Obama's War

The Afghan War has become increasingly unpopular as its grinding cost ($2B a week) receives belated scrutiny. Obama sticking to the promised troop reduction timetable, despite little in the way of tangible results from 'the surge', will make few happy. It will be seen as a trickle not a flow. The Army wants more time at maximum troop strength. And the public is bored shitless with the whole costly affair especially since the US is now perceived to be “broke”, overextended militarily and in headlong decline.

Obama in the heat of the 08 campaign let his hubris get out hand. Along with promising to leave Iraq, he also promised to prevail in Afghanistan and track down Osama Bin Laden - two different and only partially related objectives. To Obama’s credit Osama Bin Laden is now history and his terrorist organization with its holy war ideology seems to have been eclipsed by the "Arab Spring" which is anything but Jihadist.

But promising to succeed in Afghanistan was a big mistake. Apparently Democratic Presidents (and candidates for such) have to appear strong on military matters to avoid being called out as wimps and ‘out hawked’ by Repubs (especially ex war hero John McCain.) Yet by honoring his campaign promise (at least this one) and doubling down in Afghanistan, Obama's commitment has only made things worse not better - the classic tar baby effect (as Lyndon Johnson learned in another war in another time.)

Furthermore, the US military officers corps (who are mostly Republican-leaning and don't much trust Democratic Presidents) do not want to be a part of another war that 'was lost.' That's not exactly career building. Besides not offending the military establishment, Obama did not want to oppose the popular Gen. David Petraeus, whose 'surge' in Iraq allowed that war to be perceived as a sort of victory or at least not an abject defeat, as big a disaster as it was and still is. Also to make matters worse, Afghanistan and Pakistan are totally interlocked geopolitically (remember the Pakistan ISI originally established the Afghan Taliban.) This regional relationship wouldn't matter except Pakistan has deliverable nuclear warheads (and has been known to proliferate said technology.) Furthermore the ‘incubated virus’ of the Afghan Taliban has now come back and infected Pakistan further destabilizing an already dysfunctional country.

The original sin here was that after our war of vengeance against the Taliban for not coughing up Al Queda after the 9/11 attack actually succeeded, Bush and Co., idiots that they were, turned away and started a second even bigger war. This as we know allowed the Taliban to regroup, regain territory and support, and define the US presence as an evil occupation army not as benevolent 'nation builders' as we liket to see ourselves.

Obama should have run as a total anti-war candidate and offered to redirect all or part of the money being spent there on military operations instead on making Afghanistan a showcase example of what can be done with a failed Muslim state. And if it was too late for that, then cut our losses and get the hell out– after all it was Bush’s war, not Obama's yet. He still would have beat McCain. Remember in those days the Repubs were still being blamed for the economy then in a full nosedive.

Now he’s stuck. If he pulls out too fast and Afghanistan and/or Pakistan plunges into chaos and/or the Taliban take over again after ten years heavy fighting, many lives lost and something approaching half a trillion dollars pissed away, it will certainly be a post-mortal victory for Osama Bin Laden. Yet with all attention now fixed on “the Deficit” and how to reduce it, how can he afford to stay? Plus the original reason for invading them has been 'deep sixed' and the remnants of his organization run out of the country. The Graveyard of Empires indeed…

Is there any consequence to always being wrong?

There is seems to be no consequence to being dead wrong if you’re a Republican. The Bush II years were an unmitigated disaster any way you look at it: two brutally expensive still unpaid for and still both ongoing wars; failing to ‘apprehend’ Osama Bin Laden); running the federal debt through roof (in which the Debt Ceiling was routinely raised with no comment); the rerun of an already discredited idea -“supply side” economics (lowering tax rates does not lead to more aggregate tax revenues from increased investment); a deregulatory landscape free-for-all especially in the financial sector resulting in a world wide financial credit paralysis which in turn triggered a deep recession nearly as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s (which we are still wallowing in.)

Yet somehow through a mix of right wing radio and Fox media blitzes, a gullible and easily distracted public, and a fat passel of lies and world class dissembling by seasoned Repub pols, all this has allowed the Republican Party to somehow miraculously survive to fight another day.

