Obama & Keystone: Betrayal of Future Generations

Dear Mr. President,

I read with doubt and then disbelief the glowing tributes to your inaugural address. “Soaring rhetoric,” “Obama unbound,” “Obama offers liberal vision.” Even Jim Higthtower drank the Kool-Aid: “Barack Obama stood tall before the people to declare without guile and for all to hear: This is what I believe; these are my guiding principles; this is where I intend to move America.” I did not hear your speech but I printed it out and read it. Sorry, Mr. President, but I didn’t think it was all that great. A few good lines but nothing I’d call soaring or stirring, nothing that changed my opinion of what has been and what is to come. Platitudes and promises, long on generalities, short on specifics, nothing to make me a true believer. Some progressives and environmentalists focused on your mention of climate change—“We, the people still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”—and right there’s where I think the rubber meets the road, the bellwether of Obama Redux. On Tuesday, Nebraska’s Republican Governor, Dave Heineman, approved a revised route for the Keystone Pipeline—against vocal opposition by citizens and environmentalists—and tossed it in your lap. Yesterday, 54 Senators—44 Republicans and 10 Democrats—signed a letter urging you to approve the pipeline. I’m putting my money on approval. A safe bet, I think. Why would you have approved the southern leg—even called for expedited construction—if you didn’t intend all along to approve the northern leg? And a look at your history is pure Drill Baby Drill: opening the Arctic, re-opening the Gulf after the disastrous BP blowout, opening coastal waters, unregulated fracking, allowing coal exports to China (indeed, all that tar sands oil coming down through the Keystone pipeline is destined for foreign buyers, not domestic), and, most significantly, no major initiative to shift from fossil fuel to renewable energy. There’s nothing to cheer about in your record and nothing in your rhetoric to make me believe your second term will be any different from your first. Sadly, I believe only the latter phrase—“failure… would betray our children and future generations”—will be part of your legacy, for your first four years are filled with betrayal, with lies and false promises, and what I read Monday was more of the same.

Kill List Tuesday & The Inaugural Address

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Dear Mr. President,

All the pomp and ceremony over, it’s back to business as usual and today being Kill List Tuesday, business as usual is selecting those who will die this week by drone strike or Special Forces assassins. Do you regard Kill List Tuesday as a presidential perk, deciding who will live and who will die? A vent to frustration? Revenge for past wrongs? Or even more horrifying, do you believe this is the right thing to do? Yesterday, during the pomp and ceremony, the killing took no pause. A small article in the NYT reported that a drone strike in Yemen on Monday killed 3 suspected members of Al Qaeda. The same article reported that Saturday, two drone strikes in that country killed 8. No additional information was provided, but by now we the people know that drone strikes in Yemen are run by the CIA, you authorize each one and they are all illegal, immoral, against the UN Charter, against international law, against the Constitution, and against human decency. No evidence, no court of law, no trial by jury, no legal recourse, each murder a war crime and a crime against humanity. Your inaugural address included these words: “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” but bureaucratizing and institutionalizing targeted assassinations makes them accepted policy and self-perpetuating. You honored “our brave men and women in uniform tempered by the flames of battle” but where is the bravery in sitting at a computer far from any battlefield and launching death and destruction on a helpless victim from an unseen drone? You also said, “A decade of war is now ending,” but that too, is false. Your drone wars will continue and the war in Afghanistan will not really end in 2014, merely evolve, for as many as 20,000 American troops will remain indefinitely and tens of billions of dollars will be spent to prop up the corrupt Karzai regime, an affront to Afghans and Americans alike. No matter the words or proclamations or resolutions or inaugural addresses, our wars of terror will not end as long as we as a nation are addicted to violence and as long as war remains accepted policy; war will simply shift and morph and evolve into other forms of destructive brutality and other forms of injustice and violence. How can anyone believe your words of peace, Mr. President, while your drones rain Hellfire on the deserts of Yemen and the mountains of Waziristan in a campaign of terror unmatched in human history?

