“Where I Was Wrong”

 

UNCLE TOM’S HOUSE?

“Where I was wrong,” said President Obama at his press conference on a Thursday in May 2010, as he mulled over the oil spill, “was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.”

Instead what deference to oil companies brought was an utter disregard to laws, and the worst oil spill in history. Oil companies fear the governments and laws of Brazil, or Angola. But not of the USA. (There is massive deep water drilling off these two, among many countries).

This seems to be a pattern with Mr. Obama. He seems to have been in the "belief that those who are presently in power had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios".

This is especially true with the so called "financial industry". "Industry" means, etymologically, to build inside. People in finance do not build anything, but they have captured the vocabulary of those who do, insisting that they introduce new "products" as part of "innovation", a way to drone people with the sound of new new new, when all they do is concentrate ever more power around themselves, the old fashion way. Power, that is property, people, and even hope.

But it is also the approach of Mr. Obama in Afghanistan. Obviously there, some day, Mr. Obama will pontificate about it, too. He will say: “Where I was wrong, was in my belief that the military-intelligence complex had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.” Mr. Obama’s tactics in Afghanistan are deeply flawed. Americans now use illiterate warlords, with divided loyalties to reign over there, some making fortunes from US taxpayers.

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

A security post on the road controlled by Matiullah Khan in southern Afghanistan. He leads a private army that earns millions of dollars guarding NATO convoys. See NYT, for a very revealing article.

***.

Divided loyalties seem to be the way, with Mr. Obama and his government. Just as Mr. Obama is bipartisan, he finds natural to rest his tactics in Afghanistan on warlords who are bipartisan, half Taliban, half corrupt.

The strategy I advocate in Afghanistan is the exact opposite: a clear philosophical choice, by supporting only dedicated secular forces. (And if that cannot be done: out; but Afghanistan used to be secular, so it can be done).

The hope you can believe in is that those who are good to the hyper wealthy financial "industry" will be well rewarded later. See Clinton, Rubin, Summers, Geithner, and countless other critters, we don’t even bother remembering the names of, whose wealth profited from past goodness to the so called financial "industry". Rubin’s and Clinton’s fortunes are now in the hundreds of million dollars. Serious money. Clinton is still playing a political and public relation role, as he provides the sympathetic face plutocracy needs.

As Mr. Blow, an editorialist of the New York Times pointed out :"With all due respect to the president, who is a very smart man, how is it possible for anyone with any reasonable awareness of the nonstop carnage that has accompanied the entire history of giant corporations to believe that the oil companies, which are among the most rapacious players on the planet, somehow “had their act together” with regard to worst-case scenarios."

Mr. Blow is very Afro-American, let it be said in passing, to neutralize all silly accusations of racism some of the simple ones are bound to brandish, as they read the stunning punch line of this essay. I find Mr. Blow’s editorials generally cogent, courageous, and not caught in the racial obsession with the color of the skin, many others have, or think political to have. (As Mr. Obama does, since born from a white mother, and brought up by white grandparents in a non racist, although pluri-ethnic, but certainly non "black" society, he now defines himself as "black", although he is brown, something any African in good standing such as myself will immediately recognize.)

Charles M. Blow is The New York Times’s visual Op-Ed columnist. His column appears on Saturday.

Mr. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years…

***

Frank Rich in an excellent editorial in the New York Times points out that: "It turns out there is something harder to find than a fix for BP’s leak: Barack Obama’s boiling point. The frantic and fruitless nationwide search for the president’s temper is now our sole dependable comic relief from the tragedy in the gulf… We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills. But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

His most conspicuous flaw is his unshakeable confidence in the collective management brilliance of the best and the brightest he selected for his White House team — “his abiding faith in the judgment of experts,” as Joshua Green of The Atlantic has put it. At his gulf-centric press conference 10 days ago, the president said he had “probably had more meetings on this issue than just about any issue since we did our Afghan review.” This was meant to be reassuring but it was not. The plugging of an uncontrollable oil leak, like the pacification of an intractable Afghanistan, may be beyond the reach of marathon brainstorming by brainiacs…"

Verily, all over history, common sense has always beaten expertise. Why? Because experts are infeodated to power, they owe everything to it. So experts are clever, as long as Power is clever. Experts play a support role to Power. If they contradict it, they are nothing.

When president Franklin Delano Roosevelt separated banking from financially speculating in the "Banking Act of 1933" ("Glass-Steagall"), he was acting as the son of privilege who wanted to exert power, by beating plutocracy into submission, to give power back to the rule to the People. Roosevelt had been born a plutocrat, he wanted to achieve more than his class could provide.

The counter-attack of privilege came after Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s. Starting with Nixon and Reagan, public money and power were subverted to give ever more private power to a small oligarchy. Nixon created the HMOs on the public dime, and Reagan helped by geniuses such as Lawrence Summers started to remove the barriers between banking and speculation (that caused the immediate failure of thousands of "Savings and Loans").

One has to understand that banks, all banks are publicly funded and guaranteed. That makes banks, all banks into public institutions. That is why Goldman Sachs rushed to become a bank in 2008 (instead of an “investment bank”, which was actually a speculative private bank). This way Goldman Sachs could access the public money spigot.