Blown out big time in the 2008 election at all levels, the Repubs regrouped especially in the Senate, and cornered they bared their long knives. They misused and abused the old boy Senate rules especially the veritable old filibuster rule to paralyze legislation and political appointments. Result: legislation that did survive was so watered down and gutless that many Obama supporters lost faith. One important example was the critical stimulus package intended to pump some air back into the deflated economy which was nearly a flat tire by early 2009. Tried and proven Keynesian counter-cyclical policy had worked for decades. Consequently most mainstream economists urged a robust and targeted stimulus package but all we got was a diffuse and poorly aimed one badly undermined by Republicanesque tax cuts.

Obama is no FDR. At that pivotal point he did not sense the need to rally the nation. Instead he tried to deal with the devil, the devil being the Repubs collectively. The stimulus package of 2009 after lots of fanfare did not have the bite nor the scale it needed (and it did escape notice that far more was done to save the broken banks which through their own greed and irresponsibility had reluctantly and humiliatingly required a bailout.) In any case we are now all paying for that the inadequate first stimulus package. We still have nearly 9% official unemployment a year and half later, and the American people are totally demoralized. The aftermath of the real estate bubble, which drove the entire economy for most of 2000s, is a ravaged landscape of foreclosure-riddled ghost towns, lost dreams and personal bankruptcies. Yet in DC all attention is now suddenly turned from the continuing effects of the biggest downturn since the 1930s to the perennial problem of the national deficit.

But what is forgotten in all the posturing over the ‘unsustainability of the entitlements’ and the 'over extension of the welfare state' is that the recession itself causes the deficit it to increase ever faster. Out of work people pay less taxes, buy less and thus feed negative energy into the recessionary cycle. Repubs lied about the effectiveness of the first stimulus insisting it was flop. It was a flop in terms of theater but not in terms of actually producing a reversal in the downturn and mild positive numbers in the economic indicators. But most Americans saw little tangible evidence in their daily lives as the economy only very slowly came back to life.

And into that breach wades the hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, demagogic (while using the word on the Demos), opportunistic bastards known as the GOP especially their young guns such as House member Paul Ryan. Now with hotheads and airheads of the so-called Tea Party faction behind them, the GOP is threatening to blow up the entire global economy by refusing to legally raise the debt ceiling on money already legally allocated if they don't get their way. These fuckers are incredible! These teabagging assholes think that the worse case is simply some Ayn Randian/Grover Norquest wet dream: a shrinking and then drowning of what’s left of the US's rather limited "welfare state" in the proverbial bathtub.

The problems is, like the gangsters that they are, the Repubs have discovered extortion works! Having gotten away with it twice before, they believe the third time's in the bag. First, in late 2008 they refused to vote for retaining the middle class tax rate (which if eliminated would have kicked the already weak recovery into reverse) unless they kept their Bush II engineered budget busting lowered tax rate for the very rich (which Obama eventually caved in on.) Then they held up the badly overdue 2011 budget until lots of painful (and recession exacerbating) cuts in the 12% slice of discretionary spending was reduced (which did zilch to fix the overall deficit problem.) Now they want to use that same perverse leverage on the routine (and unpleasant) raising of the debt ceiling.

Everyone including the dimmest Repub House backbencher knows that all hell will break loose if the US defaults (or seems like might default) on its long running debt. For starters the interest on Federal Treasury bonds will rise and counter productively increase the national debt itself, not to mention the dislocation and chaos if checks to pensioners, contractors and government workers stopped flowing. And of course the stock and bond market could weird out big time as well as the already unstable commodity markets. And if the US sneezes the hold world economy catches a cold or worse. Of course it’s a game of chicken and no one (except the Pee Party nuts) wants to actually drive the car off the cliff or be blamed for said car landing on said rocks.

Remember the one thing about the Repubs that always appeals to the average overextended American is the Repubs (irresponsible and demagogic) anti-tax policy. It is their ace-in-the-hole, their tactic for all seasons, their ever-popular standby carrot ‘n stick. But will this continue to work forever? The old bait 'n switch - offer to lower everyone's taxes but then mainly reduce taxes on the already shamelessly financially porcine.

But they unlike the Demos the Repubs also do service their base, a base that consists of hodgepodge of disparate subcultures. You have the anti-abortion zealots, the 2^nd Amendment gun rights fanatics and now the stronger than ever Ayn Ryan worshiping teabagger/Libertarian ideologues. Plus there is their real base: the Fortune 500 corporations with their army of lobbyists and of course those of the very rich, the sociopathic crime families who are completely free of any debilitating social or environmental conscience.

