Obama: The People's War President?

Last week, I received news that an old friend—the son of a former Libertarian congressional candidate—had become a conscientious objector in his Army unit following an action that killed noncombatants. This was Wayne's first tour of duty, but there is no doubt that he was well-practiced in the fieldcraft and personal discipline required for good soldiering.

He grew up in a close-knit Christian family that homeschooled their children on a fifty acre plot of woods in the wiregrass region of lower Alabama. Wayne grew up reading, hunting, fishing, shooting guns, and playing paintball with his brother and sister. While working with the Libertarian Party of Alabama, I visited their home on several occasions between 2002 and 2004, and I remember Wayne as a respectful young teenager with an expansive vocabulary and his father's knack for computer games.

Around five years after the last time I saw him, Wayne's infantry unit deployed to Iraq. Having been in the Army for a couple of years already, his father reports that he was "gung-ho" about the Army life, even in a combat zone. Wayne's unit assaulted a building thought to contain "insurgents," and air support was called in from an AC-130 gunship and an AH-64 Apache helicopter. After the target was bombarded from the air with 105 mm shells and strafed with 30 mm cannon-fire, the structure was cleared, and only lifeless women and children were found inside.

After returning stateside, Wayne determined that his conscience would not allow him to kill for the United States government again. Despite ridicule and worse from his "battle buddies," Wayne, now facing another Iraq deployment, has begun openly speaking his conscience and declaring that participation in the Iraq War is participation in murder.

Barack Obama was held out by many as the most radical voice for peace among the viable Democratic presidential candidates in 2008. What a disappointment to those who voted accordingly! The peace president has broadly expanded the Afghanistan campaign, begun bombing runs in Yemen, and still maintains tens of thousands of combat troops, albeit at reduced levels, in Iraq (although my friend reports that private military contractor usage has been amped up to compensate). There have been rumblings about stepping up U.S. efforts to "stabilize" Somalia, and Xe (formerly Blackwater) mercenaries are already on the ground there. The Obama administration has also worked to move more troops into the murderous anti-coca campaign in Colombia, where "false positives" (anti-narco-gestapo-speak for "murdered civilians") continue to mount.

Fear of American operations into Colombia's neighbors has made political hay for South American political oppressors, as the socialists in power in Venezuela and Ecuador have effectively used the American regime as a foil in their own democratic socialist melodramas, working to clamp down on dissenting media outlets and otherwise centralizing control of those economies into state hands.

In total, the United States has around 394,000 troops deployed on foreign soil. In comparison, the rest of the world's governments combined have fewer than 150,000 of their military personnel on international deployment.

Like his war-hawk predecessor, the current president is pursuing a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace. And like the Bush government, Obama's administration has moved to cover-up evidence of torture and other crimes committed by U.S. personnel.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent Salon column that this should come as no surprise to those who remember that in 2008 Obama's current head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, advocated government operations to actively infiltrate and disrupt groups that openly questioned the truthfulness of the federal government's various organs. Sunstein pitched such actions as means for promoting public faith in the government.

Administration figures have also been up to no good in domestic policy debates, with the undisclosed bankrolling of soi disant "independent" experts like Jonathan Gruber. The MIT professor took federal money to promote the president's healthcare agenda in the media, but forgot to mention this rather substantial conflict of interests when grandstanding for his government employer. Greenwald correctly concluded that such official deception is symptomatic of yet another administration's narcissistic self-assuredness and disdain for honest debate.

If anyone doubts that government propaganda kills, look at the eighteen year-old kids who join the military because they believe they will be "protecting freedom" by serving as emissaries of the leviathan state that once used atomic weapons against civilians and which imprisons a higher percentage of its own citizens than any other modern democracy.

Rather than sending naive, trusting young people like my friend Wayne to risk life and limb committing mayhem in the name of "regional stability" and other nebulous trump cards, Obama should bring American troops home now. But he will not do so. He will simply put new window dressing on the tired old political barbarism of high-time preference foreign policy and spending for spending's sake, and will continue to show the same disregard for the individual lives irreparably harmed as a result. Where's the hope?

(Also published in the January 2010 issue of Dicta, the Suffolk Law Paper.)

Happy New Year--Tough Times Ahead

Happy New Year. January 2009 brings with it the landmark inauguration of Barack Obama. The GOP machine that has held the executive reins in Washington will yield to the new Democrat executive. Yet, what will change? Despite his occasional antiwar rhetoric, Obama has announced that he will retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. So much for "change." Gates was slippery enough to avoid criminal liability in the Iran-Contra scandal. As deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gates was a belligerent influence, encouraging covert bombing raids against the Sandanista government in Nicaraugua. However, his refusal to cooperate with the Office of Independent Counsel eventually paid off for him--his endurance in stonewalling OIC investigators outlasted that office's political capital and Gates escaped mostly unscathed, although the scandal lost him his 1987 bid to become top spook at Langley.

Obama also promises to step up the efforts of the Bush administation in hemorrhaging dollars for the sake of some ill-conceived "stimulus" program, as if more wild spending could be used as an effective salve for the pains now felt from years of carefree government excess. Even worse than the monetary helicopter that Obama plans to deploy to bribe the electorate, leading voices in the new administration and in the Democrat-controlled Congress are calling for trillions more in direct and indirect bailouts for companies either too irresponsible or too outmoded to perform efficiently in modern markets. The penalties against companies like Ford that refuse to participate in such quasi-nationalization of industry will likely continue as well. A $1 trillion plan for expansion of public works projects, which was pushed in part by steel industry lobbyists, is in the works. Numbers in the trillions are hard to fathom, but a useful point of reference is the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $12–14 trillion, if World Bank, CIA, and IMF figures are any indication.

More central the current economic crisis is the epidemic of bank failures. As reported by ABC News last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has compiled a secret list of 117 banks that are on the brink of failure. After the twenty-five bank failures in 2008, the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund has been drawn down to roughly $20 Billion. This means that the fund could be bankrupted by as few as two of three large bank failures. Despite the looming insolvency of the FDIC, Obama has decided to retain current FDIC chair and 2006 Bush nominee Sheila Bair, probably though the end of her original term in 2011. Bair, one might recall, took unprecedented steps to extend the liabilities of the FDIC by providing unlimited backing for some kinds of non-interest-bearing accounts and backing other kinds of debt issued by at-risk banks.

All of these decisions seem to indicate that Obama's inauguration represents not a refreshing change from the irresponsible and short-sighted policies of the Bush II years, but rather a continuation of those failed policies, compounded by wild new spending initiatives and more monetary expansion from the Federal Reserve. Instead of a sober period of fiscal belt-tightening, Obama appears to be suffering from the same Keynesian delusion as his predecessor—that the answer to irresponsible, wasteful spending is even more spending, including the creation of up to 600,000 new government jobs. The same mental malaise has also taken hold of the minds behind the Wall Street Journal, which on January 6 ran an article entitled "Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes." While decreased consumer spending will mean slower growth, this is a good thing where we are talking about phantom growth driven by monetary policy mania rather than solid economic fundamentals. Far from "aggravating" the crisis, responsible financial decisions—choosing to live within one's means, saving, and planning for lean times ahead—are the only way to end what will otherwise blossom into America's Second Great Depression. Sadly, Washington seems set to continue on as a fount of fiscal lunacy, and the American people will suffer because of it.

(Also published in the January issue of Dicta, Suffolk Law's newspaper)