Tag Archives: obama

Boots on the ground.

I won’t waste any breath on much of what’s happened in politics this week … that Hobby Lobby suit before the Supreme Court has got me hopping mad, but I’ll hold that for another week while I take the President to task for his speech to “European youth” about the Crimean crisis. One particular passage is very worthy of attention:

Russia has pointed to America’s decision to go into Iraq as an example of Western hypocrisy. Now, it is true that the Iraq War was a subject of vigorous debate not just around the world, but in the United States as well. I participated in that debate and I opposed our military intervention there. But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state that could make decisions about its own future.

Laugh away.

Here, Barry seems to be saying that it’s all right to ignore the clear will of the UN Security Council (and General Assembly) and invade another country, so long as eight years later you leave what’s left of them to sort out their political future ( this after their refusing to sign off on a status of forces agreement we were pushing for). It’s as if the dubious notion that we had a “vigorous debate” (perhaps in the street, but certainly not in the mass media) prior to starting the Iraq War somehow makes up for the fact that we went into that country on obviously false pretenses, over the objections of major allies and partners, including Russia.

That was bad enough. But just the fact that we are comparing Russia’s incursion into Crimea (death toll: less than ten, to greatly exaggerate the actual number) unfavorably with our attack on Iraq (death toll: hundreds of thousands, with fratricidal violence still killing thousands a year long after our exist) is craven beyond belief. He didn’t even mention the continuing conflict in Afghanistan. Small omission.

Finally, the resource point is a red herring. We didn’t go into Iraq to “grab its resources for our own gain”, though how that fact makes us virtuous is beyond me. Still, if Iraq’s main export was chicken wings, we would never have been there. It isn’t about stealing the oil; it’s about having a say in where it goes and where it doesn’t go. That’s as old as the American empire, and twice as thick.

Russia is a bad actor, no denying it, but we are far worse. Before we start condemning them for mustering their soldiers within their own borders, we might consider pulling ours out of the scores of countries where they are stationed, all around the world.

luv u,

jp

Bad guys.

When I watch news reports about the Ukraine crisis, I’m reminded of that Dave Mason song from back in the seventies, that went something like this:

So let’s leave it alone
Because we can’t see eye to eye
There ain’t no good guys
There ain’t no bad guys
There’s only you and me and
We just disagree

Are you scared? Really scared?Right, well … I was never a big fan of Dave’s, but you get the idea. Part of the problem with our once-over-lightly media culture is that there is an extraordinarily rapid resort to black-and-white, wrong vs. right narratives that are easy to report, easy to digest, easy to repeat again and again. In all that, we lose the sense that it’s possible to have two assholes in a fight – adversaries who are divided by conflicting claims, not by a contrast between absolute good and absolute evil.

I guess what particularly galls me about the current state of play is that when you draw attention to this fact, you are accused of being an apologist for the Putin regime. Fact is, Putin’s regime is the model of governance in Russia that the United States clearly preferred, one we actively encouraged and supported relatively uncritically until the falling out around the Iraq war. What we’re staring in the face right now is the product of two failed American policies: (1) support for a strong executive in Russia from the Yeltsin years forward, and (2) insistence not only on perpetuation of NATO after the end of the Cold War, but expansion of the alliance deep into eastern Europe, over the vehement objections of the Russians.

Russia’s objection to NATO expansion? Well, this is just a guess, but I’m pretty sure they are against any major military alliance on their western flank, probably because they were invaded four times, starting with Napoleon, the last time nearly destroying Russian society. That’s a living memory for some in Russia, and something no doubt written in their DNA at this point. You can say they’re a little sensitive about threats from their west. Just a little.

That doesn’t excuse beastly behavior, but you have to admit … compared to the suppression of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, this invasion and  annexation of Crimea has been pretty tame. I’m just saying, we need to dial it back a little, and remember that we still have thousands of nuclear weapons. Indeed, there can be no military conflict between Russia and the United States that won’t practically guarantee the destruction of all of humankind.

If we fight, no one wins. Take that to the bank.

luv u,

jp

Taking sides.

If anything, the crisis in Ukraine grew hotter this week, and it’s getting kind of scary. Through it all, though, there has been a persistent tendency in the media to support the maximalist position of the U.S. government and our European allies – namely, that the Ukrainian opposition is fully legitimate and essentially beyond any critical scrutiny, that the Russians are engaging in bald aggression of a kind not witnessed in decades (!), and that the violators of human rights in Ukraine are all on the pro-Russian side.

