Bamboozled

There is always some reason that they will try to convince you not to believe what you feel in your gut. They will try to bamboozle you
– Barack Obama

I admit I was swept up in the national euphoria of President Obama’s election. I really believed that something would be done about the economic crisis, our unjust “War on Terror”, and the creeping fascism these wars have engendered. But by now it should be clear that President Obama has no plans to change anything.

According to the mainstream media, the financial meltdown has been contained. Consumer confidence is rising along with the stock market, and the battered US economy is on the mend. President Obama has been widely praised, and given most of the credit, for his deft handling of this crisis.

The press and pundits are right about one thing: Obama’s economic solution is ingenious, even miraculous. It requires almost no sacrifice, no belt-tightening, no spending cuts or tax increases. His administration will simply print three trillion dollars worth of U.S. Treasuries, and we will borrow and spend our way out of this depression.

The Federal Government will run a deficit of $1.85 trillion this year, and another $1.2 trillion next year. Printing all these Treasury Bonds over the next two years will be easy. The hard part will be finding enough suckers to buy them, and then financing the interest payments on our skyrocketing debt.

During the campaign Obama referred to our imploding economy as “the most serious crisis since the Great Depression”. He was absolutely right. We are in the midst of a financial disaster, and we have been through this before, twice.

The Gilded Age ended with a monetary crisis in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Roaring Twenties ended when the stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression. After each of these economic crises, there was a backlash against the excesses of capitalism.

Incoming President Teddy Roosevelt was forced to borrow money from wealthy elites to finance the government. Yet he did not become a tool of the financiers. He earned the nickname “trustbuster” for reining in monopolies, and passed the first income tax into law.

In 1936, at the bottom of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt raised the top income tax rate to 79 percent. He made the oligarchs howl, and financed the New Deal that lifted millions of Americans out of poverty. Incidentally, the US economy grew by a record 14 percent that year, and the following year FDR balanced the federal budget.

Unfortunately for us, Obama is no Roosevelt.

Not only is President Obama not raising taxes, he won’t even repeal the Bush tax cuts, which aren’t scheduled to expire until 2011. While we’re running multi-trillion dollar deficits over the next two years, the richest Americans will pay a 35% income tax and only 15% on dividends. This is a disgrace.

Things would really change for our financial class if they paid 79% of their income in taxes to the U.S. Treasury. In 2007 The richest one percent of Americans were worth over $16 trillion, more than the bottom 90 percent of U.S. Households. The idea that we cannot raise taxes on these people, and have to run these massive deficits, is absurd.

Half of this year’s Federal Budget is debt, and half of the deficit is the President’s $787 billion “stimulus” package. Obama’s emergency spending initiatives ignore the fastest growing outlay in the Federal budget; interest on our national debt. We will pay $460 billion this year, and five trillion dollars over the next ten years, to the holders of US treasury bonds.

President Obama has done nothing but protect the moneyed interests, yet he is at the height of his popularity and prestige. His first 100 days in office were a whirlwind of public speeches and appearances on popular TV shows. All carefully choreographed to maintain the fiction that he is a Populist, ready to take on the elites who are exploiting us.

It’s working. A CNN poll conducted after Obama’s first 100 days revealed that 63 percent of Americans believe the President has the “right priorities”. Two thirds of those surveyed think President Obama is doing a “good job” keeping his campaign promises.

As a Presidential candidate, Obama vowed to get us out of Iraq, end the use of torture, close the illegal prison at Quantanamo Bay, and investigate those responsible for these crimes.

True to his word, Obama has announced plans to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq. But he fails to mention that another 50,000 military personnel will remain in Iraq indefinitely, guarding U.S. Bases. After calling the war a “mistake” during the campaign, his administration plans to permanently occupy the country.

The President has put a stop to all “enhanced interrogation methods”, but he has continued the policy of extraordinary rendition. This allows the United States to hand foreign detainees over to other countries for interrogation. The Obama administration no longer condones torturing prisoners, they simply transfer suspects to foreign nations who will torture them.

Two days after being sworn in, President Obama signed an executive order to close the Quantanamo Bay prison within one year. The problem is, if the detainees held there are transferred to the United States, then our own laws apply and they would receive a fair trial. After throwing out all the illegal evidence gathered through torture, many of them wouldn’t even be convicted.

The President admitted as much last month: “We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there will be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes because evidence might be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.”

During the same speech Obama unveiled plans to incarcerate these individuals indefinitely, without trial. This new system of “preventative detention” is of course unconstitutional, and will eviscerate the Bill of Rights. The erosion of our civil liberties continues under our new President, in the name of national security.

Obama recently banned the release of the US torture photos depicting sexual assaults on detainees at US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has stymied private lawsuits by refusing to declassify secret documents, citing national security concerns. Finally, the President has rejected calls to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s war crimes.

The Obama administration’s plans for our future are even more ominous than their refusal to investigate the past. Right now a bill is working its way through Congress that will give the President authority to regulate and restrict internet traffic. The CyberSecurity Act of 2009 is the Patriot Act writ large over the internet, and once again national security is the excuse to restrict our liberties.

When this bill was introduced, the mainstream press began covering a strange story: Allegedly our energy grid had been hacked, and the culprits were Russia and China. No evidence for this cybercrime has been presented, all we have are the statements of our government officials.

It should be noted that we spend more on our CIA and National Security Agency than China and Russia spend on their militaries. Yet we cannot locate Osama bin Laden, the man who allegedly masterminded the 9/11 attacks. Nor can our intelligence agencies even provide evidence that links him directly to the crime.

Nevertheless, Obama has put America and the world on notice that the War on Terror goes on. In his famous speech in Cairo on June 4^th, the President warned his listeners: ”The battle against terrorists will continue, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.”

Nobody knows what will happen next, but by now we know what’s not going to happen. We’re not getting our country back. The Obama administration will not raise taxes on our financial class, or make drastic spending cuts. We are not going to withdraw from our wars in the Middle East. Nor will our government prosecute those who carried out these war crimes.

Obama was America’s last chance. He could have saved this country. But he didn’t.

That is the real tragedy of President Barack Obama.