printWho Does Barack Obama Remind Me Of? BUSH. The indignant protestations from the Republicans notwithstanding, the two parties and potentates are interchangeable.
Dec 11, 2009: “… leaders say they will try to raise the ceiling to nearly $14 trillion as part of a $626 billion bill next week to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other military programs in 2010.”
September 11, 2003: Bush increases the ceiling on a whopping $6.8 trillion national debt.
Pleasing neoconservatives: Bush’s preemptive war doctrine never failed to bring a smile to Bill Kristol’s face. Pursuant to last week’s Nobel War Speech address, Obama too is making Bill warm all over.
Read the “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize” to see why Bill is glowing.
Update (Dec. 15): The two converge on war and on chasing “fat cats” (bar the likes of Barney Frank):
Bush: “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, courtesy of the Republican Party, cost American companies upwards of $1.2 trillion. The capital flight it initiated caused the London Stock Exchange to become the new hub for capital markets. Given America’s habit of forcing its habits on others, SOX struck fear into quite a few Liberal Democratic hearts in the House of Lords. Lord Teverson worried about the ‘increasing danger of regulatory creep from American regulators that threatens [Britain’s] own light-touch approach to financial regulation.'”
Barack: “A regulatory tsunami is on its way. ever-increasing regulation, stricter corporate-governance standards and the threat of higher taxes in response to the ballooning deficit. This week the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it considered carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, raising the spectre of clumsy administrative measures to reduce emissions—a prospect even more terrifying to business than the cap-and-trade scheme currently under consideration in Congress. Meanwhile, hopes of business-friendly reforms to America’s convoluted corporate-tax regime, among other things, have fallen by the wayside. …
‘The concern is pervasive but rather amorphous in the sense that different executives have very different worries,’ says Joe Grundfest, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who now runs a ‘boot camp’ at Stanford University for corporate directors. ‘Some fret over tax policy. Others agonise over cap-and-trade, or health-care reform. Many worry about additional corporate-governance regulations. It’s a smorgasbord of corporate neuroses out there.'”
Update II (Dec. 15): Peter Schiff, of course, is hip to the Bush/Barack overlap: “Through aggressive monetary and fiscal stimuli, we are trying to re-inflate a balloon that is full of holes. This was the Bush Administration’s exact response to the 2002 recession. It’s shocking how few observers note the repeating pattern, especially the fact that each crash is worse than the last.”
This time of year, Jews commemorate a partial victory that occurred when bearded religious fanatics, operating from caves and hills, held out against the secularizing superpower of the day (Greece). In fact, over the next 100 years, both the Greek-Jewish struggles and internal struggles among the Greeks and the Jews themselves led ultimately to the rise of Rome instead. Indigenous guerrilla movements have great advantages over “advanced” occupiers – ask Lord Cornwallis and General Westmoreland. One wonders whether we are seeing this with the US, Afpakistan, and China.
I recommend Glenn Greenwald of Salon magazine comments on the Bushama continuity both about his Nobel Prize Coronation Speech and the hypocrisy of the fawning left:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/12/…/obama
Equally interesting but more in the “domestic policy” realm is Matt
Taibbi’s comment on Bushama’s complete subservience to the Goldman-Sachs-Federal-Reserve-Wall-Street bankster axis:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout
It seems that Bushama comes in two varieties: (a) the religious, Manichean, macho, light-colored version and (b) the secular, nuanced, sensitive, dark-colored version. Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.
http://en.wiktionary.org/…/plus_ça_change,_plus_c’est_la_même_chose
If there’s any nuance between the two parties and their respective panjandrums in regard to the nation and its institutions it would have to be the language employed (“social justice”, “progress”, “tradition”) in defense of making rubble where once there was a nation.
Do we get a special prize when our debt-to-GDP ratio hits 100%?
They’re pushing an unaffordable new health-care entitlement, an absurd plan to fight global warming that will cost literally trillions, and expanded war in Central Asia and wonder why banks are unwilling to make loans and businesses are unwilling to make investments. The private sector does not like uncertainty about future burdens to be placed upon it by the government. No amount of pontification from Obama will change that.
He’s now whining and complaining that the banks must repay the debt the owe the tax payers by making more irresponsible loans. To be fair, it is the banks’ fault for taking Caesar’s money. They shouldn’t be to surprised when he comes asking for payback.
To Bob Harrison: When the so-called private sector (banksters, automakers, agribusiness, military-industrial complex) plutocrats bundle contributions to hired crooks (known as politicians), it IS THEIR FAULT.
A cute little post is:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/ostrowski/ostrowski94.1.html
What passes for “private” big business vs. “government” in 2009 America was foreseen by Orwell in the end of Animal Farm:
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”