essential ones identified above. Clothes are indispensable. Movies and dining out. Vacations have been considered a fixed cost of good living, but an increasing number are having to scale down or flat out reclassify travel as a discretionary expense. Regular maintenance of the house and car, as well as addressing unexpected emergencies, including of course medical crises, are at least partially foregone by a rising number of regular folks. (Our ardently Republican family physician tells me that she is alarmed by the number of patients who tell her that they must cut back on food in order to pay for prescriptions.) Deductibles, out-of-pocket expenses and prescription drug payments are often sizeable. And there are the perpetually escalating costs of education and child care.

That $872.00 a month is being whittled down to a pittance. And keep in mind that half of the median wage earners are worse off than this; half of that lower half lives below the official poverty line. No wonder the only way so many people have held their finances together is with the glue of credit.

This unenviable position gets worse. There is the ongoing economic crisis, which we are assured by Obama-Bernanke will improve soon, even as cumulative job loss, declining wages, and increasing foreclosures and bankruptcies persist for years. Many of what used to be the highest-paying wage earning jobs with the most generous benefits will disappear, and those remaining will suffer wage reductions of up to 50%, sharp reductions in health benefits and further erosion of the power of virtually impotent labor unions. The "restructuring" of the auto industry is the handwriting on the wall for the wage-earning population (the majority, remember, of the entire population).

It is fantastic in the extreme to imagine, as the Obama team does, that greater working-class indebtedness is any part of a solution to embedded structural problems.

The Paradox at the Heart of the Problem

The living standards of working people have been under assault by Democratic and Republican gravediggers of the NewDeal and the Great Society for 36 years. Global neoliberalism confronts vanishing industrial investment opportunuties in the form of global excess manufacturing capacity, and intensified global competition resulting from the successful reindustrialization of Europe and the emergence of formidable competitors in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere. The response has been to embark upon a worldwide cost-cutting campaign. And of course the costs targeted are labor costs.

A successful campaign against wages and benefits depresses the largest source of the demand for GDP, the consumption of working people. By the canons of any school of economic thought, this is a surefire recipe for depression. What is required to restore the economy to health -even capitalist standards of health- is anathema to capitalism, namely a determined poitical-economic campaign to raise workers' income and benefits dramatically.

Obama and his advisors are insisting that this will be the happy result of the recovery plan. We have seen that this is most unlikely. The prevailing sentiment of the financial elite unwittingly underscores the circular logic undermining the recovery plan. Here is the New York Times's account of the thinking of the typical financial poobah:

"It doesn't matter how much Hank Paulson gives us," said an influential senior official at a big bank that received money from the government, "no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns." The official added: "Who are we going to lend money to?" before repeating an old saw about banking: "Only people who don't need it." (Oct. 20, 2008 "One Day Doesn't Make a Trend," by Andrew Ross Sorkin.)

The banks won't lend freely until the economic crisis is ended, but the crisis won't end until the banks lend to people who are broke.

Mass Mobiization Replaces the Keynesian State: Shortening Labor's "Unusually Long Fuse"

The above-described contradiction in the financial system today is unlikely to be addressed by the kind of Keynesian state which forestalled a resumption of the Great Depression after the Second World War. The state is now transparently fashioning policy in the interests of the financial elite, which now designs and often executes policy, as I the case of the bailout. These fellows don't depend on production and employment to make their fortune. They sell not widgets but debt, the most fitting product for a population mired in austerity.

And enduring austerity is the only alternative given the imperatives and interests of the financial plutocracy. The media have been foreshadowing the structural changes that the economy is moving toward. In "Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy" (NYT, March 7, 2009, by Peter S. Goodman and Jack Healy) we are told that

"...growing joblessness may reflect a wrenching restructuring of the economy.... In key industries - manufacturing, financial services and retail - layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business. "These jobs aren't coming back," [said a chief economist at Wachovia] "A lot of production either isn't going to happen at all, or it's going to happen somewhere other than in the United States. There are going to be fewer stores, fewer factories... Firms are making strategic decisions that they don't want to be in their businesses."

The article quotes a Stanford Hoover Institution economist as saying "The decimation of employment in legacy American brands such as General Motors is a trend that's likely to continue. We have to stimulate the economy to create jobs in other areas."

And what might these new jobs be in an America now resigned to ongoing deindustrialization? The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a study in 2006 identifying the occupations projected to add the greatest number of jobs between 2006 and 2016. These are not jobs characteristic of a high-wage, high-productivity economy. They are: - - nursing aids, orderlies and home health aids

- registered nurses
- retail salespersons
- customer service representatives
- food preparation and serving workers
- general office clerks
- personal and home care aides
- postsecondary teachers
- janitors and accounting clerks

Not a widget producer to be found.

