Tomdispatch.com Tomgram: David Swanson, The More Things Change
The President spoke to a high school audience yesterday. There was nothing wrong with his speech, mostly he talked about his struggles as a youth. It seems like he makes one or more speeches every day--like he is still running for office. He is a good public speaker, he says wonderful things you want to believe about peace, taking care of the underdogs, making America great again through change.
Somehow his actions are not in concert with his words. America is, however, getting change and rapidly, although it is not the change most of us had in mind. The communist/socialst/ fascist agenda is moving upon us a breakneck speed.
Let’s take a look. As a candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war, yet 6 months after entering the Oval Office, the same number of troops remain in Iraq. The ‘withdrawal
schedule’ remains unchanged, yet the troops are still there.
In his speech in Egypt he promised a conciliation toward the Mideastern nations and the Muslim community, yet he continues with the diatribe against Iran favored by Israel. Some say Israel still runs our foreign policy. Certainly they are still the benefactors of billions of U.S. dollars and weapons.
The Bush people built the most expensive and extensive embassy in Bagdad, staffed by 1,000 diplomats and aides. The budget to run such an edifice is 15 billion dollars per year, Obama is projecting $1.8 billion for 2010. The ‘new’ administration is planning to spend $1 billion to build an embassy and other diplomatic facilities in Islamabad.
Rather than withdrawing from the costly and useless war in Afghanistan started 8 years ago, the president is sending thousands more troops to the war. But what did we expect since he chose the same Secretary of Defense ( Robert Gates) as had his predecessor.
David Swanson wrote”. . [continuing Bush policies] of sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.
I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
If Bush were in his third term, [or Obama in his first] we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road.. .
In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.
Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.
The bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term [are] still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, was . . reappointed to run the Fed. . . And Obama makes sure that there is to be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their presidential campaign. If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to."
The Wall Street people who were at the center of the economic debacle which happened on Bush’s watch, have been appointed to key positions in the Obama administration. Where is the ‘change’?
Seems to me ”I’ve heard this song before”.
With Love and Kindness,
THE HATMAN
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