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<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'>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 <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Costa Rica</st1:place></st1:country-region> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'>Comment if you are inclined.<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'>Kris<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><a href="http://www.bidstrup.com/index.htm">http://www.bidstrup.com/index.htm</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p align=center style='text-align:center'><a name=editorial><b><font size=5
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-weight:bold'>- FRONT
PAGE EDITORIAL -</span></font></b> </a><o:p></o:p></p>
<h2><b><font size=5 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:18.0pt'>Follow
The Money - Redux<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h2>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>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:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>1. I
predicted that <i><span style='font-style:italic'>corruption would flourish,
even worse than in the Reagan presidency.</span></i> 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 <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Baghdad</st1:place></st1:City> 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?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>2. I
predicted that <i><span style='font-style:italic'>Junior would exhibit an
authoritarian streak that would have embarrassed even Richard Nixon, and that
the Nixonian "enemies list" scandal would be far exceeded.</span></i>
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" <i><span
style='font-style:italic'>computer</span></i> 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 <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>
found themselves on this supposed list of terrorists.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>3. I said
that <i><span style='font-style:italic'>Junior would be the buffoon who would
be the titular head of state, but Dick Cheney would run the government</span></i>,
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 <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>4. Any <i><span
style='font-style:italic'>Supreme Court vacancies would be filled with only
hard-core right-wing ideologues</span></i>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>5. I
predicted that Bush would <i><span style='font-style:italic'>use the power of
his office to line the pockets of his cronies</span></i>. 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 <st1:State
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:State> 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 <a
href="http://www.bidstrup.com/decency.htm">Dick and Dubya Scandal Chart</a>,
"Junior Gets Things Done") - of the dozens of <i><span
style='font-style:italic'>quid pro quos</span></i> 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?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>6. I
listed <i><span style='font-style:italic'>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.</span></i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>7. I said
that the <i><span style='font-style:italic'>"war on drugs" would get
bigger, more futile and even more counterproductive than it already was</span></i>.
Well, it is up to $12 billion a year now, up from the roughly $2 billion when
Junior took office. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>
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 <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
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 <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> is increasing, and is now
nearly twice what it was before cocaine was made illegal in the 1920's.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>8. I
predicted that <i><span style='font-style:italic'>there would be no meaningful
election law reform</span></i>. I badly underestimated this one - the
"Help America Vote Act" proved, in three subsequent elections, to
simply take the <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Florida</st1:place></st1:State>,
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 <st1:State
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Ohio</st1:place></st1:State>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>9. Public
<i><span style='font-style:italic'>education, I predicted, would continue its
sad decline</span></i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>10. Labor
law, I said, <i><span style='font-style:italic'>would be diluted or eliminated
through lack of enforcement</span></i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>11. And
last, but hardly least, I said that you should <i><span style='font-style:italic'>expect
the boom to gradually end</span></i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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:<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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 <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region>, will
discover that their decision to return from exile was premature.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 color=red face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
color:red'>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 <st1:country-region
w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region> government will become permanent this time,
and their secretly held contempt for democracy will become nakedly apparent, as
the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>
becomes a one-party state in all but name. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">U.S.</st1:place></st1:country-region> moral authority and influence
will be at an end. The American experiment in democracy will be over. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><i><font size=3
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-style:italic'>Scott
Bidstrup, Tobosi de El Guarco, Costa Rica, February 12, 2009</span></font></i><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></p>
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