In the Georgetown speech Obama alerts us that "We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity, where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad." Obama has repeatedly underscored that the main propellants of "new normal" growth will be investment and exports, attended by reduced consumption -necessitated by wage reduction- at home. He is in tune with the neoliberal Economist magazine, which, in expanding on the notion that consumption will play a much diminished role in future US growth, writes "Something else will have to grow more quickly. Ideally that would be exports and investment." (May 6, 2009)

The picture is clear: wage reduction is a strategic imperative if the US is to regain the competitive edge it enjoyed in the boom years 1949-1973. Policymakers are convinced that manufacturing activity is gradually shifting from the US, Europe and Japan to China, India, Brazil and other low-wage countries, so that US companies will be increasingly in competition with firms located in predominantly low-wage countries. US workers will have to make the necessary "adjustments." Obama was quite explicit in an interview on September 18 with the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 18, 2009).

"Pittsburgh is now having to pay attention to what happens in Beijing and Bangladore and Eastern Europe in ways that in the past it didn't have to pay attention to... The manufacturing base that employed so many people, the decline in that sector of the economy took decades. It didn't start last year, it's been going on for two decades. And reversing that and rebuilding it is going to take two decades as well."

It doesn't get any clearer than that. Remaking American industry in the image of the restructured General Motors and Chrysler will take decades, after which a leaner, meaner America employing workers making poor-country wages will rise from the ashes to regain its status as a great power whose economic prowess will once again match its military predominance.

This is the kind of "recovery" that current policy serves. President Obama promotes, or does little to defeat, policies whose net beneficiaries are financial poobahs, insurance companies, and Big Pharma. It's becoming increasingly clear that only mass politics can address this situation.

A mass movement organized around, e.g. continuously widening, scandalous inequalities not seen since the early 20th century, would resonate with countless Americans.

Mainstream media report mass disaffection with permanent war and transparently elite-driven policy. In "In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse" Steven Greenhouse (New York Times, April 5, 2009) hits the nail on the head. He contrasts the relative miitancy of European labor, which has in fact made it far more difficult for European capital to impose neoliberal "reforms" on workers there, with the inertia of US workers:

"...[M}ore than a million workers in France demonstrated against layoffs and the government's handling of the economic crisis...French workers took their bosses hostage four times in various labor disputes. When General Motors recently announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the company's German headquarters. But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison... Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars, and companies cut wages and benefits."

Curiously, Greenhouse fails to mention the 250 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago who occupied their factory last December in response to announced layoffs and the closing of the factory. The result was a $7.5 million settlement, giving each Republic worker 8 weeks salary, all accrued vacation pay and 2 months health care. This was admittedly a limited victory, but why not think of it as a "green shoot" of a different kind?

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and has written articles and essays that have appeared in The Nation, Commonweal, Monthly Review, Common Dreams, Global Research and a range of professional journals in economics, sociology and law. E-mail address: nassera@evergreen.edu

Obama and the politics of distraction

Posted by Raphael Sonenshein

'Distraction' image courtesy mocoloco.com

Democrats have trouble winning presidential elections. One reason is that they have difficulty keeping the campaign focused on their issues. Polls show that this year especially the issues favor the Democrats, with the big ones, the Iraq war and the economy deeply in the Democrats’ favor.

But campaigns are not stately debates about issues. They are also battles over what the debate will be about. The politics of distraction can be very powerful, and Democrats have struggled with it for years. Consider how John Edwards found his campaign derailed because he had an expensive haircut. John Kerry had to deal with false attacks on his war record.

Right now, the biggest distraction for Obama is Hillary Clinton’s quixotic campaign. Even though she has no chance to win the nomination, she keeps going (at least for a few more days). Media coverage of the fairly ridiculous case for Florida and Michigan being seated at the Democratic convention distracted from Obama’s attack on John McCain for flubbing how many troops we have in Iraq.

Of course, the biggest distraction for Obama has been the Rev. Wright controversy. And since this is a real issue, he has had to deal directly with it at some length. While he has dealt fairly effectively with the story, and this week quit the church, this distraction may always be there as a kind of low-level illness. But there will be more, and the Republicans are artful at working the media to keep them alive. A good example is the misstatement Obama made about his uncle liberating a Nazi death camp. He had the wrong camp, and corrected it. It made headlines.

