{news} Green candidate Dan Hamburg on Obama's first year

[Tim McKee]

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This opinion piece is from former US Congressmember and 1998 California
Green gubernatorial candidate Dan Hamburg. In 2010 Dan will be running
for county supervisor: http://www.votehamburg5.org/

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http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20100107/OPINION/100109616/1350

GUEST OPINION: Hamburg on Obama's first year

By DAN HAMBURG

January 7, 2010

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.”

While the failure to reach a climate agreement in Copenhagen is being
blamed on China, it was the United States — the world's lone superpower
— that lost face.

Mark Lynas exposed this in the Guardian writing “The Chinese premier,
Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead
sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit
opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal ...”

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 AfPak war is more of the same. Asia Times correspondent Pepe
Escobar's 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.”

Barack Obama understands this. He also knows that beneath the soil of
Afghanistan is a rich store of uranium, tungsten, molybdenum and rare
earths (used for everything from TVs to wind turbines to Priuses). And
the corporations that supply the missiles, the drones, the surveillance
equipment, the helicopters and the fighter jets know that Obama knows
this. Why else would they have made him the heavily funded presidential
hopeful in history?

In fulfillment of his pledge to the armchair warriors, President Obama
has just signed the largest military budget in history, larger than the
combined spending of the rest of the planet. Now this military is being
unleashed on a semi-literate people engaged in a decades-long civil war.
Chances of “success” are slim.

As Florida Democrat Alan Grayson explains, “This is an 18th century
strategy being employed against a 14th century enemy.”

Military intelligence inside the Obama administration estimates that
there are approximately 100 al-Qaida fighters in the entire country of
Afghanistan. This is the “cancer” the president says justifies sending
30,000 more troops at a cost of $1 billion for every thousand. Once the
latest Obama surge is in place, the United States will have twice as
many troops and contractors in Afghanistan as did the USSR at the height
of its south Asian disaster.

While the elites — economic, military and political — hold tight to
their faith in the exceptional character of the American imperium,
pressure is building for a new narrative. “Burgeoning forces for
democracy are emerging,” writes Middle East scholar Mark Levine, “both
in the Muslim world and across the global south.”

These forces were on display in Copenhagen and are now bravely gathering
on the streets of Tehran. U.S. preoccupation with the global war on
terror has helped Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil and other Latin American
countries free themselves from decades of subservience.

The new decade could even bring a resurgence of democracy here at home.
If Barack Obama isn't prepared to help lead such a movement, he'll have
to get out of the way.

As Dylan warned a few decades back, “You'd better start swimming or
you'll sink like a stone.”

Dan Hamburg, a resident of Ukiah, represented the 1st Congressional
District from 1993-95.

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-- 
*************************************************
Tim McKee -National Committee of the Green Party for the state of
Connecticut, New Britain,CT
(860)778-1304 Cell- best way to reach me
(860) 505-8454 (H)
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