A Good Year For Obama, Not For The Rest Of Us

Dear Mr. President,

Here we go over the cliff. Will it be like the end of the Mayan calendar, a non-event? Probably. But the real catastrophes, the war against the planet, your drone wars and the war in Afghanistan didn’t make it into any list of top stories for the year, at least none I could find. You’ve successfully made war a non-issue. Nobody cares. Except for those on the receiving end, the Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis and whoever else you unleash Hellfire missiles and teams of assassins on. A recent article reported the grim fallout from the drone war in Waziristan: the Taliban has now taken to executing suspected collaborators. Turns out the CIA pays $350 to anyone who reports an insurgent/Taliban/Al Qaeda person. Any checks on that information? Maybe someone had a grudge or just needed the money to feed their family. How do you verify any of this? The CIA at it again, fingering people, guilty or not, no different than the NKVD secret police back in the day. Meanwhile, here at home, you offer Republicans a sweetheart deal upping the threshold for increased taxes from $250,000 to $450,000 so even fewer of the rich have to pay that tiny 4.6% increase. And your business friendly regulatory agencies, I see in today’s paper, just gave 14 banks, guilty of illegal and ruthless foreclosures, a free pass if they pony up $10 billion between them. Ostensibly earmarked for underwater homeowners and those whose homes were illegally foreclosed, nobody knows how victims get  identified since the deal is, no further investigation or analysis of the mortgage scandal if the Banksters pay up. But no matter, the billions go back into the treasury and who cares about the kicked-out-of-their-homes homeless anyway, right? You got re-elected so you don’t have to play the game any longer. Not a bad deal for you, for the government, for the banks—just a cost of doing business, $10 billion a tiny fraction of the profit they made in their criminal venture. So Happy New Year, Mr. President, except it isn’t for those we brutalize and kill abroad (and at home—think Bradley Manning) and for those whose homes got foreclosed (4 million and counting since 2008 and no end in sight), but for you a good year when nobody pays attention to your wars of aggression and other crimes against humanity and so long as the media doesn’t report it, you’re home free. Nothing to be proud of, but still, it looks good on your resume: Commander-in-Chief and chief enabler of the criminal class.