In order to keep the distractions from messing up your campaign, you have to speak loudly, clearly, and firmly. You have to say things that are more interesting than your haircut, or the latest distraction. And you have to say them over and over again. You can’t get caught up in the distractions. Deal with them, and move on quickly. So far, Obama is showing some skill at this, as he has directed his attacks at McCain, and not at Clinton. That’s a way of saying, without saying, that the nomination race has been over for a while. He turned McCain’s distraction of challenging him to go to Iraq into an attack on McCain’s lack of knowledge about Iraq despite his several trips there.

I expect a cascade of distractions from here on. They are like marbles on the floor, or nails in the roadway. They will keep coming. If one doesn’t work, another one will come up. They will come by viral email. They will come on radio talk shows. They will be presented on the evening news. Some will be true, if pointless. Some will be plainly false.

Obama’s road to the White House is not paved with thoughtful debates, although there will be some. It’s paved with marbles and nails. His task will be to keep our eyes on the road.

OBAMA: NOBEL PRIZE 'CALL TO ACTION'

There is no intent whatsoever to mock Obama for the Prize. We hope that if he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize he will honor that tradition. We have no doubt that he can honor the Prize if he so chooses.

Shock: President Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize

By Stephen C. Webster
Friday, October 9th, 2009 -- 5:47 am

Update at bottom: Obama 'humbled' by win, views it as 'call to action'

President Barack Obama sensationally won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, less than a year after taking office, with the jury hailing his "extraordinary" diplomatic efforts on the international stage.

Obama was honored "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Thorbjoern Jagland said.

The committee attached "special importance to Obama's vision and work for a world without nuclear weapons" and said he had created "a new climate in international politics."

However, as he is overseeing the ongoing military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama was not considered by many Nobel-watchers to be a leading candidate.

"Likely candidates had been seen here as including human rights activists in China and Afghanistan and political figures in Africa," The New York Times noted in a story published moments after the decision was made. "But the committee said it wanted to enhance Mr. Obama’s diplomatic efforts so far rather than reward him for events in the future."

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said.

As word spread around the world of Obama's shocking victory, many welcomed the announcement with open arms.

"We trust that this award will strengthen his commitment, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to continue promoting peace and the eradication of poverty," read a statement issued by the Mandela Foundation.

Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer added: "I am very happy that he got it. Now he has to do something with the award. It raises expectations on him to stand up for oppressed nations. ... Uighurs are getting killed even now. With the award, he should know how to talk to dictatorships like China."

"Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts," the Nobel citation reads. "The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."

"This year's peace prize nominees included 172 people and 33 organizations," noted CNN. "The committee does not release the names of the nominees."

Former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari won the award in 2008.

Obama 'humbled' by win, views it as 'call to action'

In a hastily arranged speech in the Rose Garden that started nearly an hour late, President Obama said that he was "surprised and deeply humbled" at the honor of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but that he viewed it as a "call to action."

"Let me be clear, I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations," President Obama said. "To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize - men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace."

Obama added, "But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents."

This video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast Oct. 9, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com

With AFP.

Published on Friday, October 9, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Barry in the Bush With Smiles

by David Michael Green

It takes a real artist to render a crushing majority into a hapless political object.

And Barack Obama is a real artist.

He’s had quite an impressive week. At least for an anvil.

Here’s one New York Times headline, regarding the Olympics debacle: “Chicago Is Rejected in First Round of Voting”. Impressive.

Here’s another: “Jobless Report Is Worse Than Expected; Rate Rises to 9.8%”. Can you say “Bye-bye, Barack”?

Ah, but he was actually just warming up. David Paterson, the governor of New York, bitch-slapped the president for being stupid enough to lean on Paterson to get out of the 2010 race. Paterson is a disaster as governor, and Obama is worried that he’ll drag down the Democratic ticket, lowering the president’s majorities in Congress.

The first problem with that calculus is that there are fifty states in the union, notwithstanding the natural arrogance of New Yorkers who tend to think they own the planet. The Democratic Party’s problems are far bigger than New York. They begin on one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and end on the other. As usual, most voters will be using the mid-term elections as a gut-check on their feelings about the current government. If the inept, cowardly and inert Mr. Obama needs someone to resign in order to save the party, that dude in the mirror with the big ol’ grin would be the most efficacious choice. Charlie Cook is now giving the Democrats only a fifty-fifty chance of retaining their majority in the House, which is now a whopping 79 seats. Man, you have to really work at it to blow something that badly in nine months time.

