[PAA-Discuss] Follow the Money - Redux

[Ron and Kris Graham]

A guy I know sent me the link to the article below. Read it and absorb it
thoroughly. This guy's predictions about Bush were dead on accurate, and his
predictions about the Obama presidency are panning out, too. If the American
people don't wake up and revolt against this corruption and fascism we'll
all be looking for a way to get to Costa Rica or someplace else. I am going
to continue to explore Mr. Bidstrup's website and see what other pearls of
wisdom he has to share.

 

Comment if you are inclined.

 

Kris

 

http://www.bidstrup.com/index.htm

 

- FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL - 


Follow The Money - Redux


I have made it something of a tradition in this space, when a new president
takes office, to make predictions for what I see happening under the new
president, and review the predictions I made for the last one, and see how
they panned out. Well, the time has arrived; we have a new president, and
the national nightmare of the last eight years is finally at an end. And it
is time to review my predictions and see how they turned out - and make
predictions for at least the next four. So, back in December, 2000, just
after the elections of that year, I made some predictions in this space, and
it is time to see how I did:

1. I predicted that corruption would flourish, even worse than in the Reagan
presidency. Well, I was right about that one. Remember how 24 billion
dollars of Iraqi money literally vanished without a trace, after much of it
was literally handed out on the streets of Baghdad from the back of pickup
trucks as if it were so many shopping coupons? And how soldiers were even
playing football with shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills? Or who could
forget Katrina, the Mother of All Corruption Scandals, where more than $78
billion simply couldn't be accounted for?

2. I predicted that Junior would exhibit an authoritarian streak that would
have embarrassed even Richard Nixon, and that the Nixonian "enemies list"
scandal would be far exceeded. I was dead on about that one, too, when it
was revealed in the Washington Post that there was not just an enemies list,
but an actual "enemies" computer under the control of the Republican
National Committee that maintained a list of not just a couple of dozen
names, as did Nixon's list, but had more than 10,000 names in it. And when
asked about it, Dick Cheney actually had the testicular fortitude to tell
the Washington Post reporter, "you f**k with us, we'll f**k with you!" They
certainly did. I was personally driven into exile, and underwent two
assassination attempts, two kidnapping attempts, endless interrogations and
breakins. And my experience was hardly unique. And it wasn't just that
enemies computer, either - virtually anyone who publicly condemned the Bush
administration found themselves unable to get on an airplane and go
anywhere. Third party officials, even members of congress. To this day, I
still can't just get on a plane and go somewhere. In the end, one person in
300 in the United States found themselves on this supposed list of
terrorists.

3. I said that Junior would be the buffoon who would be the titular head of
state, but Dick Cheney would run the government, and would do the bidding of
the religious right, including such men as Richard Mellon Scaife. That
Junior was enthralled by the religious right goes without saying, given his
knee-jerk support of Israel, his antipathy towards any policy that did not
reflect his fundamentalist religious beliefs and his enthusiastic acceptance
of far right religous hatemongering and control-freak social policies. And
indeed, the day to day affairs of the government were, indeed, run by Dick
Cheney until his screwups led to a change of policy after the disastrous
(for Bush) elections of 2006.

4. Any Supreme Court vacancies would be filled with only hard-core
right-wing ideologues, and I was proven right - the Supreme Court took a
hard lurch to the right with the Bush appointments, and has overturned or
seriously undermined many long-standing social protections, such as
reproductive freedom, Affirmative Action, school segregation, etc.

5. I predicted that Bush would use the power of his office to line the
pockets of his cronies. Remember how Vice President Cheney's not-so-ended
relationship with Halliburton led to that company's doubling and tripling
its profits each year for several years after Cheney took office? Or how the
crony capitalism of the Bush years made the "revolving door" of
business-government relationships in Washington all but become a two-way
street, so much so that it no longer even elicited a comment? Junior wasted
no time in fulfilling this prediction (see the Dick and Dubya Scandal Chart
<http://www.bidstrup.com/decency.htm> , "Junior Gets Things Done") - of the
dozens of quid pro quos sought by his principal campaign contributors, I
could find only one that was not fulfilled within two years of his taking
office. And those are only the ones I could find - how many more escaped
notice? And who could forget the revelations of what happened with the
Katrina relief money?

