Bretigne's Open Salon Blog

Did Obama Let You Down? There’s Still Hope!

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 15:03:04 -0500

Three years ago, I wrote an article in which I made some very specific predictions about the incoming Obama administration. I wrote the piece in the form of a letter to my pro-Obama friends and said that by the end of his term, Obama’s administration would not look very different from that of George W. Bush. I told them that if I was wrong about my predictions, I would re-think all of my beliefs about our political system and about politics generally, and if I turned out to be right, I asked them to do the same.

I don’t know if any of my friends took me up on my challenge – I’m guessing they didn’t, since I never heard from any of them about it. But I do know that many of them are disappointed in what Obama has done so far, and that many are feeling hopeless about the upcoming election, resigned to their belief that there is "no better alternative." Incredibly, some of them plan to vote for Obama again.

It is for this reason that I would like to revisit those predictions I made three years ago. I still have nearly a year to go, but I think it is clear to anyone paying attention that Obama is not the pro-peace, pro-civil liberties candidate many of his supporters believed him to be. Nor is he going to "fix" the economy anytime soon. What may not be so clear though is that there is a better alternative. It also may not be clear that there is a way to support that alternative without sacrificing the option to vote for Obama in the general election.

So let’s look at those predictions. If we’re already on the same page about Obama’s presidency, then just skip this part and go to the last section of this article to read about the better alternative.

I confined my predictions to the areas where I believed my pro-Obama friends and I shared common ground: A desire to end our country’s wars of aggression around the world; A desire to see our basic civil liberties protected; and a desire to have a healthy economy. Here is what I wrote, and here’s what has happened:

Foreign Policy:

At the end of Obama's first four-year term:

The US will still have an active military presence in Iraq.

Obama ended the war in Iraq, right? Not exactly. While the administration may have officially declared the war to be over (an interesting feat in itself as it was never declared to have begun in the first place), the US does indeed maintain an active military presence there. Several hundred military personnel will remain under the Office of Security Cooperation, the US has built an embassy the size of the Vatican, with 17,000 employees, and there are an estimated 3,500-5,000 private contractors who will be working with Iraqi security forces.

The US will have attacked at least one more country that poses no direct threat to us. (I'm not even going to count his early air strikes on Pakistan.)

Libya. Yemen. Somalia.

Military spending will have increased.

At the end of Bush’s term – a year that featured the "surge", which made military expenditures unusually high, the US defense budget was $667 billion. At the end of 2011, the (estimated) defense budget was $708 billion. Even adjusted for inflation, this is an easy one.

Even more significant though, is that under Obama, war funding has also increased. While this figure did peak at $189.94 billion in Bush’s last year, dropping to $159.21 billion for 2009, total war expenditures under Bush were $625.41 billion, while in his first three years Obama has already spent $497.6 billion. He would have to bring war expenditures down below $127.81 billion for 2012 (from $169.7 billion in 2011) in order to come in a penny under the George Bush years.

4. US citizens will be no safer from terrorist attacks. I say this because I believe the (sadly all-too-accurate) perception of the US as an imperialist warmongering nation will persist. I realize this one is open to interpretation. I would just ask you to honestly ask yourselves at the end of these four years whether this is the case.

I say I got this one right too. But as I said, it’s open to interpretation.

It is perhaps in this area that it is easiest to see how perfectly seamless Obama’s administration has been with that of his predecessor. There are differences to be sure, but differences that are of importance only to policy wonks, not to the people who are suffering from and paying for the US’s interventionist foreign policies.

As a dramatic illustration of this cohesion, listen to this video of US General Wesley Clark (ret). Clark tells of a memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office in October of 2001, outlining a plan to attack and remove the governments of seven different countries in five years. The countries listed were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran. Listen to General Clark and then try to tell yourself that President Obama is not simply continuing where the Bush administration left off.

Civil Liberties

More than 1% of US adults will still be in prison. This number will very likely be even higher than it is today, and the black and Hispanic portion of that population will not have decreased by any significant amount.

