[Peace-discuss] Obama's war, bailouts must be opposed

[Morton K. Brussel]

This is a persuasive polemic. The awful nature of the Obama  
administration's foreign and domestic policies is gradually leaking  
out and may eventually destroy him, and who know what will happen  
thereafter.  There is little evidence that Floyd's arguments, which  
ought to be widely promulgated, are wrong. --mkb

On Apr 1, 2009, at 3:38 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [From Chris Floyd. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com 
> . --CGE]
>
>
> ...[On Friday, March 27] Barack Obama announced, with a flourish of  
> falsehoods and fearmongering, his grand plans to escalate the "Af- 
> Pak" War.
>
> Not that I was surprised by any of it: both the truth-abusing  
> rhetoric and the war-expanding intentions have been hallmarks of  
> Team Obama's Afghanistan policies since the early days of his  
> presidential campaign. And Obama, eager to establish his tough-guy  
> cojones, was killing civilians in Pakistan and ordering up an Afghan  
> surge just as soon as he climbed into the Imperial cockpit. His much- 
> vaunted "strategic review" was simply a bureaucratic exercise to  
> determine how best to tweak and refine the policies already adopted  
> by the Bush Administration and its military managers -- all of whom  
> were of course retained by Obama. Again, this was to be expected.  
> After all, "continuity" has been his watchword -- or rather, it  
> became his watchword right after he was swept into office as the  
> self-proclaimed embodiment of the public's desperate longing for  
> change.
>
> Even so, to see the expansion of the Af-Pak War finally, formally  
> promulgated, and to realize what this really means, not in terms of  
> the ludicrous political theater of Washington and the media, not in  
> the war-game fantasies of think-tankers and armchair warriors, but  
> in the actual costs -- the death and suffering of thousands of  
> innocent people, the ruinous chaos and the violent hatred  
> engendered, the massive financial corruption and gargantuan debt  
> added to our already corrupt and bankrupt system, the further  
> coarsening and brutalization and militarization of our society, and  
> again, because it bears repeating, the physical and emotional  
> destruction of countless human beings whose only crime was to be  
> born in a region targeted by the Great Gamesters of the world, the  
> warlords in turbans and those in Brooks Brothers suits, the  
> gangsters in the alleys and in the corridors of power -- this is a  
> bitter and sickening thing. And no amount of foreknowledge or  
> cynicism makes it any easier to bear. The day it gets easier, the  
> day your cynicism makes you shrug off the horror -- "So what else is  
> new?" -- is the day your soul dies.
>
> The wagon train with its rotting cargo keeps lurching on. A change  
> of drivers has not meant a change in direction. As Tom Englehardt  
> points out, in both foreign policy and on the economic front, the  
> Obama Administration is trying frantically to preserve an imperial  
> system that is cracking under the weight of its own immoral  
> excesses, its own arrogance and willful ignorance. But owing to the  
> latter, their only solution is to do more of the same things that  
> have plunged the system into severe crisis.
>
> In fact, the domestic side of their efforts is even more radical,  
> more shocking than Obama's dull-witted "continuity" in Terror War.  
> The new administration is openly transferring trillions of dollars  
> to a small core of financial elites, in effect placing the rest of  
> the country into a state of economic peonage to these remote and  
> unaccountable overlords -- who have, astonishingly, used the fear  
> and suffering created by their own actions as an opportunity to take  
> their domination of society to even greater heights. What Obama and  
> his economic team are abetting is, as Simon Johnson and others have  
> noted, nothing less than an oligarchic coup d'etat. I lived through  
> one of those in Russia in the 1990s, and it was not a pretty sight.  
> And again, because the scale of the American power structure is so  
> much greater, so too will be the far-reaching, long-lasting  
> consequences of this coup.
>
> I've never been a starry-eyed idealist. I've never preached the  
> counsel of seeking the perfect at the expense of the good. And I've  
> never believed that any single politician or administration could  
> take office and magically transform the nature of the American  
> empire overnight. I acknowledge the aptness of the metaphor used by  
> many of Obama's defenders: the image of a sea captain, beset by  
> virulent opponents on the bridge, struggling to turn a vast ocean  
> liner in the opposite direction, in the midst of a raging storm.  
> That would indeed take a long time, and tremendous effort, and  
> require stoic patience from the passengers.
>
> But that is not what is happening. The long, hard, thankless effort  
> that it would take to roll back the bloated global empire of bases  
> and curtail the power of the oligarchy (for you can't do one without  
> the other) has not even begun. Obama is not trying to wrest the ship  
> of state toward a new direction; he is deliberately and willingly  
> continuing on the same disastrous, destructive course as before.  
> Every day carries us further and further away from the shore, and  
> makes any effort to reverse course that much harder -- if indeed, it  
> is still possible at all.
>
> [Full article at http://www.counterpunch.org/]
>
>
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