6. I listed what I figured would be the big winners for corporate welfare:
the defense industries, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, utilities, mining and chemical
industries, and Big Pharma. I was right on every single one - "defense"
benefited from the largest military budgets in the history of the planet,
including support for two wars of empire, Big Oil was the big winner when
global warming denial became a hallmark of the administration, and the
administration did nothing to stop an asset bubble in the energy sector, Big
Tobacco won by a Dept. of Justice subversion of the vast liability lawsuit
judgment against Big Tobacco that was won by the states, utilities also
benefited by a systematic subversion of green energy, denial of science, and
subversion of pollution controls, mining won big with plans to lease
sensitive federal lands and blocked reform of the Mining Law of 1872,
chemical industries won by his subversion of environmental controls and
product liability lawsuits, and Big Pharma was the only real winner from his
expensive Medicare Drug Benefits Program, while the ability of Americans to
import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada by mail order was steeply
curtailed. Of course, there were many more corporate welfare winners, but
those are just the ones I predicted.

7. I said that the "war on drugs" would get bigger, more futile and even
more counterproductive than it already was. Well, it is up to $12 billion a
year now, up from the roughly $2 billion when Junior took office.
Afghanistan went from an insignificant player in world opium/heroin markets
to by far the world's largest producer, all while Bush's army was occupying
it. Meanwhile, the human rights abuses by the Colombian government,
supposedly in the name of the war on drugs, gets routinely swept under the
carpet, while the largely nonexistent human rights abuses by the Venezuelan
government get blown all out of proportion. All the while, the U.S., it now
turns out, incarcerates by far the largest proportion of its population than
any other nation on the planet due largely to the drug war, and of course,
cocaine on the street is purer, cheaper and more readily available than it
has ever been. And the cocaine addiction rate in the U.S. is increasing, and
is now nearly twice what it was before cocaine was made illegal in the
1920's.

8. I predicted that there would be no meaningful election law reform. I
badly underestimated this one - the "Help America Vote Act" proved, in three
subsequent elections, to simply take the Florida, 2000 abuses and put them
on the road - and make them a national phenomena. They swung the elections
by falsifying the vote in several states, notably Ohio, in 2004. Only a
wholesale economic collapse prevented another right-wing Republican
ideologue from getting elected in 2008, in spite of the fact that the
outgoing Republican president had become the most unpopular president in
more than a century.

9. Public education, I predicted, would continue its sad decline under Bush.
Well, of course, the "No Child Left Behind" act enshrined the practice of
teaching to the test, rather than teaching for learning - and, once again, I
was dead on. Educational levels continue to decline relative to the rest of
the world.

10. Labor law, I said, would be diluted or eliminated through lack of
enforcement. Spot on with this one, too. Virtually no discrimination
complaints were ever investigated by the Labor Dept. during the Bush years,
in spite of the fact that the complaint rate increased, and Bush's Supreme
Court appointments were the deciding votes in court decisions that
essentially gutted pay discrimination protections. H1-B visa programs were
greatly expanded, forcing many well-qualified U.S. engineers into
unemployment, while engineers from the third world were brought in, housed
in cheap dormitories and paid as little as $6,000 per year to do highly
intricate engineering work. Working condition scandals became rife, and, as
I predicted, little was done to stop it until farm workers in California
were discovered to be dying in the fields because it was found they were not
being allowed to stop long enough to simply have a drink of water.
Immigration law came to be abused in some of the largest immigration raids
in history to break up attempts to unionize illegal immigrants trying to
stop their abuse by employers. Human trafficking became a national scandal,
and little was done to stop it.

