Half my library comes from these sales. Great institution, too. -Ed
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090916_obamas_presidency_isnt_too_big_to_fail/
Obama's Presidency Isn't Too Big to Fail
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: Sept. 15, 2009
A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars and
public tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to
have it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger of
going bankrupt. He has blundered into a deepening quagmire in Afghanistan,
has continued the Bush policy of buying off Wall Street hustlers instead of
confronting them and is now on the cusp of bargaining away the so-called
public option, the reform component of his health care program.
Those are not happy sentences to write for one who is still on the e-mail
list of campaign supporters urged to back the president in the face of
attacks that are stupidly small-minded. But to remain silent about his
errors, just because most of his critics are so vile, is hardly an example
of constructive concern for him or the country.
Yes, Obama was presented with a series of crises not of his making but for
which he is now being held accountable. He is not a "socialist" who grew the
federal budget to astronomical proportions. That is the legacy of George W.
Bush, who raised the military budget to its highest level since World War II
despite the end of the Cold War and the lack of a formidable military
opponent- a legacy of debt compounded by Bush's decision to first ignore the
banking meltdown and then to engage in a welfare-for-Wall-Street bailout.
And it was Bush who gave the pharmaceutical companies the gift of a very
expensive government subsidy for seniors' drugs.
But what is nerve-racking about Obama is that even though he campaigned
against Bush's follies he has now embraced them. He hasn't yet managed to
significantly reduce the U.S. obligation in Iraq and has committed to making
a potentially costlier error by ratcheting up America's "nation-building"
role in Afghanistan.
Just as he was burdened with the Afghanistan situation, Obama was saddled
with a banking crisis he didn't cause, and the worst that can be said of his
attempted solutions to the financial mess is that they were inherited from
Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. But Obama, who raised questions
before his election about the propriety of a plan that would rescue the
banks but ignore the plight of ordinary folks, has adopted that very
approach as president. He elevated Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner,
the two Democrats most closely aligned with Paulson's policy, to top
positions in his government.
Obama's proposed new regulations, while containing some kind words about
better informing consumers, do not portend any breakup of the "too big to
fail companies" whose problems were permitted to fester by previous
deregulatory measures. His answer is to increase the regulatory capacities
of the Federal Reserve, which failed to use its already existing and
considerable powers to avoid the debacle.
The promise is that next time the Fed will behave better. As Obama put it
Monday, "So our plan would put the cost of a firm's failures on those who
own its stock and loaned it money. And if taxpayers ever had to step in
again to prevent a second Great Depression, the financial industry will have
to pay the taxpayer back every cent."
Why not now? And why has he accepted the Wall Street line that all this
represents a "collective failure," as if the con men and the conned had
equal responsibility? According to Obama, "It was a failure of
responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take
reckless risks that they couldn't afford to take. It was a collective
failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street, and across America
that led to the near-collapse of our financial system one year ago."
Hogwash. The chicanery of the financial system, securitizing highly suspect
mortgages, was codified into laws that made the hustle legal.
That insistence on equating the swindled with the swindlers is also what is
wrong with the evolving health care reform plan. The assumption from the
beginning, when Obama reached out to insurance companies to come up with a
deal, was they had the interest of their customers at heart. They don't,
and it is the purpose of government regulation in the area of health as well
as banking to even the scales between the powerful corporations and the
consumers from whom they profit. That is the purpose of a public option
worth its name.
Without a government program as a check on medical costs, Obama will end up
with a variant of the Massachusetts program, one that forces consumers to
sign up with private insurers and costs 33 percent more than the national
average. He will have furthered the Bush legacy of cultivating an ever more
expensive big government without improving how the people are served.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
Europe Says a Third of Karzai Votes Are Suspect
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and SANGAR RAHIMI
NY Times Op-Ed: September 16, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan - European Union monitors said Wednesday that about
one-third of the votes cast for President Hamid Karzai in the Aug. 20
election were suspicious and should be examined for fraud.
Their assertion was a more serious indictment of the election's already
marred integrity than those of other foreign monitors and only deepened the
political crisis here. President Karzai's campaign office angrily dismissed
the European Union assertion, which came as the latest preliminary tally of
votes showed he had won - if the suspect ballots are included.
Mr. Karzai, who is vying for a second five-year term, won 54.6 percent of
the vote, enough to avoid a runoff election, according to the tally released
by the country's national election commission. His closest challenger, the
former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, won 27.8 percent.
But the election was tainted by blatant evidence of ballot-box stuffing and
other frauds, and the country's United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints
Commission has ordered recounts and forensic examinations of ballot boxes in
10 percent of polling places. That would involve at least 15 percent, and
possibly a far higher proportion, of reported votes. The complaints
commission, led by a Canadian, is the ultimate arbiter of election results.
Some Western officials say that if all fraudulent ballots were discarded,
Mr. Karzai's tally would drop below 50 percent, forcing him into a runoff
against Mr. Abdullah. But it is unclear how many ballots might be ruled
invalid in the recount, and even if Mr. Karzai were ultimately forced into a
runoff, the harsh winter weather might prevent it from being held until
April.
The fraud, and the risk that it could leave the country with a government
widely seen by Afghans and the international community as illegitimate, has
left Afghanistan's Western backers in a growing quandary: whether to be more
aggressive in pressuring Mr. Karzai's government and his loyalists at the
election commission to work harder to prevent fraud, or to be more
conciliatory and accept his re-election as a fait accompli.
There are growing fears among United States and European officials that the
fraud and a drawn-out recount or runoff risks derailing American and NATO
efforts to stabilize the country by hurting the Afghan government's already
low credibility among its people and weakening support for troop increases
in Western countries where polls show growing disillusionment with the war.
Its sinking popularity follows the deadliest stretch for United States and
NATO forces of the conflict. Three American soldiers were killed Tuesday in
southern Afghanistan by a roadside bomb, the United States military said. At
least 344 Western military fatalities have been recorded so far this year, a
17 percent increase over last year's entire death toll, according to
icasualties.org, which tracks fatalities.
Now, the evidence of widespread electoral fraud has further dimmed support
for the war.
In a news conference just hours before the pre-audited results were
released, the European Union monitors said they believed that the tally
included 1.5 million suspicious ballots, or more than one of every four
votes cast.
Dimitra Ioannou, one of the union's election monitors, said 1.1 million
suspicious votes belonged to Mr. Karzai and 300,000 to Mr. Abdullah.
European officials emphasized that those numbers did not necessarily
represent fraudulent votes, but votes that needed to be investigated.
In response, Mr. Karzai's campaign lashed out against the announcement as
"partial and irresponsible," setting the Afghan leader against
representatives of countries his government depends on for military and
financial support against a raging insurgency that controls much of the
countryside. A spokesman for Mr. Karzai's presidential office declined to
comment on the campaign office's statement.
But Mr. Abdullah's campaign, which has maintained that more than one million
votes are fraudulent, strongly backed the monitors' announcement.
"Their job is to observe the election process and announce what they have
seen," said Fazal Sancharaki, a spokesman for Mr. Abdullah. "This is their
authority and responsibility."
According to the election commission, turnout was 38.17 percent, and about
three of five voters were men.
Mr. Karzai received 3,093,256 votes; Mr. Abdullah 1,571,581 votes; and the
third-place finisher, Ramazan Bashardost, 520,627 votes. The total number of
valid votes so far is 5,662,758, the commission said.
Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.
***
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