Shutting Down the Government But Not War

Dear Mr. President,

The government shut down today while the crazies in Congress take an ideological stand: Repeal Obamacare! what the pundits call your “signature” achievement. But Obamacare is a watered down version of what should have been. Obamacare is really a gift to the insurance industry with a side benefit for some of the 30 million uninsured Americans. Real healthcare reform would be single-payer healthcare for all, like other industrialized nations but you took that off the table even before negotiations began. I think your signature achievement is not Obamacare but your bureaucratizing and normalizing war. A real signature achievement would have been to end war and normalize peace, understand the causes of 9/11 and remedy them, and conduct a national reconciliation of the lawless Bush years, but you ruled that out soon as you got elected and continued and expanded the phantom War on Terror. When I survey your accomplishments over the past 4 years, 9 months, I see devastation, misery and loss of hope. Your drone wars terrorize villagers in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere, people who have no idea who we are and are no threat; your ongoing militarization of America’s “law enforcement” and the massive surveillance state are harbingers of tyranny and repression; and the erosion of freedoms, the secret laws and secret courts and secret activities of our government are not the acts of a democracy but signs of the totalitarian fascist state to come. And while we spend trillions on wars and tens of billions propping up dictators and repressive, corrupt regimes like the Egyptian military coupmasters, the Saudi princes and Hamid Karzai (is the CIA still delivering bags of Ben Franklins to his office every month?), Detroit, Stockton, San Bernadino and Harrison County, Georgia go broke, pensioners no longer have an income, homeowners lose their homes to robber baron Banksters, and social programs are decimated. All in the name of National Security, the latest false god of the political class. The years of your reign are an unmitigated disaster, Mr. President, worse than your predecessor’s. You are indeed the more effective evil. You found power in making war and you used it. Maybe shutting down government is a good thing, I thought, maybe it will curtail war. But I read this morning that you signed an executive order to continue paying the military regardless. So everything stops except the killing. The Republicans are protesting the wrong thing.