Okay, well … a few points that probably need addressing:

Coup or no coup. Russia calls what happened in Kiev a few weeks ago a coup; Washington does not. In the United States, labeling something a coup triggers legislation designed to impede the delivery of U.S. aid to coup regimes. Our administrations of both Sensitivity training, American style.parties typically do an end-run around this by simply avoiding the word when it’s inconvenient. We’ve done this with Egypt and with Honduras. When it’s someone we don’t like, it’s a coup, plain and simple. In Kiev, the elected leader of the country was ousted without due process, in the midst of a negotiation over rebalancing of political authority and early elections. It’s not outlandish to call that a coup, regardless of how kleptocratic the old regime may have been.

Who killed who? The killing of oppositionists by sniper fire on February 26 has often been cited as a primary rationale for the ouster of the Ukrainian leader. Those killings were chalked up to the regime. However, this past week, The Guardian and others have reported on claims by the Estonian Foreign Minister that the shooters were hired by the opposition. The new Ukrainian government is reluctant to open an investigation into this.

Atypical aggression. Really? This can be reported with a straight face from a country that invaded Iraq ten years ago? In this category, we haven’t a leg to stand on.

My point is, before we rush in to aid this new government, let’s be honest about what our interests are in that region. And let’s not paint one side virtuous and the other evil before we know the facts.

luv u,

jp

Persistent truths.

As I write this post, the parliament in Crimea has just voted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, to which it belonged until the mid 1950s. The Russian parliament, in turn, is considering legislation to enable it to accept new provinces, an ominous turn to Where's America in this picture?be sure. There is a referendum on Crimean secession scheduled for later this month, and the new Ukrainian government is crying foul. So … are we on the brink of a new Crimean War? Charge of the Light Brigade, anyone?

The “Putin is Crazy” narrative is dominating the news cycle here in the United States. I can hear it right now, on the evening news. Even supposed activist liberal shows like Rachel Maddow are playing this as a crisis for which Russia is solely responsible, and strong evidence of Putin’s departure from reality. He’s living in another world, the German premier suggests, and that claim is being hammered home, day after day, on every network, every news channel, every media outlet. One would think no one had ever occupied a square mile of foreign territory before. (Ummm …. Afghanistan? Guam?)

I hate to be the lone dissenting voice on anything, but this thing is obviously spinning out of control, and the potential consequences are enormous. Despite his autocratic tendencies, Putin is not hard to figure out, friends. He doesn’t want another Syria as his next door neighbor. With the ouster of Yanukovych, he sees the potential for civil conflict, possible failure of the central government, etc. Putin sees the United States and Europe as having stoked the opposition, and in all frankness, it’s probably true that we did. We regularly support political movements in other countries to an extent that we would consider unacceptable should another country attempt the same on us. Now we openly support the revolution in Ukraine.

Is is about supporting democracy? Well, that’s certainly not a prerequisite for U.S. support. See Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc., etc. In all honesty, I think it would be a really good idea to work towards a diplomatic solution with greater energy. There is a tendency to fall into old cold war habits – a fact that reveals the bankruptcy of our obsession with communism back in the day. It’s really just about great power competition, and that should be considered illegitimate, particularly when so many lives are at stake.

Between us, we still have thousands of nuclear weapons. This is not something to fool around with.

luv u,

jp

State of the Hoover.

Listened to Obama’s fifth State of the Union address Tuesday night and was not surprised to hear many of the same small-bore themes we’ve heard from this president many times before. I am not One-way ticket to Hoovervillesomeone you could describe as disappointed in the president: he is very much the kind of leader I expected him to be following his 2008 election. Probably the most prescient look at the then-early Obama presidency in 2009 was published in Harper‘s under the title Barack Hoover Obama. The author Kevin Baker pointed out that, like Obama, Hoover was a very intelligent, well educated, worldly, and highly capable man – that was the reason he was elected president.

And yet, Hoover failed miserably. Baker sums it up in this passage:

Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required. Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt.

This is, in a nutshell, reflective of the tragedy of Barack Obama, who was elevated to presidency at a moment in our history when enormous economic challenges demanded solutions of similar magnitude; when every month upwards of 750,000 Americans joined the ranks of the unemployed; when our hopelessly corrupted investment banking system was imploding and homeowners faced with a tsunami of foreclosures. Yes, he stanched the bleeding, but for a variety of reasons – not least of which being a lack of willingness to try something different – he did not provide an alternative vision of society that would have place us on the road to full employment, environmental sustainability, guaranteed housing, single-payer health care, and secure retirement.