Inauguration Day

Dear Mr. President,

Today the big show, the swearing in, the parade, the inaugural balls sponsored by heavy hitters like ExxonMobil, AT&T and Microsoft, each ponying up $250,000 to $1 million. Lots of pomp and ceremony that means nothing since you were officially sworn in yesterday as required by the Constitution. Politics is nothing but entertainment nowadays, meaningless public spectacle; the real deals cut behind closed doors and only those with the entry fee admitted. Like that Amgen deal buried deep in the fiscal cliff budget, a clause inserted in the last hours before the vote so no one would notice (New York Times, January 20, p. A1). It gave Amgen another 2-year delay before reducing Medicare payments for a dialysis drug, essentially taking $500 million from Medicare and giving it to the company, the same company that on December 19 pled guilty to criminal charges of illegal marketing and paid a $762 fine. But with 74 lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill and millions in campaign contributions, no problem influencing lawmakers and getting another 2 years to rip off Medicare. The myth of government by the people, for the people and of the people, an axiom of accepted truth repeated and handed down from generation to generation long after the truth is gone and the myth is ancient history. In 2008 we voted for Hope. Hope you would lead us out of the slough of despond and into a brighter future, into the light of peace and prosperity. That did not happen. Instead, we sank ever deeper into the quicksand of war and violence, of kill lists and targeted assassinations and drone strikes. You pursue wars of terror and we accept the loss of freedoms, the rule of law, justice, equality and fair play. In contrast to the Hope of 2008, in 2012 you ran on a campaign of Fear, fear of Romney as the greater evil and fear of what the Republican crazies might do. I met someone a few nights ago who followed that pattern, who believed your lies and false promise of Hope in 2008 and fell for the lesser of two evils scare in 2012. He was shocked when I said you were not the lesser but the more effective evil, worse even than Bush. He didn’t know you made it a crime to demonstrate on federal property or that you’d gutted the constitution with the NDAA, FISA and the Patriot Act. He hated your drone wars but still has Hope, classic denial, willful ignorance. Hope is only for those who can afford it. Like Amgen and ExxonMobil and AT&T. Otherwise, Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.

Photo: Charles Dharapak, Associated Press

Obama's Greatest Crime Against Humanity

Dearr Mr. President,
I read today that Congress allocated $50 billion in disaster relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy. About the same amount was handed out after Katrina. That’s more than $100 billion for devastation from natural disasters. However, these are not really natural disasters, they’re man-made from the burning of fossil fuel, a topic some politicians deny outright and others, including you, refuse to address. Impending doom is not a subject anyone wants to talk about but still, it will not go away in spite of our ignoring it. For 30 years the U.S. has subverted any meaningful progress on reducing global emissions and when you came along in 2008 and promised to address the issue, you were like a breath of fresh air and people backed you. You could have done something significant but you were in Big Oil’s pocket and adopted their mantra of Drill Baby Drill; after all, global warming doesn’t give campaign contributions. The Solyndra debacle killed the last hope for change and at the Doha conference last year, you sent the same old hit men to sabotage the talks and they were effective; no progress was made. But still, global warming will not go away and the climate scientists have gone from warnings to hard facts that it’s happening faster and with more deadly results than any of them had imagined a few years ago. Now some speculate that it may be too late to prevent catastrophic climate change, that we have already passed the tipping point but still, nothing from the political class in Washington. You pore over Kill Lists but ignore the real enemy—pollution of the planet. You open Arctic waters to Big Oil and do nothing to regulate fracking while you de-fund solar and wind research. How is this any different than the Bushes? Mr. President, you were not hired to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity but to identify the real threats to the country and address them and those threats are not some sandal-clad Kalashnikov toting militant in the mountains of Waziristan or the deserts of Yemen or Somalia but the rape of our planet and impending ecological disaster. Why do we spend trillions on war against a phantom enemy and almost nothing to fight the heating of our planet, the pollution of our air and the poisoning of our water? This is beyond irresponsible, Mr. President. You are dooming future generations to misery, to unnecessary suffering and want, to a life filled with chaos and uncertainty. It is your greatest crime yet against humanity.