The second problem with asking Paterson to step out of the race to save Democratic majorities in Congress is that Obama has them already, in lopsided amounts, and he’s not doing a damn thing with them. Instead of kicking some butt to line his own caucuses up and forcing them to pass some real serious legislation that the president demands (see Bush, George W, for illustration. Also, Reagan, Ronald W.; Johnson, Lyndon B.; and Roosevelt, Franklin R.), this fool is doing deals with Republicans who are trying to destroy him, and the very predatory industries that are precisely the problem with American healthcare. I guess he must think that the GOP is just kidding. You know, like they were with Clinton. In any case, why worry about maintaining your majority if you have no intention of ever actually using it?

And the last reason that Obama is idiotic for meddling in state and local politics is because he was sent to Washington to save the country from the sixteen or so serious crises his predecessor bequeathed him, and about all he has going for him is the good will of the public who gave him the job. Spending your time dicking around with who should be the Democratic Party’s nominee for municipal dog-catcher is not exactly what people had in mind when they gave him this mandate. By going to Europe to beg for the Olympics, or by immersing himself in local politics, this chump is spending his political capital at a furious pace. It wouldn’t even be worth the effort if he was getting what he was asking for. But of course it’s far worse that both Paterson and the IOC slammed the door in his face, as publicly and as emphatically as imaginable. If Obama taped a “kick me” sign to his back, he could hardly signal any better his ineptitude and his willingness to get rolled at every conceivable opportunity.

There’s more, of course. Another headline reports that “Panel Finishes Work on Health Bill Amendments”. The public option, already a weak sister to any real reform of the predatory wealth extraction system masquerading as national healthcare, was of course voted down by the Senate Finance Committee referred to in the title. Obama has yet to seriously weigh in on any preferences he might have. Apparently he is going to wait until the end of the legislation process. Assuming that he actually has any preferences – and I don’t, unless you count carrying water for corporate power and Wall Street – how astonishingly stupid is that as a strategy? After all the grief and months of effort Congress has gone through to maybe produce a bill, is it conceivable that they’d want to entertain some major new change at the last minute?

Then there’s Afghanistan, where the president has his own general running around painting him into a policy corner with only one option. Any military guy who tried that under Bush got summarily cashiered, even though they were actually telling the truth. You know, like maybe 160,000 GIs weren’t gonna be sufficient to occupy a country of 25 million pissed-off Iraqis. Say that and your career was over, Shinseki-style.

Is anyone else sensing a pattern here?

Obama would make a great nineteenth century president. You know, all those guys with names you can never remember, because they pretty much didn’t really do anything? Back in those days, Congress was king, and presidents – except during wartime – were essentially glorified clerks, executing the Congressional will, as per their Constitutional duty. That’s certainly one way to do it. It’s just that it pretty much isn’t what people have come to want and expect for the last century or so. And it sure as hell isn’t what Obama promised in the election.

But he has really specialized in being an acted-upon object, rather than a political protagonist, despite possessing the most powerful position in the world, commanding majorities in Congress, an initially adoring public wishing him tons of good will, and all manner of crises to warrant if not demand bold action. In his reticence he is not only carrying forward a fine Democratic Party tradition of recent decades, but in fact refining it into an art form. The pattern works like this: Republicans charge like bulls through china shops and grab the mantle of power, proceeding then to ram their program through, no matter the casualties. When they reach levels of greed, corruption and failure so excessive that even comatose Americans can no longer stand it, some effete Democratic stooge named Carter or Clinton or Obama is called in to hold down the fort long enough for the regressives to regroup and start the cycle again. But Obama in action – better rendered as ‘Obama’s inaction’ – makes Clinton look like a litter full of Mike Tysons crammed into an overheated pressure chamber by comparison.

It’s astonishing how Democrats can never seem to block anything the hard-right wants to do, even when they have majorities, while the GOP kills everything the Democrats supposedly want, even with minuscule minorities in Congress. Gee, one could almost get the impression that Democrats don’t really want anything much different from Republicans, but just have to adopt a different alt-persona to hide their intentions from the public. Republicans use guns, god, gays and Gaddafi as distractions from corporate looting. Democrats strap on their cardigan sweaters and try really, really hard to do something, but gosh-darned it, just never seem to get anywhere.

As for our friend Mr. Obama, he seems busy unlearning every lesson of the last three decades. He doesn’t appear worried that the right will challenge his legitimacy as president ‘cause, of course, they never did that to Carter or Clinton. He doesn’t seem worried that they’ll happily destroy the country if necessary in order to wreck his presidency because, of course, there’s little precedent for that. He doesn’t much care to use the bully pulpit and strong-arm Congress to get what he wants because, of course, that never got Reagan or Bush anywhere.