As of August, 2011, the US prison population was an astonishing 2.4 million, or roughly 1.16% of the adult population, and the number of black and Hispanic prisoners remains wildly disproportionate to population ratios.

We will still suffer from the kind of police abuse that is becoming more and more common: military-style raids on unarmed civilians in their homes; the shooting and tasering of unarmed citizens; and police and judicial corruption leading to the jailing of many more innocent people than can be acceptable under any system...

I think it’s hard to argue that these trends have in any way abated. If anything, law-enforcement has become more militarized, more turned against the people it is supposed to protect. If this is news to you, you might want to spend some time here or here catching up.

...Read the rest here.

Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:01:42 -0500

My contribution to "Why Peace" is online today here. I hope it helps to clarify why I am not only against some wars, but against all war.

From the essay:

As I write this, my son is running around the house naked, even though I’ve asked him twice to put his clothes on. I can hear the bathroom sink swooshing on and off as he makes a swimming pool for his zoo animals. I weigh getting up and possibly waking his baby sister, who is sleeping on my chest, against the lesser likelihood that he will catch a cold from running around the house naked and wet. I decide to stay put. The swooshing continues.

I wonder how a man named Scott Oglesby would deal with my son’s exuberance, his lack of "respect for authority," his occasional noisiness. Last December, Oglesby, a police officer, was at Stevenson Elementary School in Bloomington, Illinois, when he heard a seven-year-old special-needs boy having a seizure. Oglesby ran into the room where the boy was being restrained by a school psychologist, shouted "you’re giving me a headache!" and grabbed the boy by the throat, holding him up in the air until he turned red, before throwing him down in a chair. Oglesby is now on "restricted duty," but no criminal charges will be filed against him.

I’d like to think that cases like Oglesby’s are rare exceptions. But every week there seems to be another story about someone being shot with a taser over a traffic violation, or for not responding the way the officer wanted them to. There was the paralyzed man thrown from his wheelchair by an officer in a Florida jail; the New York City cop who stopped a woman from driving her dying daughter to the hospital; the mentally handicapped teenager who was tasered to death after waving a stick around; and, in May of 2010, in another increasingly common militarized raid on a family’s home, the shooting death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones as she lay sleeping next to her grandmother. (There is little doubt as to what happened because the 20 officers who burst into the girl’s home had brought with them a camera crew for a reality-TV show.)

...read the rest here.

My List Isn't As Long As Yours, But...

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 19:10:17 -0400

So there are a few lists of demands and grievances from the Wall Street protestors floating around the Internet now. Those I've seen pretty much confirm what I've seen in the various clips of protestors that are circulating: That most of the protestors, while rightly outraged, don't have a clue about what caused the problems they are now outraged about, nor about what to do to fix them.

So here's my list. It's a lot shorter than the ones I've posted above, and I don't think it's because I've given the matter less thought than those folks have:

1. End the Federal Reserve and replace it with nothing. Immediately.

2. Legalize competing currencies.

3. End corporate welfare, including all bailouts and subsidies.

4. Stop violating the First Amendment, and prosecute those officers and police officials who have violated the First Amendment rights of protestors.

Any other ideas? I'd like to include something about reimbursing people who have lost their homes, jobs, businesses, etc. because of the government-orchestrated boom and bust. But how would you even begin to even calculate all of that? And who would be doing the reimbursing? The taxpayers? Random financial institutions? I don't see a just way of doing this, but am open to suggestions.

Any ideas people send me that I like, I'll add to my list. And I encourage others to come up with their own lists.

The Evils of Money

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:09:11 -0400

This is a response I wrote to a friend's FB post lamenting the money-grubbing nature of the guy in the video below. My friend accused this guy of being part of the problem, so I felt compelled to write this. And then after doing so, I realized it kind of encapsulated what I'd like to say to the rightly outraged folk who are occupying Wall Street, and to everyone who is fed up with being stolen from but, I think, doesn't quite understand how it is they're being stolen from or who is doing the stealing:

Here is the video.