What do we have instead? A vague proposal for something called MyRA and other similarly lame initiatives. We need to drive a more progressive agenda forward. If God had intended voting to be consequential, s/he would have given us decent candidates. It’s really just up to us.

luv u,

jp

It ain’t broke.

Not that this is all that unusual, but I heard from various representatives of the Republican party and the “tea party” movement on NPR this morning. I really wonder why these right-wing types are so critical of NPR – the network is almost wholly devoted to providing them with outsized coverage. Every time they sneeze, Steve Inskeep is holding the rag. Sure, I listen to them regularly, because they have some good reporters, some good programs, and because they’re better than everything else on my upstate New York radio dial. But that’s a bit like voting for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Yeah, Barry’s a pretty lousy president; he’s just better by an order of magnitude than the object he was running against. Pretty low bar, frankly.

Low-bar radioWhat irks me, though, is the legitimization of truly extremist right-wing notions of governance (or lack of same) through what I’m sure NPR and other networks consider “balance coverage”. A brief example: yesterday there was a report on some research having to do with economic inequality and the degree to which people believe the federal government has an active role to play in addressing its effects. It was presented in the usual “this side thinks this, while the other thinks this” manner; specifically, 90% of Democrats believe the government should be involved in fighting inequality, while Republicans are evenly split. This was played as reinforcing the notion of a nation divided along party lines, but they buried the lead – by these percentages, it looks like a significant majority … maybe 60 -70% – agree that the government has an active role to play. Why the hell isn’t that the story?

The only reason why extremist tea party-type ideas significantly influence national policy is that they have an outsized voice in the national conversation. That’s why we are essentially cutting the long-term unemployed off at the knees, canceling their unemployment when there’s still three job seekers for every available job, slashing food stamps while cutting taxes on corporations and throwing more money at the Pentagon. Large numbers of unemployed people are a necessary component of capitalism – that keeps labor inexpensive and profits high. So to the free market fundamentalist, that system is not broken … it’s working just fine. And that is the point of view that will continue to drive the national conversation until, along with the tea party, Occupy Wall Street gets their own response to the State of the Union.

Color me disgusted.

luv u,

jp

Sucking sound +20.

We are approaching the grim milestone of twenty years after the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement – a pact that is described even by bland media outlets like NPR as having benefited only corporations in the 3 countries affected. Twenty years after its passage and signing by President Clinton, the evidence is in and it seems clear that many if not all of the criticisms were justified. And now that it is well-established and that we have entered into numerous other trade deals modeled on NAFTA, mainstream news organizations can report the obvious, namely:

  • NAFTA has fueled immigration to the U.S. from Mexico. By forcing Mexican corn farmers, for instance, to compete with Cargill, the agreement effectively destroyed large segments of rural livelihood in Mexico, sending economic refugees streaming into their cities and ultimately across the U.S. border in a desperate bid to find gainful employment. (I might add that, coupled with the high demand from the U.S. for illicit drugs, this destruction of legitimate crop farming has likely led to greater resort to illegal agriculture, marijuana production, etc., in the Mexican countryside.)
  • NAFTA has undermined employment and wages in all three countries. This is the sad truth behind Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” – the allure of moving production to Mexico has emptied factory towns in the United States, leaving us with the miserable husk of an economy we’ve been living through these past five years in particular.
  • NAFTA has provided a pernicious model for other agreements. The Trans Pacific Partnership is just the latest in a series of NAFTA like “free-trade” – actually, investor rights – agreement that have popped up since 1994. Some have failed, like the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), which was dropped after news of its consideration became widely distributed. But generally, these pacts have contributed to a neo-imperial system of enormous corporate wealth unattached to any nation or government, pushing labor back on its heels.

The thing is, we are grappling with something more serious than a recession, and NAFTA is one manifestation of the deeper problem we face. Our basic right to earning a livelihood is under attack, and we have to be more determined in our efforts to not only defend against this attack, but to push back and press forward.

luv u,

jp

Like they care.

One more shot at this Affordable Care Act issue, and then I’ll shut up about it for a while. It irritates the hell out of me, to be honest, that I have to defend this product of a conservative think tank, but that’s the crossroad we find ourselves at. Just a few points:

Denying working people healthcare since 2008People losing health insurance. This is a shocker, but people have always been booted out of their health plans. This is nothing new. Sure, Obama didn’t qualify his claim that people could stick with their policies if they liked them. But the media’s claim that this amounts to the President’s “Katrina moment” is simply ludicrous. All of the examples of people who have been forced off of their substandard plans have involved people who can generally afford better. One brought forward by NBC was a freaking attorney in Washington. Come on!