But the Repub base is not enough to carry them over the line electorally in many important areas of the country. They must appeal to the called “independents” - the perpetually undecided, the distracted, the apolitical, the apathetic (who often hide behind a facade of cool cynicism.) The tired old refrain “taxes are too high” and “the Democratic Party led government wastes your money and will raise taxes”, "tax and spend liberals' are the real problem, etc, These have become tried and proven means to get these sometime voters and right leaning 'independents' off their asses and voting for Repubs. But will it work forever?

The Democrats must hold the line in this latest effort of budgetary extortion. Reasonable plans do exist, “centrist” in any reasonable political spectrum. But again Obama seems to be conceding too much in his opening position. He should be starting from as far “left” as possible in terms of our crazy right-shifted spectrum and work toward a moderate, real centrist position. And such a position already exists in the (unfortunately named) Peoples Budget proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It contains reasonable adjustment of tax policy so as to reinstate what worked in the past along with a healthy trimming of the bloated budget military, and it would balance the budget by 2021. And it accomplice all this without butchering the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Medicare/Medicaid programs.

The only antidote for Republican poison is a robust counter proposal that solves real problems and takes on the crushing corporatist state institutions that are bleeding us dry and dragging us into the Third World, ‘banana republic’ status. Here's hoping we will see a new more combative Obama. The American people, that is those who are not already lost to tin-hatted delusion, would respond to forceful leadership at this crucial junction in US history.

Obama and the Democrats: A Fatal Under Reach?

Barack Obama (and Harry Reid leading the Demos in the Senate) seem to have frittered away a rare opportunity for real change. With their reluctant, diffident, non-confrontational, filibuster-shy approach they have achieved the worst of both worlds – virulent ire from the right and crushing of all hope on the left. On issue after issue this administration has come on too weakly and compromised too soon against a ruthless adversary that takes no prisoners: health care reform, not prosecuting the torturers in our midst, postponing real confrontation with the doomsday scenario of impending climate change, ignoring the environmentalists on the risk of offshore drilling, not reversing the Bushian Justice Dept’s draconian overreach, letting the banks call the shots on a bailout of a mess that they made, and most of all failing to robustly address the Great Recession.

Of course the rescue of the economy is still a work in progress, but it’s not going well. In early 2009 we needed a seriously large stimulus that was well designed, without gimmicks (like tax breaks) and implementing visibly useful public works projects, infrastructure overhaul and a wholesale green re-engineering of the economy. If implemented in concert with a massive “bully pulpit” campaign informing the public as to the impending global disaster of climate change, Obama could have produced the public support necessary to hold off the opposition. But no, we got a typical half-measure (even though the numbers seemed large) that satisfied no one.

That said, please don’t vote for a Republican as a protest of the Obama administration’s disappointing performance thus far. As bad as the Democrats are we must support them. A return of the Repubs by their attaining a majority in either house of Congress will be an unmitigated disaster. They have no answers!

The Bushian dead-enders, the racists, the hardcore right, libertarian ideologues and the Repubs in Congress will hate and oppose Obama whatever he does. And an organized Fox Channel/hate AM radio supported, loud, ugly, ‘tea party’ type backlash was inevitable. Whatever was proposed by the Democrats, be it tepid ‘boiler plate’ moderate Republican programs (as it appears to be), or a mildly reformist agenda (as it could have been) or a true break with the past (which was possible), the right would have been livid with rage.

But ask yourself where would we be if the McCain/Palin “team” had gotten in? John McCain had no plan at all for an economy that had just plunged off a cliff (in fact even he admits he dislikes economics.) Look at him now as he skidaddles to the extreme right shamelessly abandoning all previous reasonable positions (climate legislation, immigration, campaign finance) to save his butt. We might have had more budget busting wars, though. And Sarah Palin (one heartbeat from the Presidency) is a certified airhead who resonates only with others of her ilk. To everyone else she is either a dangerous demagogue or a broad (excuse the pun) target for derision.

Recall that by January 20, 2008, Inauguration Day, the US economy was in full free fall. Remember the entire banking sector had seized up and we all were relying on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (a ‘liberal Democrat’ FDR Depression Era reform) to keep our bank’s doors open. Unemployment was in vertical ascent, the auto industry was a basket case and most of us our houses had lost 1/3 of their value.

