Now a year into Obama’s presidency, many Americans are beginning to realize that empty campaign slogans like ‘hope’ and ‘change’ have brought about nothing of the sort. Many Obama supporters believed they were voting in the Bush cure-all. However, the destructive policies of the Bush era have continued, albeit with a friendlier face.
Just as Bill Clinton’s professor Caroll Quigley argued, the elite have constructed a paradigm in which the two parties essentially pursue the same policies, while putting on a good staged fight for the public to argue over: ‘The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea … Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.’ In layman’s terms, America got played. New face, same corporatocracy.
Foreign policy is still dominated by interventionism, the notion that America can and should police the world. Any ‘hope’ that there would be a de-escalation of war under Obama’s watch has been shattered. The Nobel Prize winner was recently successful in extracting $708 billion from Congress to wage war. Iraq has been a clear disappointment to those who thought Obama’s mandate was to end the war. In Pakistan, over 40 missile strikes have resulted in as many as two million Pakistani refugees. Afghanistan has seen an increase of over three times the number of troops prior to Obama taking office.
Regarding monetary policy, Bush and Obama even had the opportunity to overlap rather than just emulate each other. The TARP bailout initiated by Bush and championed by Obama has now grown to a total taxpayer liability of over $23.7 trillion, an estimate that is now six months old. The ‘stimulus’ package, which according to the Obama administration created jobs for 440 non-existent congressional districts, was a pathetic attempt to continue the papering over of previous economic errors of the Bush administration. Artificial government spending did nothing to stop the 4 million jobs from vanishing in 2009, the same number of jobs that Obama’s economic advisors warned would be lost without stimulus spending.
Those who sincerely believed the corporatocracy behind Bush would be dismantled by electing Obama were shocked to learn that many of the very same appointees of the Bush and Clinton administrations were joining the Obama White House. Just like the puppet president before him, Obama is beholden to the establishment that put him in power. While the American people were asleep at the wheel, drunk from rhetoric, the warfare-welfare state expanded by leaps and bounds.
Recent revelations indicate that Treasury Secretary Geithner committed a federal crime by ordering AIG to falsify its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to cover up almost $70 billion of U.S. treasury funds that went straight to buying toxic derivatives from the criminal banksters at 100 cents on the dollar. Now the American people are waking up to the monstrosity of the criminal undertaking of the international banking elite and their political servants.
Even as I write this, the Obama-hype train continues to be derailed with the victory of populist Scott Brown over Martha Coakley for Senator of Massachusetts. This libertarian momentum has been growing and will continue through 2010.
If Americans are looking for true change and real progress going into the new year, the only chains that will effectively constrain politicians and secure the rights and freedoms of the people will be those of the U.S. Constitution. Since our constitution demands that a declaration of war by Congress is required to wage war, neither Bush nor Obama are engaged in a constitutionally legal war. Our constitution demands that money not be manipulated by privately owned central banks but rather requires sound and stable money by declaring gold and silver to be the only legal tender. Neither Bush nor Obama, however, are willing to shut down the Fed’s banking cartel.
We can no longer afford to have popularity contests between Republicans and Democrats. We must demand that the law of the land be followed, and to hold our politicians to this standard.
That’s real change.
Sukenik is a member of
the class of 2010.