Sigh. I wasn't going to post here because I don't want to get embroiled in a whole debate, but it just keeps gnawing at me and it is such a critical distinction to make so I'm going to try: This guy is NOT the problem. Money is NOT the problem. He may be "money grubbing" and greedy and all kinds of things you don't like, but he did not start this mess and no, he is not fueling it. What started it was the bastardization of money through government manipulation of it that allows the govt. to sap the wealth of everyone else for its own ends.

Money is a tool that was developed by human beings to make their lives easier. Just like you’ve noticed that your landlord doesn’t want to take rent in bamboo or bananas, most people would prefer not to have to go around looking for other people who want precisely what they happen to have at the moment, in order to get what they want. Money is the tool that allows people to exchange bamboo and bananas for a place to live, without having to carry around bamboo and bananas all the time. THAT’S PRETTY MUCH IT. To impute some kind of malice or evil to the institution of money is to completely misunderstand it.

This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it weren’t for the fact that so many people aim their rage for the current economic mess we are in at the “greedy money grubbers” or “capitalism” or even money itself. As long as we all keep misunderstanding what caused the problem, we’re going to keep experiencing the same problem over and over and over again.

Here’s what actually happened - starting a long, long time ago: Left to their own devices, people came up with things that could be used as media of exchange and as stores of value. These things ranged from salt to seashells to big-ass rocks under the ocean that no-one could even move. Historically, people have favored precious metals because they are easily transportable, limited in quantity and hard to fake, easily divisible, don’t spoil when you keep them for a long time, etc. etc.

Governments, all over the world and at different times, have taken over the once voluntary and grass-roots institution of money. They have declared themselves the arbiter of what is and is not to be used as money, how much it is worth, and more recently, they have removed money from any link to anything real (like salt or seashells, or gold or silver). Fast-forward to today’s world and what we have is (in the country I live in) a government that monopolizes the issuance of money, and the money it issues is just paper. That’s it. They don’t even pretend that it’s tied to anything else. It is “worth” what they say it’s worth.

Through various means (fractional-reserve banking, central bank interference in the market for money and manipulation of interest rates, etc.) the government is able to inflate the money supply to its own benefit. For a more rigorous and scholarly understanding of how this works, please refer to this Scrooge McDuck cartoon.

Essentially, the folks (and the people they pay - think military contractors, etc.) who create the money are the ones who get to use it at full value. By the time it gets down to the rest of us, it holds only a fraction of its value and we need a lot more of it to buy the things we want and need.

Meanwhile, by pumping extra money into the system, the central banks create artificial booms which later turn into very real busts. People think there is more (real) money than there actually is. The price of money (the interest rate) is lower than it should be, so people believe that it is cheaper to invest than it actually is. All kinds of people (not just “money-grubbing traders) invest in things, thinking the cost of doing so is cheaper than it is, and you’ve got a bubble. This is what caused the dot com bubble and bust, and it’s what caused the housing bubble and bust. And before you dismiss my analysis, please note that the only people who accurately predicted the housing-market bust (Peter Schiff, Ron Paul and a few others) were the people using this same analysis.

You can argue that the banks and bankers are a big part of the problem, and you’d be right. But not for the reasons you think you are. They are not part of the problem because they are “greedy” or because they deal in “money”. They are part of the problem because they are profiting from what is essentially counterfeiting. They are destroying the money supply, and much of the wealth that ordinary people have built up for themselves. They absolutely are profiting at our expense. But unless you understand HOW they are doing that, you’re not going to even come close to addressing the real problem. In fact, you will probably make it worse by calling for “more government regulation of the financial industry.” This would be nonsense. It is government’s involvement in the world of finance, and more centrally, in money itself, that is at the source of the problem.

You are right to be outraged at those who have caused the financial mess the world is in right now. But please please please take a few moments to understand precisely who those people are and how they did it before launching an all-out offensive on anyone who deals in the world of “money.” If you do, you might actually help prevent it from happening again.

How to End War - video

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:09:09 -0400

Here is the talk I gave earlier today on "How to End War":