I can’t believe I’d ever say this, but the question Obama should be asking right about now, is “What would Bush do?”

I’ll tell ya what. He’d jam his legislation down the throats of the other party, putting the fear of god in them if they dared to oppose the emperor. He’s rip people’s lungs out and stuff them back through their eye sockets if they looked at him cross-eyed. He’d lie to members of his own party and carpet bomb their entire home neighborhoods if they dared vote against him. If any media talking head didn’t tell the lies they were programmed to speak, he’d kidnap their kids and send them to Gitmo, treating them a good waterboarding for every one of their birthdays. And, he’d call in Rove to stomp some people good, the nice Republican way.

What would that look like? Here’s journalist Ron Suskind relating an inside taste of what he observed while waiting outside the Ol’ Karl’s office for an interview, back when he was running the White House political operation:

“Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. ‘We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!’ As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. ‘Come on in.’ And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.”

Why won’t Obama do this? Why won’t he unleash all the powers at his disposal, knock heads together, and smash political opponents to smithereens in order to get his way? Two reasons. First, he wasn’t a complete personal screw-up for the last half century, acknowledged even by his own parents to be a total embarrassment. He therefore doesn’t have the burning need to show the world they’ve been wrong about him his whole life, like a certain other fellow recently seen roaming the halls of the West Wing.

The other reason is that Obama doesn’t actually appear to be doing anything that requires any particular toughness. He’s not trying to sell a bullshit war or dismantle Social Security, like Bush. He’s not trying to end legal and institutional racism in a country where it was as pervasive as bibles in ‘Bama, like Lyndon Johnson did. He’s not attempting to bring the country kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, even after it was already one-third over, like FDR was.

In fact, he doesn’t really appear to be doing much of anything, including producing the much-vaunted ‘change’ we heard endlessly about during last year’s campaign. Unless, of course, you count the nice demeanor with which he continues the predatory policies of Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes. This is essentially George W. Bush’s third term. It’s Barry in the Bush with Smiles.

Obama more or less just seems to want to hang for a while, passively swaying in whatever winds happen to be blowing through at the moment. That might have worked in the 1950s, or even the 1970s, but not today. The brownshirts of the American right have been playing for keeps for some time now. And, while it’s true that they can be their own worst enemy in normal times, these are hardly normal times. Failing to address the real economic pain people are feeling, failing to provide remotely meaningful healthcare reform, failing to clean-up the corporate predators slamming the public with bad mortgages, sky-high credit card interest rates and bailouts of the already rich – all of these are an invitation for some change Obama can believe in, especially in 2012. If he insists on being a political object, the right will gladly turn him into one. It will be a freakin’ anvil too, not the fifth face on Mount Rushmore.

This is not kid’s stuff. These mobsters are possessed of insatiable greed, and they are clever beyond belief at mobilizing the anxieties and inadequacies of a public already dumbed-down to a level of political immaturity that can barely keep pace with the amped-up fires of their personal rage to which it’s dangerously coupled. How many re-run episodes of this mini-series do we need to see before we get clear on how it turns out?

The right is wrong on nearly everything, of course – the elites because they lie, and the shock troops because they’re frightened of their own shadows and therefore find blessed relief in every possible palliative from the pope to Palin. But they are correct about Obama being a complete patsy. They like to bring that up in the foreign policy context, because it’s good for scaring voters, and because it doesn’t remind moderates of just who is actually rolling this punk here at home (a very fine example of which was provided by the cheers that went up from our nice super-patriots when America lost the Olympics bid). But the truth is that a movement that should have been discredited to the point of annihilation by its very own actions is now instead setting the agenda in Washington, and the guy who won the landslide seems busy trying to push the mud back up the hill so that he can be buried by it himself, instead of the people who pretty much literally want to kill him.

I really don’t know what to say or think about this dude anymore. The way democracy is supposed to work is that his desire to hold office and the public’s preference for certain policies should reinforce each other and impel us toward a mutually satisfying presidency. Instead, though, he trucks along seemingly oblivious to the fact that the exact opposite is occurring.

This country is sinking in every way imaginable, and he will be held to blame in 2010 and 2012.

And so he should be.

It’s just that that will also mean the return of the monster set, absolutely foaming at the mouth after four years in the wilderness not holding the presidency to which they believe they’re fully entitled to own.

And then Obama will join Clinton, running around the world making speeches and writing books. Maybe they’ll even do joint appearances.

Thanks for that, Barack. You’re a real patriot.

Oh well. At least you got the important stuff right.

You won’t have ruffled any feathers while being president.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.