Now less than two years later things still suck but they suck a little less. Or maybe it’s worse in the sense that we now all of us are thoroughly disabused of any ‘audacity of hope’ campaign bullshit. Obama’s corporate alignments and abandonment of his base has won him enemies on all sides and few allies as Yeatsian centrifugal force sets in.

The fight in Congress now should be over another major stimulus package as we seem to be falling back into the dreaded ‘double dip.’ But it’s not. That battle is already lost due to the widely held perception is that the first $830 billion was a big fat flopperoo. Why throw good money (we don’t even have) after bad? The Repubs, of course, fuel this belief. But what was avoided will never be known. And how bad it might have been is simply unknowable. It’s impossible to prove a negative. But it certainly didn’t fix things entirely. As most economists predicted it was too small. The typical Obamaian reluctance to swing for the fences is now biting him and his party in the ass.

The Republican Party’s plan is simple. They want things to get even worse. They offer no credible plan for the economy other than to further sabotage of the Democrat’s agenda through recalcitrance. They can only drag out their tired old warhorses: “more tax cuts” and “cutbacks in entitlements.” But it’s even uglier than that - they want to retain the budget busting tax cuts put in by Bush for millionaires and billionaires, tax cuts that didn’t do jack shit for the economy. It only fed cybermoney into a feeding frenzy of disastrous financial speculation that almost brought down the whole global banking structure. The big buck buckaroos won’t invest their money in new factories and jobs in the US. Forget it! Their money earns greater returns in firms that offshore manufacturing by availing themselves of cheap labor and environmental law free zones.

In the last great economic downturn the FDR administration reluctantly adopted the theories of John Maynard Keynes. Once that happened the Great Depression became significantly less onerous. Keynesian fiscal policy is the idea that government should makes up for inadequate aggregate demand during downturns in the “business cycle” by deficit spending. And then repay the deficit by taxing it back during the upswings. The old ‘priming of the pump.’ This policy was dominate and not even questioned by either party up until the 1980’s. Then something called ‘supply side’ economics came on the scene. It is the disreputable cousin of them more academically respectable Monetary Theory. Monetary theory is the ideological adversary of Keynesian theory favored by conservatives. All of this is tied into the rise of something called neoliberalism, which actually negates ‘liberalism’ as understood by most people.

For a number of reasons Keynesian theory fell out favor by the late 1970s, one reason being that it seemed to be failing. Something called ‘stagflation’ had set in. During the heyday of Keynesian theory it was normally accepted that inflation was a tradeoff for growth. As the government spends money, the demand for goods and services would sometimes outstrip supply and force prices up - hence inflation. But at least unemployment was tolerably low even as prices crept upwards. But in the late 1970’s, the hapless Jimmy Carter years, we experienced both flattening growth along with inflation. Energy costs (mainly oil) went through the roof and was probably the main culprit but the anti-government spending ‘monetarists’ and their allies on the right, the flakier ‘supply siders’ (AKA “voodoo economics”) advocates stepped into the breach. The ‘supply siders’ purport to believe in a notion long since discredited, “Says Law”, that supply creates its own demand. Following from this they (pretend) to believe in the ever appealing but manifestly erroneous idea that if you lower taxes the amount of economic activity generated, the supply side, will create enough demand and thus enough economic growth will occur to compensate for the lost tax revenues. But unfortunately it doesn’t work!

The Republican, Ronald Reagan (and later his imitator, Bush II) lovingly embraced this bogus concept and as president(s) implemented it – result massive, bone crushing deficits. The irony is that (old style moderate) Republicans always hammered the Democrats over modest Keysensian deficits, but as born again ‘supply siders” they ran the deficit through the roof. The real reason obviously is to tie the hands of successive Democratic administrations from implementing popular social spending programs – schools, health, welfare, infrastructure. And it has worked. It worked with Clinton and now it is working with Obama only on a more profoundly disastrous level. The deficit is now $13 trillion and growing. How do you public support for more spending to counter the worse recession since the 1930s with that backdrop?

