Barack Obama swept into the presidency of the United States on a ticket for change. As his first year in office ends, despite the pledges to campaign supporters, President Obama’s record speaks for itself. Stripped of articulate rhetoric, glowing forecasts and lofty visions, President Obama has served, most clearly, the interests of Wall Street and big business. He has inflated the military budget with plans to expand aggression abroad, perpetuating the prosperity of the U.S. military-industrial complex. His approach has been anything but change, matching the actions of nine out of eleven U.S. presidents since the Second World War.
The President’s pledge to health care reform, which could easily have been legitimized by expanding Medicare and making it accessible to all American citizens, deteriorated into compromise and partisan bickering. Instead of promoting true national health insurance (a single-payer, federally based system), President Obama entered the debate in retreat, bent on preserving profit-based insurance companies. The public insurance option is simply an equivalent player, offering small relief in consumers’ medical costs.
In foreign policy, Barack Obama shows no distinction from his predecessor. The United States, now escalating a war at Afghanistan on the pretext of chasing al Qaeda, continues to promote war in the Middle East and Central Asia. President Obama’s National Security Advisor estimates that 100 members of al Qaeda are at large in Afghanistan, none in a position to directly threaten the United States or its allies. Despite these observations, President Obama has chosen the expanded war option, using the al Qaeda argument in much the same way Bush/Cheney manipulated WMDs and fear mongering as the excuse for a preemptive strike on Iraq.
Escalating a war to end terrorism and Taliban insurgency is counterintuitive. The Taliban has free access to Pakistan, a nuclear armed country strained by its own political and economic instability. If the United States proceeds militarily at Afghanistan, objectives can only be met with an expansion of the war into Pakistan. To reduce troop exposure, the U.S. contemplates the high-tech penetration of Pakistan with pilotless drones, a tactic guaranteed to produce substantial collateral mayhem. Such action would alienate the Pakistani people and unleash a broader based, anti-American movement within that country. In any scenario, the Afghani and Pakistani people will suffer hardship and loss of lives. Despite the technological superiority and overwhelmingly high kill ratios of “enemy insurgents” to American troops, the United States will have significant casualties, too.
So, President Obama, where’s the change? Without jobs, losing homes at alarming rates, the majority of American people have no more now than under the Bush TARP agenda. Wall Street is up to speed, apparently the real objective. The foxes—Geithner and Bernanke—have been minding the henhouse—Wall Street. Main Street, Obama’s trumpeted beneficiary of his election success, fares as poorly today as it did during the Obama inaugural celebration.
During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama made a variety of forecasts and continually shared his “visions.” A swing in the independent vote signaled a clear mandate for his proposals. Green energy technology, a renewed automotive industry with a focus on reducing the carbon footprint, entrepreneurs coming out of the American grassroots fabric to develop green industries—all of this sounded appealing.
At present, China and the United States create 40% of the world’s greenhouse emissions. The only “change” in sight is a U.S./Obama Administration commitment to reduce emissions by a mere 17% over the next decade. European industrial nations are aghast at the lack of American environmental commitment in measureable terms. Representative of President Obama’s lack of commitment is his ongoing support of so-called “clean coal.” Mountaintop removal coal mining threatens the quality of life at Appalachia and raises environmental havoc throughout the region.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s constituency at my home state of Nevada faces the highest house foreclosure rate and skyrocketing unemployment. 65% of Nevada’s homes are candidates for either foreclosure or years of being “under water” (equity or principal worth less than the current loan balance). While Senator Reid has been outspoken about health care reform and the public option, he faces a reelection dilemma in 2010 if independents swing with Republicans as a response to Nevada’s economic crisis.
If Senator Reid fails to turn the state’s economy around significantly, many of his constituents and supporters could defect to the Republican side. For the President, the loss would be the end of a Democratic majority in the Senate as well as its Democratic majority leader. Nevada would have three conservative members in Congress, each likely opposed to the President’s proposals.
Given the economic climate across the country, and the likelihood that 2010 could prove equally disappointing in terms of Main Street’s recovery, President Obama may well find himself facing a Republican majority in Congress by January 2011. If so, contrary to James Carville’s gloating post-election predictions of a forty-year Democratic Party reign, President Obama may languish as a lame duck for the last two years of his administration. Reelection in 2012 would be highly unlikely unless the Republican presidential candidate is grossly flawed.
Like the majority of American voters, I placed my bet on Barack Obama. I wanted him to win and move forward with progressive change. When he concentrated on Wall Street’s needs and generated a half-hearted stimulus package that even a Reagan Republican could support, I raised an eyebrow. When President Obama reduced the prospect of Medicare for everyone into a public option health insurance program that would force all Americans into the hands of insurance companies—either private or public—that raised my other eyebrow. And when a foreign policy of idealized rhetoric and glad-handing diplomacy, apparently enough to win a Nobel Prize, revealed its true nature in the support of an overseas offensive under the name of homeland security, I finally got the message: President Obama’s change is, in direct contradiction to his campaign pledges, more of the same and support for the status quo.
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Indra’s Net
While Indra’s Net speaks to WWII and the Vietnam experience, it also speaks to the larger issue of war. War is once again the central theme of American foreign policy, and my blog welcomes earnest viewpoints and founded facts that illuminate the impact of contemporary wars and ways nations can ameliorate political and cultural differences—and defeat terrorism—short of wide-scale military conflict…Take in the novel. It’s up for discussion.—Moses Ludel
“…this ambitious novel spreads its net across the marches of history, reeling in gold nuggets of intriguing fictional action…One of the best things about this novel is the author’s firm grasp of history, especially as experienced from the viewpoint character Dinh…the comprehensive novel reads like a history book without the boring bits…An engaging, satisfying, and richly lengthy read.”—****Holly Chase Williams, ForeWord CLARION Reviews.
Featured at the New York and Los Angeles BookExpo, Beijing and Frankfurt Book Fairs…Available through all major book outlets and independent bookstores in soft cover edition and Amazon Kindle book.