11. And last, but hardly least, I said that you should expect the boom to
gradually end. Even I didn't figure that this man was going to start a
full-blown depression, but that is how it worked out. Things are looking
pretty grim out there, far worse than I had ever expected. And, as I
predicted, the policies instituted or advocated by this man were the direct
cause of this slump in economic activity.

So, there they are. You be the judge of how well I did. And with that in
mind, what are my predictions for the incoming Obama administration? Wish I
could be sanguine, but I am not. Here is my list of predictions for Obama:

1. Obama will have a hard time getting his legislative agenda through
Congress, in spite of Democratic control. The Republicans have become past
masters at rallying their troops to push their spectacularly failed
ideological dogmatism, and the Democrats in Congress will behave as if their
priority is bipartisanship more than getting anything done. As a result, the
increasingly militant Republicans will continue to arrogantly behave as if
they are in charge, and as a result, they will be. And Obama will be
clueless about how to neutralize Republican dogmatism, and why it is
important to do so, and the feckless Democratic leadership in congress will
barely understand what hit them.

2. Obama will lose control of Congress in 2010. The Republican playbook,
which brilliantly succeeded in capturing control of Congress in 1994, is
being repeated almost word for word, and the Democrats, including Obama, are
fecklessly playing their parts very well. The Republican playbook succeeded
then and it will succeed again if Obama fails to figure out what is going
on, and so far he appears to be clueless.

3. The recession will deepen into a depression, and Obama will get the
blame. The Republicans, who have learned well from generations of fascist
propaganda efforts, will effectively pin the blame on Obama in spite of the
fact that it started on their watch and it is their doctrinaire ideology
that will have made it worse. But, as Hitler observed, all it takes for a
lie to be believed is for it to be repeated often enough - especially if it
is a big lie, and the Republican lie machine will do a very good job just as
it has for the last eight years.

4. Obama will not roll back the human rights abuses and "unitary executive"
privileges usurped by the preceding administration. Don't expect the Patriot
Act to be rolled back in any meaningful way, nor the domestic NSA or FBI
spying to end. The CIA will continue its extraordinary rendition program,
will continue to secretly torture prisoners, and the Obama administration
will not lift a finger to stop it. If/when investigated, it will be
discovered by human rights campaigners and investigative journalists that
the reason why is that Obama is sympathetic with and beholden to the
intelligence community. When his employment history with a CIA front company
is investigated, it will become apparent that the old adage that "once CIA,
always CIA" applies to him. My fellow exiles, who are gleefully moving back
to the U.S., will discover that their decision to return from exile was
premature.

5. This supposedly liberal Democrat will, just like Bill Clinton before him,
eventually come to be viewed as "Republican Lite" by his base - the
left-of-center portion of the Democratic party, because, like Bill Clinton
before him, he will have largely implemented the Republican agenda. Analysts
will see this to be the consequence of his being beholden to business
interests in getting elected in the first place, and they will be right. As
a result, he will have a hard time rallying his base to get re-elected, and
will not be. 

6. Obama will become a one-term president, who will be largely seen (in the
near term, at least) to have failed, much like Jimmy Carter, mostly because
he failed to implement his vision (to the extent that he has one). Actually,
like Jimmy Carter, he will be a far better president than will be generally
believed, but such is the power of the Republican spin machine, that he will
be stigmatized unfairly. He will be spun as a symbol for the failure of
liberalism, when, in reality, he would have failed because he compromised
too much his original vision and integrity. 

7. The Republicans, who view the Congress and the White House as rightful
Republican property, will resume control in 2012, and this time, they won't
give it up, because the doctrinaire ideologues will have, by then, taken
complete and uncontested control of the party. Republican control of the
U.S. government will become permanent this time, and their secretly held
contempt for democracy will become nakedly apparent, as the United States
becomes a one-party state in all but name. U.S. moral authority and
influence will be at an end. The American experiment in democracy will be
over. 

Scott Bidstrup, Tobosi de El Guarco, Costa Rica, February 12, 2009

 

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