Funding Torture

Dear Mr. President,

“U.S. Military Stops Sending Detainees to Some Afghan Prisons on Rights Fears” (The New York Times, January 17), raises questions in my mind. I remember some months ago we stopped transferring prisoners because the Afghans were planning to put them on trial rather than hold them indefinitely. Now, accusations of torture and human rights abuses have stopped the transfers again. I suspect it’s not that our folks didn’t know their folks were torturing and abusing prisoners; it’s that the UN report makes it public and there’s a pesky law called the Leahy law “which prohibits Defense and State Department financing to foreign government agencies that practice torture or other human rights abuses and take no action to punish those responsible.” I guess the Leahy Law doesn’t apply to us, otherwise we’d have to stop funding the Pentagon and the CIA, what with our history of torture, rendition, Guantanamo, drone strikes, kill lists and targeted assassinations. I don’t want to be too cynical here, Mr. President, but doesn’t this sound like it applies to us too: “It is known that the Afghan security forces have committed abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians and the mistreatment of prisoners,” said Tim Rieser, foreign policy aide to Senator Leahy. “They have not been accountable in ways Senator Leahy believes they should be.” No American’s been held accountable either—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Obama–and Bradley Manning, who tried to expose war crimes has been held 965 days without trial, much of that time under conditions of torture. The article continues: “At stake are billions of dollars in direct American aid that will essentially pay the salaries of every member of Afghanistan’s security forces for years to come — but which would legally not be payable under the Leahy provision if torture and other abuse continues.” Now, I know the Afghans aren’t about to change their ways just because of some silly U.S. law and I also know your folks will find a loophole so we can give the Afghans all those “billions of dollars” while here at home we go on an austerity budget, cut pensions, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and other services a government should provide its citizens for the good of the country. Something’s seriously wrong here, Mr. President. We cannot kill our way to peace and security. We cannot spend trillions on war and nothing on peace and expect a better world. We are a nation of barbarians and you are our Attila the Hun.

War on a Santa Rosa Food Bank

Dear Mr. President,

There’s a food bank in Santa Rosa, California (pop. 170,000) 50 miles north of San Francisco, that’s been handing out free food to people in need for 40 years. They started out in a spare room in a church and 17years ago moved into an abandoned firehouse. The city has let the group—called FISH (Friends In Service Here)—use the firehouse rent-free and paid the utility bills to boot. Since there are no paid staff and no overhead, every penny donated goes to food to give away. Last year FISH gave more than 500,000 pounds of groceries to more than 61,000 people, one third the total population of the town. The unpaid director is an 87 year-old woman who grew up in the Great Depression and whose mother taught her early on that “people with food on the table have a human duty to share with those who don’t.” This is Old America’s values, the moral compassion for, and human duty toward, one’s fellow being. These are not the same American values you praised Dr. Death for—John Brennan, when you nominated him to be the next CIA director. These are not the values of the political class today, Republicans and Democrats alike, not the values of the 1% or the power brokers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C. These are values scorned and ridiculed, subverted and suppressed but they are basic to our nature and essential, for without them a community, a nation and humanity itself cannot survive. This Santa Rosa food pantry has provided a valuable public service to the community for 40 years, Mr. President, the antithesis of kill lists, targeted assassinations and drone wars. They feed the hungry, as Jesus did, they see their fellow being with compassion and they make peace not war. But war has affected the group in an indirect way, for the war and the military budget has sucked vast quantities of money, trillions of dollars over the past decade, out of our economy and Santa Rosa is one of its victims; it cannot afford to make the building conform to new federal regulations and so, FISH has been notified they must evacuate the building this year so the city can sell it. A single Hellfire missile costs in the neighborhood of $60,000. A Predator drone, approximately $5 million. It would take only a tiny fraction of that for Santa Rosa to upgrade the old firehouse and let FISH continue their good works. In the end, all war is local and I keep thinking of that bumper sticker on a friend’s car: How’s the War Economy Workin’ Out For Ya? Not so good in Santa Rosa.