People never getting health insurance. While the G.O.P. and the entire mainstream media have had their hair on fire about the attorney lady who lost her catastrophic health insurance, their political allies in statehouses across the country have done everything they can to ensure that the ACA is a failure. A key component of this is refusal to expand Medicaid, which is keeping millions of working poor people from getting coverage. The reason for this is purely ideological. Louisiana governor “Bobby” Jindal complained about having more people in the cart than pulling the cart, implying that Medicaid expansion would only help the unemployed. Sure it would (and it should), but it wold also help millions of working families – people who work a hell of a lot harder than he ever has.

I’m beginning to think that Bill Clinton should have climbed aboard the ACA-type plan the Republicans were proposing back in the nineties, before they went entirely insane. At least that would have been in place, and there would have been some opportunity to improve upon it since.

As it stands now, the G.O.P. have no concrete proposal to provide health coverage to every American. Their only plan is to shoot the ACA down before it gets some traction.

luv u,

jp

Kill zones.

Back when I was knee high to an antelope, in the scented 1960s, the U.S. was engaged in what is now described as “limited war” in Vietnam. Our concept of limitation is, well, somewhat limited, as it amounted to an all-out attack on Vietnamese society, particularly in the South Vietnam hinterlands, which took the brunt of the bombing, defoliation, and other depredations. Part of that policy was establishment of “Free-fire zones” – when night fell and the friendlies were inside the wire of the strategic hamlet, anything that moved beyond the wire was fair game. Hence the shooting, the bombing, etc.

This is our target?Our drone war in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and essentially everywhere else, runs on a similar principle. It isn’t as all-out, of course, but it appears to be nearly as random. And just as every living thing in the Vietnamese countryside was assumed to be Viet Cong, every military age male in the tribal areas of Pakistan is, by definition, an extremist, a combatant, a terrorist, and therefore the target of killer drones, piloted by some dude who works at a terminal in a trailer about fifty miles from where I’m sitting right now.

That definition of “military aged male” appears to be expansive enough to include the 67-year-old grandmother of Rafiq Rehman, a school teacher in North Waziristan. She was killed by a drone-fired  missile while tending her crop. (Rehman and his family were interviewed on Democracy Now! a couple of weeks ago.)

This policy is not only criminal, it’s stupid, unless of course the objective is to generate future conflicts. People in these tribal areas live under the buzz of killer drones every day of their lives. There is simply no telling when you, your father, your daughter, your best friend will be blown to bits at random by an unaccountable power, an out-of-control empire pressing its advantage against people who cannot defend themselves against this deadly technology. As an American of a certain age, I grew up under the threat of nuclear war. There was a sense of danger that attended every day of my generation’s childhood. This drone war is much more tangible, much more immediate, but psychologically corrosive in a similar way.

We are investing in a generation of people who hate our guts. We need to stop this now.

luv u,

jp

Lies, etc.

The airwaves are thick with heated commentary on how President Obama overstated the simplicity of his signature health insurance legislation, popularly known as Obamacare. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” was how the refrain went throughout his first term. It was an unqualified statement and, indeed, an emotionally potent oversimplification of the type we see in political rhetoric, I don’t know … how about all the time?

Right, so, he lied in the sense that what he said was not accurate for 100% of the people who have health insurance, 100% of the time. It is, however, accurate for about 95% of the people 100% of the time, and for the other 5%, only some of the time. If you have a super crappy individual health insurance plan with an enormous deductible and you signed onto Who lied about Obamacare? Seriously?it before implementation of the Affordable Care Act, sure, you can keep that dog – it’s grandfathered in. The insurance companies simply can’t continue selling those policies now that the law is in effect because – and this is important – THEY SUCK TOO BADLY, and because of that, they do not comply with the law.

To hear t.v. commentators of nearly every stripe talk about this, you would think individual life insurance is some kind of Eden from which subscribers are being exiled by pitchfork-wielding devils. Let me tell you, I spent many years in the private insurance market. I had a plan with Mutual of Omaha and one with Excellus BlueCross BlueShield. Mutual of Omaha paid for exactly nothing; the money went one way, from me to them. BCBS was mostly BS – I had a high deductible, as did my wife. I remember once going to my doctor because of a persistent cough, having to get some blood work, and being declared well. That cost me $500 (in 2005). My wife had an emergency room visit that came to $2,000. (She was fine, also.)

My point? Jon Stewart made it best. The people who are yelling “liar!” the loudest are the same ones that have been telling ridiculous lies about the ACA since its passage. In the liars hall of fame, Obama’s “never” clause ranks far behind “death panels” and not even in the same league as “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.”

luv u,

jp