The Monetarists, led by Milton Friedman, believed business cycles can be better managed by varying the money supply through the Federal Reserve – fiscal policy. They basically want the government out of the way especially regarding regulation of business. From this flows neoliberalism embraced in recent years embraced by both political parties. Also in practice both Keynesian and Monetarist principles are used, fiscal and monetary policy, to (try to) manage business cycles as both have their virtues. For one thing the Fed can pump money into the economy without going through Congress. And of course the government is always inextricably entangled in the economy through military-related spending - AKA “Military Keynesianism.” What the right is opposed to is Keynesian social spending, the very thing that mitigated the Great Depression. The Great Depression had a ‘double dip’, too (what many are afraid of now) as the FDR adminstration pulled back in government spending in 1938 due to pressure from the GOP. But the (military) Keynesianism eventually saved the day due to massive deficit spending to fight WWII.

We need another Keynesian social spending injection now but we won’t get it. The right is too influential and the most of the public have never taken Economics 101. We need another blast of deficit spending to overhaul our infrastructure and to implement climate saving ‘green technology’ on a large scale. But instead what we have forming is a political tug of war between the still employed (the majority) who have been encouraged to worry about “Obama’s deficit” (that he inherited most of it from Reagan and Bush II) and the un and underemployed who are increasingly desperate. As we cut back on spending it will get worse but it will be blamed on the Democrats. We are following the same path the Japanese took in the 1990s.

Americans seemed to be ‘ahistorical’ even regarding recent events and only respond to the siren call of the moment. Hence during crisis periods those with the least intellectual integrity and the most visceral appeal can step into the breach and rule the day. It’s sad but true from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush we have had to endure fools in times of crisis. Where do we go from here? Which well-coifed, golden tongued, empty-suit charlatan will step forward to lead us down the primrose path?

The Day the Earth Stood Still

A person who hates or distrusts humankind is called a misanthrope. Maybe I’m not yet at the hating level yet but certainly I am well into the ‘distrusting’ zone. I’m starting to believe human beings are simply ‘no damn good.’ The remake of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still played with this misanthropic perspective. But unfortunately it was a crummy movie. Expensively made with high production values, it was the usual blockbuster dreck. It features terrible acting by Keanu Reeves in a role that actually requires him to be stiff and boring, much lame dialogue, some extremely annoying characters (Jennifer Connelly’s character’s kid is an unpleasant whinny little dreadnaught-haired jerk) and the usual over-reliance on big buck computer generated graphics to blow lots of big things up in a big way. Yet, the basic concept had promise, an updated more broadly misanthropic version of the 1952 version’s more simplistic anti-militarism message.

In the original version the aliens arrive in a modest little 1950s scale “flying saucer” and try unsuccessfully to bring about world peace but wind up mounting a massive defensive retaliation against our puny array of laughably ineffective weaponry. This time, besides the usual defensive retaliation against our primitive peashooters, the aliens have decided they must destroy us to protect the planet from us. An intergalactic confederation somewhere has decided we are destroying a very unique life supporting celestial vessel, our Planet Earth, and we must be stopped since we are incapable of change. The concept had great promise. Too bad the movie turned out to be an unwatchable mess that required recourse to the Eject Button before anything was actually resolved. But judging from how things were going, it would no doubt have been resolved in the finest Hollywood tradition. One of the lead characters would heroically, individually, ruggedly save the entire human race, the entire planet and maybe even the entire universe. Ho hum.

When one starts seeing the human race as unredeemable, the idea that this movie was working with, one is inadvertently backing into the concept of ‘original sin.’ If you accept the idea of original sin, or more secularly, the inherent limitations of the human animal, it stands to reason our morally challenged nature will be reflected in all of our institutions.

One prime example of this is that we have inserted (and even promoted to almost a virtue status) the once widely reviled sin of greed to be the actual mainspring of our economic order, known as Capitalism. So is it any wonder that we are constantly ill served and often in crisis if we have a system of resource allocation that encourages a known form of misbehavior? Yet even if "greed" is formally if not effectively removed from the equation in a collectivist alternative, such as Socialism, other “sins” or in secular terms “human defects” reassert themselves and undermine the operational integrity of said revised arrangement. Such ignoble human characteristics as pride (careerism, egotism and the will to power) and sloth (manifested as alienation, insubordination, alcoholism and lack of pride in workmanship) reemerge. At least they did in the prime model of ‘real existing socialism’, the erstwhile Soviet Union. But they had other serious disadvantages working against them, too, such as no tradition of democracy. But that’s another story.

