President Obama’s inaugural address included a couple snippets which a few of my friends know were directed at me. So I shall respond!


Yes, Barrack, a government that works is ideal, but your observations are so wrapped up in the concept of change that you do not seem to realize something important: The fundamental truths of human liberty and government power have not changed in all of human history, today included.

Specifically, the size of a civilian government is directly proportional to its power. The more aspects of citizens’ lives a government is responsible for, the more agencies and initiatives, employees and laws it requires. Not only that, the more actions a government takes, the larger percentage of the economy that the government channels.

And the more power the government exercises, the more dependent and less free the nation’s citizens become. It is the very size of the government and scope of its power to pass intrusive laws that allows the wealthy and powerful to lobby for laws favorable to them.

The statement is ultimately rhetorical. A large government is directly opposes your stated goals of freedom and prosperity. If these are the dream and goal of America, then only a small government which hasn’t the power to deny the rights of its citizens will work.

Our founding fathers which you idealize so strongly knew these truths, and they would cry to know you think those truths no longer apply.

Then:


Again you are right that our economy favors the wealthy and this is a bad thing, but you are wrong that this is a result of the free market. As a matter of fact, the governmental protections enjoyed by the wealthy are antithetical to the idea of a free market in the first place. The Great Depression and this current recession are both the results of the government backing investors and loaning money to the wealthy through the treasury and Central Bank, and as in the Great Depression, policies which you now espouse have been shown to prolong hardship and further corrupt the market.

Impressing the large financial overhead of oversight and working out government laws with loopholes is not the answer. The answer lies in the investigation and punishment of crimes. As with personal freedom, if the government is entitled to intervene in and control the market preemptively, the government will forever be wielded as a tool by entities within the market to protect themselves and their wealth.

You cannot lie to the American people and tell them that the world has changed. There is no difference between the 20th century and the 21st. As matters of fact, the 21st century began with a war of aggression perpetrated by our government, descended into a recession caused by government policy, and is now facing a politician promising change. This story could be read from any history book from any age.

And you claim that your solutions are new, but they are not. Giving the government more trust, more power, and more of our freedoms by enlisting us into national service at the direction of our leaders—these represent a return to the old ways, when people served their governments, not the other way around.

I beg you sir, do not return us to that. Do not, while espousing the Constitution and the virtues of American freedom, extinguish the light that we have managed to keep safe from our government's indiscretions.

Finally, you are right that Americans have work to do. But that work is not for you, our nation, or our government, it is for ourselves as free human beings. We are tasked with protecting our freedom in the face of your seductive, nationalist tripe, and reclaiming whatever we can. Contrary to a statement made during your inaugural ceremony, "freely choosing our leaders" is NOT the root of human liberty. Leading ourselves is.

On behalf of the citizens of this great (sic) empire, I would like to welcome the people of Iraq into our fold!

Now that Iraqi president Jalal Talabani is in talks with the World Bank to finance Iraq's reconstruction, we can officially declare, mission accomplished! According to the linked article,

Talabanireceived President of the World Bank Robert Zoellick in Kuwait anddiscussed the necessary steps that must be taken to start rebuildingIraq ... agro-industrial and trade projects ... broad lines to upgrade the economy and carry out strategicprojects ... privatization and economic reformby encouraging the private sector under the free market principle

If the incoming Obama administration plays this like other IMF/World Bank initiatives under Clinton (you know, the model for South America that worked out so well), then we can anticipate a great investment opportunity for American business and the real pillaging can begin.

Here how it could play out, roughly:

First, in order to qualify for their IMF loan, Iraq will be forced to privatize important business sectors, even those that are traditionally public in some form, like electricity, water, sewage, etc. There will be a large discussion over the oil industry, naturally. Even though Iraq may succeed in retaining public control over its oil wealth, they will be forced to concede to certain agreements relating to the supply of that oil.

Then, because the privatization agreement with the World Bank will include provisions to allow for up to %100 foreign ownership, international conglomerates will swoop in to scoop up that ownership to derive profits directly from the Iraqi people for their water, food, and clothing. The oil Iraq provides will continue to ensure the cheap transportation infrastructure to support the centralization of production elsewhere.

If this goes well, then Iraq becomes a productive member of the empire, providing oil and natural gas resources to Syria, Jordan and Israel in direct competition with a diminished OPEC and thus strengthening the infrastructural base of our western beachhead.

If it goes poorly, we shall see a renewed insurgency there in short order, the army will be called up to quell that outlying province in likely disregard for the Status of Forces Agreement, and the brutal saga of America's adventures in the middle east will continue.

