Clancy
01-08-2010, 11:27 PM
GUEST OPINION: Hamburg on Obama's first year | PressDemocrat.com | The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100107/OPINION/100109616/1307?Title=GUEST-OPINION-Hamburg-on-Obama-s-first-year)
Almost a year ago, I wrote an opinion piece for The Press Democrat calling on Barack Obama to be the champion the country so sorely needed (“Looking for a hero in the White House,” Close to Home, Jan. 17, 2009). I pointed back to the flush of hope that greeted Bill Clinton's election in 1992, hope that was quickly dashed on the shoals of NAFTA and the Contract with America. Would Obama's early tenure follow a similar trajectory?
So far it has. Obama's first year, including the ongoing health care snafu, has served only to amplify the fact that the government of our country is run by corporations. As Ralph Nader pointed out more than a decade ago, it is government “of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the DuPonts.” Meanwhile, these corporate “persons” slyly deflect public anger back onto the government for the dysfunction and cruelty that results.
This is a society in which the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider even as the work-for-a-living class forks it over to cover bad bets made by the wealthiest. It's a society in which health care remains a privilege, tens of millions of middle-class homes are submerged and untold millions of well-paying industrial and information jobs have been outsourced. Public and private debt has reached astronomical proportions. It's a society inured to perpetual war in service to a vast armaments industry.
As Rabbi Michael Lerner put it, it's a society that “leaves people hungry not only for life's necessities, but for ethical and spiritual fulfillment as well.”
But the most hideous manifestations of the current moral, ethical and legal swamp we inhabit — worse even than the ongoing hijacking by Wall Street banksters — are the nearly decade-old wars/occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These demonstrate how far we have strayed from the nation's founding principles.
Today, our patriarchs are people like Alan Greenspan, who casually admit that “The Iraq war is really about oil.”
In truth, as author Dallas Darling recently put it, “In the end, the global war on terror is really a ruse for a centuries old dream by western powers to dominate the Arabian Peninsula.”
The Afganistan/Pakistan war is more of the same. Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar sums it up: “Once again, since the late 1990s, it all comes back to TAPI -- the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India gas pipeline -- the key reason Afghanistan is of any strategic importance to the United States.”
more
GUEST OPINION: Hamburg on Obama's first year | PressDemocrat.com | The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100107/OPINION/100109616/1307?Title=GUEST-OPINION-Hamburg-on-Obama-s-first-year)
Dan Hamburg, a resident of Ukiah, represented the 1st Congressional District from 1993-95.
Almost a year ago, I wrote an opinion piece for The Press Democrat calling on Barack Obama to be the champion the country so sorely needed (“Looking for a hero in the White House,” Close to Home, Jan. 17, 2009). I pointed back to the flush of hope that greeted Bill Clinton's election in 1992, hope that was quickly dashed on the shoals of NAFTA and the Contract with America. Would Obama's early tenure follow a similar trajectory?
So far it has. Obama's first year, including the ongoing health care snafu, has served only to amplify the fact that the government of our country is run by corporations. As Ralph Nader pointed out more than a decade ago, it is government “of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the DuPonts.” Meanwhile, these corporate “persons” slyly deflect public anger back onto the government for the dysfunction and cruelty that results.
This is a society in which the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider even as the work-for-a-living class forks it over to cover bad bets made by the wealthiest. It's a society in which health care remains a privilege, tens of millions of middle-class homes are submerged and untold millions of well-paying industrial and information jobs have been outsourced. Public and private debt has reached astronomical proportions. It's a society inured to perpetual war in service to a vast armaments industry.
As Rabbi Michael Lerner put it, it's a society that “leaves people hungry not only for life's necessities, but for ethical and spiritual fulfillment as well.”
But the most hideous manifestations of the current moral, ethical and legal swamp we inhabit — worse even than the ongoing hijacking by Wall Street banksters — are the nearly decade-old wars/occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These demonstrate how far we have strayed from the nation's founding principles.
Today, our patriarchs are people like Alan Greenspan, who casually admit that “The Iraq war is really about oil.”
In truth, as author Dallas Darling recently put it, “In the end, the global war on terror is really a ruse for a centuries old dream by western powers to dominate the Arabian Peninsula.”
The Afganistan/Pakistan war is more of the same. Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar sums it up: “Once again, since the late 1990s, it all comes back to TAPI -- the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India gas pipeline -- the key reason Afghanistan is of any strategic importance to the United States.”
more
GUEST OPINION: Hamburg on Obama's first year | PressDemocrat.com | The Press Democrat | Santa Rosa, CA (https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100107/OPINION/100109616/1307?Title=GUEST-OPINION-Hamburg-on-Obama-s-first-year)
Dan Hamburg, a resident of Ukiah, represented the 1st Congressional District from 1993-95.