And then there is that other major human institution, ‘our font of moral redemption’, our commonly accepted means to ‘explain the inexplicable’, the very underpinning of all of our cultures: Religion. Second only to the timeless struggle over issues of simple tribal dominance, nothing has caused more wars than disagreements over religious doctrine especially when linked with religio-political ideologies like Theocracy or monarchical Divine Right. Furthermore, religion as an institution is failing dismally to address our lemming-like march toward global ecological suicide. Stewardship of the planet seems to be never even on the radar of the most activist and troublesome fundamentalist sects such as Muslim jihadists, Israel’s ultra-orthodox Judaic sects and American evangelical Christians and their rabid ‘right-to-life’ movement. In fact religiously inspired horrific Jihadist terrorist spectacles such as 9-11 and the fascist reaction of the Bushian-led US government have served as a major distraction from serious recognition of the gravity of our present ever-worsening environmental crisis.

So as we end the first decade on this new millennium, humankind remains bitterly divided. Scores of nation states continue in confrontation, individually or as members of alliances with a small group of larger, more powerful nation states retaining their economically exploitive and politically dominate status. This while doomsday nuclear weaponry threatens to continue to spread to ever less coherent political entities. Add to this the diverse religious, ethnic and racial tensions that often mutate into hatred and distrust. Sitting astride this whole mess is a self-interest driven global ruling class, unacknowledged by a corrupt corporate controlled Fourth Estate, and operating primarily behind the scenes. These puppet masters pull the strings of the world’s elected and un-elected “leaders.” Despite idealistically conceived global institutions such as the United Nations that are intended to harmonize and unify, these nation states remain a quarrelling dysfunctional family. This ongoing Spectacle serves as constant distraction from the ongoing massive transfer of global wealth into ever fewer hands. This redistribution upward occurs whether the world economy sputters in recession (as now is) or hyperventilates itself another financial bubble.

This perpetual global discord and continuing spirit of nationalistic Darwinian survival- of-the-fittest distracts us from our ‘forced march to oblivion’ as the entire planet overheats. Scientists keep reminding us that this planetary overheating is fostering cascading changes through little understood feedback loops resulting in ever more grave and unpredictable secondary effects. And yet we dither while our resource devouring war machines, our atavistic internecine religious squabbles and our ever recurring geo-political maneuvering continues to distract and immobilize. All the while an ever-growing portion of the world’s myriad life forms, human and non-human, struggle for the means for survival.

Against this is a feeble and cacophonous resistance by a hodgepodge of liberals, leftists, religious do-gooders, journalists, intellectuals and artists of all stripes, each who contain within themselves a personal mixture of vanity, lust, ambition, self-absorption and other human frailties and shortcomings. So the “resistance” has no lock on being defect-free. Yet where would we be without these people throughout history - resisting slavery, monarchy, child labor, apartheid, torture, nuclear weapons, war and so on. Some small improvements have been made over the years (few would try to defend slavery these days.) But progress is always subject to reactionary reversal as has occurred in the ‘dark sided’ days of Bush/Cheney. Will any further progress be made? Barack Obama claims to be on the side of human progress. We shall see…

Obama’s latest oratorical performance

While working on my latest painting (an Edward Hopperesque rendition of a seedy beach motel near where I live, the Sea Breeze), I listened on the radio to Barack Obama’s latest oratorical performance – his February 24th “State of the Union (Economy)” address to Congress. Obama is the first US president in my lifetime that I can stand to listen to for extended periods of time without wanting to regurgitate. I was too young and air headed to be interested in politics when JFK was around. Bill Clinton was smart enough. He could to reel off data and policy and complex thoughts without notes and all, but I always felt like he was a patent opportunist setting his sails to the prevailing political winds, what with all of his ‘triangulation’ and Republican-Lite domestic policies and ‘aggro’ international endeavors like bombing Belgrade (even as the real Republicans abhorred him for stealing their thunder as they rushed ever further to the right.) The rest of them I positively hated hearing speak, especially the so-called “Great Communicator” himself, Ronald Reagan. His phony avuncular grandfatherly style always left me cold, and the implications of his message left me angry and fearful. Richard Nixon used false sentiment and the usual patriotic treacle to cover his serious pathological addiction to power. Jimmy Carter was simply a disappointment with his good intentions and inept implementation; was this the best we could do after the crashing and burning of the Republican Party under Nixon? Of course, after eight long years of W. Bush’s bumbling torment of the English language trying to explain away his disastrous policies ineptly using intellectually dishonest constructs (and outright lies) cobbled together by of his stable of hack speechwriters, anyone would sound like Abraham Lincoln or Clarence Darrow. So Obama has it made in that regard. He is an excellent speaker with something of substance to say - and a program that I more or less agree with. Like a good college instructor, he his both interesting and informative.