Summers, as Clinton’s economic boss, would finish destroying the Banking Act of 1933, and as Obama’s economic guru, he makes sure that it cannot be reborn from the wreckage: the White House is presently trying to block attempts at a cleaner separation of banking and speculation in derivatives, as the Senate has proposed ("Volcker’s rule").

The establishment gave everything to Obama, so Obama gives everything to the establishment. Gratitude, and the sheepish hormonal bath it comes from, is why great revolutions are never the work of insiders. To invent, and lead where no mind has been before, one needs rage.

It can be very dignified rage, such as that of Socrates, Cicero or Boethius, but it is still rage. (These three rambunctious philosophers were executed by fascist power exasperated by their free spirit; I could give Twentieth Century example, but readers would not know their names; although some day they will be widely known.) The implicit recognition of that mental mechanism, the importance of creative rage, is why the mythical Jesus threw the merchants out of the temple, and why Jesus made rather sinister death threats against unbelievers (which no philosopher in good standing will stoop to do, since philosophers kill ideas, not their carriers.)

Creativity always entails destruction, be it only of inappropriate neurology. That is actually why anger was invented. To foster the melting of erroneous neurological circuitry. That, and scarring the enemy.

So let’s recapitulate. Clinton was bought.

After his nomination as candidate, Clinton was told Rubin, head of Goldman Sachs, would be his boss, and then, moreover, that the even more extreme Lawrence Summers, Reagan’s aide, would help to do what was necessary, namely to dismantle FDR’s work.

Clinton was aghast. He asked Rubin the rhetorical question "You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?"

(One has to understand that the Federal Reserve is mostly a system having the appearance of objectivity, but mostly independent of democracy, being a creature of the banks that it itself feeds with public money, without any oversight of what it truly does, since it is secret. Thus one does not really know how much public money was given to Goldman Sachs in the last two years. It may have been above 60 billion dollars, some counted; but everybody knows 60 billion dollars was provided to General Motors, because there is oversight for that; GM makes things, Goldman Sachs causes trouble, and builds a new aristocracy.)

The president wanted to be "transformative". The essence of the economic and financial crises is the publicly financed, privately managed fractional reserve system itself. More globally the incest between Power and the elected representatives that our present form of democracy uses has caused the rise of various undemocratic powers.

The military industrial complex a retiring president Eisenhower saw as the greatest danger. Let him speak in his farewell address:

" A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction…

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

(In the penultimate draft of the address, Eisenhower initially used the term MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-CONGRESSIONAL complex.)

One may start with the same premise, with, say, the fossil fuel industry. After all it is also a vital element in keeping keeping on. Thus the oil energy representatives ended, literally, in bed with officials of the supposedly democratic government (Obama is talking as if he wanted to change this, but, when the lady directly in charge was fired, he had not heard about it, a particularly telling moment; who is the boss, really?)

F. A. Hayek mentions in his 1944 book "The Road to Serfdom" the danger of a support of monopolistic organization of industry from WWII political remnants:

"Another element which after this war is likely to strengthen the tendencies in this direction will be some of the men who during the war have tasted the powers of coercive control and will find it difficult to reconcile themselves with the humbler roles they will then have to play [in peaceful times]".

Although Hayek is viewed as very deep by most American neo-conservatives, from my point of view, inasmuch as the preceding remark is correct, he is also quite naïve.

The war of 1914 was launched directly by military men, But not WWII. Indeed, the military effort of the war itself resulted from men who knew, all along, a greater "coercive control", namely those who, in Anglo-Saxon countries and Germany, used Hitler as an all too willing pawn. Hitler was fabricated. Hayek did not want to understand that, because he was a follower of his "master mind", de Mandeville (early 18C). Hayek was a co-creator of shadowy organizations (Pan European Union, Mont Pelerin) which helped put in power Hitler, Thatcher and Reagan, and the members of which were amply rewarded with wealth, power and honors.

Hitler himself talked as if he could out-maneuver his wealthy sponsors, and spent a lot of his time decrying them.

(This connects to his attack on the Jews, because, after all, the Rothschilds, initially German Jews, vociferously decried much earlier by US presidents, were behind the monopolistic powers of the public-private fractional reserve system, used, as early as the 18C, by England to leverage itself against larger France). In the end Hitler committed suicide, and some of his wealthy sponsors and managers such as Prescott Bush, or Dr. Schacht ended on top, and wealthier and more powerful than ever (having escaped prosecution).

Obama is a creature of compromise between many things. His usage of "transformation" may have been just a word the uttering of which would allow to vaccinate against the concept it nominates. Why would Obama have otherwise chosen the advisers and aides he did? To use them as a cover-up, and then manipulate them subtly to achieve the transformations they were supposed to prevent?

All we can hope , at this point: to believe in Obama’s inner fiber, by making him really angry.

So let him show us that his presidency is not just about a little brown boy in a big White House, obsequiously serving his masters.

***

PA

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

***

P/S: I proposed, long ago, to use the anti-organized crime law for the Too-Big-To-Fail finance industry. In preparation to this, and to assuage some just rage, it may be good to practice RICO on BP. It is obvious that there was a deliberate, organized effort to scuttle normal laws and regulations on the part of the giant corporation known as BP (20 billion dollars profits a year).

Tags: Divided Loyalties