2. Imperialism no longer works. Nationalist and religious guerrilla forces can force high-tech imperialist armies into prolonged and massively expensive stalemates. Since the U.S. can't move fast enough in developing energy alternatives, it remains locked into the battle around the globe in other countries for the remaining traditional fuels: coal, oil, gas. Even the negative environmental ramifications of bio-mass energy haven't been thought through. This way of operating is a self-destructive loop, one that winds up involving the U.S. in senseless, outrageously expensive wars around the globe, associated with obtaining and protecting natural resources, where all the high-tech hardware is no real match for native anger and determination (read: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somali, Yemen, Pakistan, etc.) But President Obama continues on with many of the same reckless imperialist policies as his predecessors. And "thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe."
GETTING ALL HOT & BOTHERED
3. While the world fiddles, the planet burns. The developing world, anxious to achieve first-world superpower status, repeats the worst aspects of industrialization, which pollution helps to more quickly heat up the planet. Perhaps the best worst example: millions of newly better-off Chinese are buying cars and, like many in the U.S., China's rulers refuse to deal with the reality and ramifications of global warming and climate-change. Conferences after world conferences are held to deal with these topics and sometimes they even issue high-sounding goals (as in the recent Copenhagen confab), but nothing really happens. The fundamentalists and the Hard Rightists are overjoyed at the lack of action on global warming, a reality they continue to deny. And we can't even get cap-and-trade, which really is little more than the selling and trading of pollution permits, a license fee (passed on to consumers) for destroying the planet. And thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
THE BIG FLUSH
4. The economy is in the toilet, even though establishment economists keep telling us how we're just about to turn the corner. Try telling that to the 15-20 million workers who have lost their jobs these past two years and can't find others. And we're not even at the bottom of this recession/depression yet, as the next wave of mortgage foreclosures (in private residences and commerical property) and owner-walkaways are cresting. And the ripple effects from such widespread joblessness and homelessness have devastating long-term consequences socially, culturally, economically as federal, state and local taxes revenues continue to decline, and in terms of rising crime rates. The infrastructure in cities and towns can't be properly maintained and improved since there's no money to fix roads, bridges, schools, etc.
So what does Obama do?: He plays politics with deficit-fears at a time when the economy needs more stimulus, not less, certainly not a spending freeze on everything except "national security" and the military.
But, what am I saying? Of course, there's always a spare trillion lying around to pay for another extension of another war. And thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe.
MILITARY STALEMATES
5. Military experts have told the President and the public that the two wars America is fighting right now cannot be won. The most one can hope for is a stalemate while U.S. forces try to build up local armies to battle anti-Western extremists. President Obama himself, for example, has said there is little chance of victory in Afghanistan (a lesson already learned by the Brits and Russians, who were forced to withdraw over the past century and more), but he's sending more American young men and women to fight and die there anyway, in order to withdraw them later on a U.S. timetable. The presence of U.S. forces in massive numbers, and the use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with their inevitable "collateral damage" of innocent civilians, probably does more to prolong the wars and aids in the recruitment by extremists of more anti-Western volunteers and suicide bombers. But Obama will not turn back from this "hard imperlalism" momentum. And thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe.
CHANGE POLICIES? WHY?
6. Because his favorable numbers are slipping, and he got his Massachusetts wake-up call, Obama is re-constituting his old campaign staff to prepare for the mid-term elections in November. He proclaimed his policies and priorities, all good ones, during the 2008 campaign, but hardly fought for most of them. It's mostly public relations and spin-doctoring now. It would seem to make sense to examine, and perhaps alter, the Administration's ongoing policies -- but instead, we will hear new campaign buzzwords, slogans and marching orders for the upcoming election cycle. Of course, Obama could take another course: He could just get in there with the wide range of campaign promises he ran on in 2008, and fight like hell to get them implemented. But that would require a willingness to slug it out with his political enemies, and Obama seems content to try to work with those who wish him no good.
Which translates to: Nothing will really get done. Partisan sniping and mud-throwing have become the new permanent political norms. And now with the Republicans in possession of 41 votes in the Senate, much of the more progressive agenda is endangered, as the GOP can just filibuster any and all bills, if it so chooses. And the Democrats, per usual, will roll over on their backs in a submissive posture. No wonder Congress ranks so low in the estimation of the electorate -- Republicans more than Democrats, but them, too.
Check out this observation by Kos (Markos Mulitsas Zuniga, founder/editor of DailyKos.com), talking about the thoroughgoing ineffectiveness of the Democrats:
"THAT's why the base is sitting things out. They don't need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats can't govern. They already knew that Republicans don't WANT to govern, but the Democrats were supposed to be different. And they are, they WANT to govern, but they can't. And the voters that worked their asses off to give Democrats the White House and super majorities in Congress are now realizing that it was all for nothing. That all that talk about hope and change was cynical bullshit designed to motivate them. It worked once, but that crowd is learning the art of political cynicism, and it ain't pretty."
In our electoral system, every action is calculated by the politicians not for the public good but for how it will affect their re-election chances. And thus we drift toward unparalled catastrophe.
THE CORPORATE LOCK
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