We know Obama has promised to remove combat forces as quickly as possible, but that designation has always been fluid. Aside from the troops, the empire is now faced with a delicate political situation involving the barely-quelled Iraqi nationalists, Iran's strong influence within Talabani's government. As American money leaves the coffers of local militants and Iraq's economy becomes saddled with the burden of bearing the American Free (sic) Market without earning any benefit, how will the Iraqi people respond?

I can almost hear the cries of "ungrateful Iraqis" now...

Well, this is it: The last day of George W. Bush. Praise whatever god you believe in!

Here we have a leader whose Federal Reserve dumped 550 basis points between May of 2000 and June of 2003. This low-risk money combined with mortgage expansion under Clinton produced a huge housing bubble that artificially prolonged economic health in the wake of the dot-com bubble.

But looming financial disaster was not the only train wreck our fearless conductor oversaw. Here we have a leader who inherited all of the skeletons in America’s closet, and his best response to the criminal assault by al Qaeda was to deploy the military and overthrow the Taliban and Baathist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, declare a protracted War on Terror, and under the guise of wartime powers, usher in a nascent police state.

Here we have a man who campaigned as a conservative, both fiscally and in foreign policy. He declared that it was not America’s business to police the world and build nations. To suggest these promises were broken is an understatement. Amidst growing war and financial indiscretion, President Bush created the largest bureaucracy in American history: The Department of Homeland Security.

This, even as gross and negligent failures in bloated and nepotism-laden federal bureaucracy continued to trumpet the inherent inefficiency of such endeavors, as with the intelligence agencies prior to September 11th, or FEMA after Katrina.

Regions pummeled by Clinton’s wars went totally forgotten. Somalia has dwindled into a pirate-ridden wasteland, with Ethiopia and Eritrea gnashing at themselves. Eastern Europe has turned into NATO’s military buffer between the EU and the Middle-East. This is not to mention Russia, which Bush has recklessly provoked through our naked imperialism.

We have even stooped to torture.

We have seen western media fall into lock-step with the government, with the Russia-Georgia war being a prime example. While most of the world now knows that Georgia provoked Russia’s UN-sanctioned peace-keepers in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, most of America still thinks Russia is the resurgent and hostile empire that initiated the conflict. The media glossed over blatant fallacies in American leaders who with straight faces proclaimed that military solutions were obsolete in the 21st century. And yet even as only the most trivial controversy is fair game, constant scoffs about “liberal media” still fill the streets.

It is at this time which we transfer to new leadership in President-elect Obama. In one of the most widely-acclaimed transitions in history—a transition appropriate for the kind of executive despotism we have begun to flirt with—Obama stands ready to take the oval throne. He promises escalation in Afghanistan and central Asia while paying lip-service to diplomacy with Iran. After courting the anti-war movement in the democratic primary, he has selected a hawkish secretary of state in Hilary Clinton. He has appointed a widely-renowned neo-conservative to handle Iranian relations. He has chosen to keep Bush’s Secretary of Defense. He has explicitly backed current Federal Reserve policy. He vows to continue the zeal of Bush, first by distributing still more printed money into the economy saying “We must act now” and disregarding all parallels to the Great Depression which all intellectual sources—including bankers’ stooges Greenspan and Bernanke—have since attributed to the very same loose monetary policies, and then by institutionalizing the very organizations which have destroyed our health care.

And as more and more Americans come to depend on the government for their livelihood… as more and more economic activity is controlled by a purchasable bureaucracy… as more and more we look to our leader and our Homeland…

…we will transition to something at once foreign and familiar, and oh, will there be a great war soon!

The Answer
Robinson Jeffers
      
Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken. 

The Great Explosion
Robinson Jeffers

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no
way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae
like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with
fireworks
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
the howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
gather again and pile up, the power and the glory--
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the
whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back
and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes--or tragic children--share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care
and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness--look at the
tide-stream stars--and the fall of nations--and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor--I know not
--of faceless violence, the root of all things. 

The Eye
Robinson Jeffers

The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific--
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
faiths--
Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea--look west at the hill of water: it is half the
planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never
close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.

Ode
Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy. 1844–1881

We are the music-makers,    
  And we are the dreamers of dreams,    
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,    
  And sitting by desolate streams;    
World-losers and world-forsakers,
  On whom the pale moon gleams:    
Yet we are the movers and shakers    
  Of the world for ever, it seems.    
 
With wonderful deathless ditties     
We build up the world's great cities,
  And out of a fabulous story     
  We fashion an empire's glory:     
One man with a dream, at pleasure,     
  Shall go forth and conquer a crown;     
And three with a new song's measure
  Can trample an empire down.     
 
We, in the ages lying     
  In the buried past of the earth,     
Built Nineveh with our sighing,     
  And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying     
  To the old of the new world's worth;     
For each age is a dream that is dying,     
  Or one that is coming to birth.