But with things the way they are Barack Obama had his work cut out for him. His speech last week had to provide both necessary balm to a nation that is reeling from a quintuple whammy - and provide hope. Americans are being knocked silly by at least five interrelated shocks to their systems. First we have a plunge in material well-being like none I have seen in my lifetime. Virtually the entire middle and upper middle class is now suddenly poorer as the value of their primary asset, their house, continues to sink like a rock. Secondly, personal and family nest eggs are broken and running out of the cartons and all over the counter top as their stock market investments and the value of their 401Ks continues in free fall. The third factor is the profound loss of confidence in the very (de)regulatory establishment, itself. The government allowed the entire banking system to implode due to an appalling instance of greed and collective irresponsibility by Wall Street as they milked vast wealth out of the ever-expanding housing bubble. Now that the bubble has burst, the same fuckers have the supreme audacity to “request” hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to staunch the financial bleeding of their banks and investment houses. Yet despite the grudging largess of the taxpayers for so far 350 billion bucks and counting, the whole thing remains dysfunctional as ever with credit still frozen solid. The financial crisis (now worldwide) acts on the recession like supercharger moving it ever closer to into the category of yes - a Depression. So now, whammy Number Four - millions (billions worldwide) now face unemployment as the downturn feeds on itself and losses mount in more and more industries resulting in evermore workers hitting the bricks. Finally Number Five in this ‘quintuple whammy’ and the basic problem that started it all: foreclosures. Millions are losing their homes due to foreclosures as mortgage payments reset on properties whose values are plummeting. Neighborhoods formerly full of proud homeowners, being a homeowner was the primary element of the so-called American Dream, are now ghost towns. Of course, as in all economic processes it feeds on itself and the emptied housing tracts and neighborhoods lead to ever more of decline in housing values as unsold housing stock accumulates in aggregate.

Into this maelstrom young Mr. Obama has placed himself. His speech Tuesday night will only be remembered if his grandly ambitious plans work out as we all hope it does (except for that fat ass Rush Limbaugh and his Brown Shirt contingent on the far right). Even if we were not in an economic crisis of yet unknown magnitude with so far only hypothetical (and cautious) remedies being proposed and with no one really sure what will actually work, he would be in hot water. So much damage, irrespective of the current economic crisis, was done by Bush and his cabal of Republican Party Neanderthals in Congress, not to mention the neoconservative ideologues who commandeered his foreign policy and drove it over the cliff, Obama would be totally overwhelmed with just the clean up work. But confronting global warming (with renewable energy and capping carbon dioxide emissions,) implementing universal health care, pulling US troops out of Iraq without it descending into chaos (which he would be blamed for), the rubric cube of Afghanistan (potentially more of Viet Nam- type quagmire than even Iraq is,) taking on wasteful military spending, taking on agribusiness and their beloved farm subsidies, reversing Bush tax cuts for the rich and very rich, and somehow miraculously eventually cutting back on the deficit – and all at once. Each of these is a full-on, total immersion kind of issue involving bloody power struggles with very well entrenched, well funded and articulate defenders.

The very fact that he could tie them all together in credible package apprising the American people of their interrelationships is noteworthy and admirable. He was also able to communicate the fact that in this economic crisis when all bets are off, great latitude and opportunity for much needed change exists. It’s like a pinball machine that suddenly pops out several balls at once. An opportunity for a very high score as well as the danger of a very low one (due to serious distraction) both exists simultaneously.

The next year should be very interesting indeed!

Goodbye George W, Hello Obama (and the unreal expectations so generated.)

It is a relief of the first order not to have that incredible buffoon, George W. Bush, sitting astride so of much power. Bush was such a perfect paragon of ruling class arrogance and privilege combined with a studied and refined indifference to the complexity of the world. He was the worst product of Texan oil ‘n cowboy culture, a little man with a big cowboy hat – as they say 'all hat and no cows '(or common sense.) And the damage he has left behind is immeasurable and serious. Stinking heaps of GOP/Bushian feces surround on all sides. Third Reich type legislation firmly in place like the rush-to-judgment Homeland Security Act (the name “Homeland”, so very close to the Germanic “Fatherland”) and the inexorable and fascistic Patriot and the Military Commissions Acts. And who will ever forget his a monarchical (and criminal) habit of simply ignoring any laws passed by Congress that he didn’t like by issuing so-called “signing statements.” And, of course, the US already in many quarters under suspicion for trying to run the world for its own economic and political advantage, was plunged into further disrepute by starting two seemingly endless wars. Also there is Gitmo, extraordinary rendition, torture as standard interrogation policy and so on. Add to that a full decade lost in confronting the world historical crisis of global warming. And finally by having his ideologically driven de-regulatory hacks allow the US financial and banking establishment go bananas with greed eventually shoving the global economy over the cliff.

Anyway we now have a shiny new president, Barack Obama ,who is refreshingly different from the Bush in every way possible to the extent that he is viewed by many as some sort of messiah. We will soon learn that, while Obama may indeed represent a quantum leap from his hapless predecessor, he, too, has feet of clay. But for now with only a few days into his reign, things already feel a lot better as he begings knocking down some the bulwarks of Bushland like closing Guantanamo, reversing some of the last-minute Bush federal regulation changes, allowing stem cell research and so forth were - all good but expected.

Yet we must brace ourselves for disappointment. No one can turn so much that is wrong around overnight. It will be a long hard many year slog through waist deep offal. And, to make matters worse his team so far is not exactly chock-full of "progressives", free thinkers or fresh new outsiders or whatever.

Here is a list of disappointment so to date:

Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State, Ugh! Her voice is annoying, and remember she was of one the more powerful members of Congress to be fooled by the Bushian full court press leading up to the Iraq invasion. Furthermore, her hubby, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy record was not exactly stellar. Bombing the bejesus of Serbia and blaming them for trying militarily to forestall Yugoslavia from disintegrating as a nation, bombing Iraq every week or so and wiping out the sewer system leading 100,000 (by UN estimates) children’s deaths there, making zero real progress on the Israel/Palestinian mess with the less than useless Dayton Accords, continuing with the irrational blockade of Cuba, AWOL on the Kyota Treaty and so on.

Robert Gates: Secretary of Defense. A case might be made that continuity will help with the complex problems of disengaging from Iraq and confronting failure in Afghanistan. But Gates is a Bush appointee and will lead to too much continuity. A clean break is demanded. Surely there are some centerist Democrats with a military background that would be better and would send a strong signal to the world that the bad old days of neocon Bushian adventurism by the US are over.

Laurence Summers: Chairman of the White Economic Council. Where did that choice come from? Larry Summers is most well remembered as the erstwhile President of Harvard cashiered for some ill advised speech he made in which he posited that woman had an inherent gender disadvantages in math and science. But apparently he is also an economist of some repute and served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury. Is that good? Clinton left office with a rare accomplishment, a budget surplus. His administration is also up to elbows in responsibility for the deregulatory mania of the financial sector that is the source of our present world economic meltdown. With all the smarties around why choose a Clinton retread?

Judd Gregg, Secretary of Commerce. This bipartisan bullshit is going to bite Obama in the ass. This Judd Gregg character is Republican Senator from New Hampshire. Surely he could have found a pro-business Democrat for that job. Gregg won't even vote for Obama’s economic stimulus package while he is still in the Senate. Also environmental groups are opposed to his support of fish farming.

There are others that reflect a center to center right position like the very Clinton-esque choice of Richard Holbrook as special envoy Afghanistan. But other choices are good like Hilda Solis for Secretary of Labor.

Obama was carried into power by a broad coalition of center-left types but he has never pretended to be any more than a centerist, himself (who had the good fortune to not be in Congress when the Iraq war was voted on.)

Nevertheless, Barack Obama is the best chance we have had in long time. I just hope he can play hardball effectively against the very ruthless, intellectually dishonest, highly influential, inveterate rabble rousing, Clinton-crippling American right wing. They may be wounded and they may be in pain, but that makes them all the more dangerous.