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Barack Obama; the Sound and the Fury.

January 26th, 2009
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Stop America’s illegal detention systems. Tighten emissions regulations on cars. Trillion dollar stimulus plan to create jobs and help homeowners.

What more could an American public ask for?

Encompassed in there are our most obvious aspirations for the positive development of the country we live in, some of them are the keystone reasons that Barack Obama was elected president of this great nation.

 

In the last few weeks he’s garnered a lot of good press for making headway in these directions, though the progress seems more symbolic than practical– the devil is in the details, and with a few swipes of a pen those grand ideals can be brokered into PR stunts, carrying lofty iconic power but lacking any of the teeth needed for effective policy construction, and resting on the fact that the electorate only comprehends a shallow depth in the issues.

Guantanemo Bay prison is a festering boil on the face of American foreign policy—lambasted in every press, well known the world over, Gitmo serves as a potent reminder of American Imperialism at it’s worst, and it deserves to be immediately closed [hopefully in favor of a memorial to the people tortured there]. However, Gitmo isn’t the end of our detention policy, and you can do only limited good without closing the CIA floating jails, the network of ‘black sites’ across Eastern Europe, and most importantly, significantly altering our policy regarding ‘extraordinary rendition’ [the process of apprehending people in a foreign nation and moving them, without legal process, to a third party nation with laxer human rights laws-- this was made ‘legal’ in a presidential order by Clinton in 1995]. Has Obama made any mention of these other elements, no—he simply wants the camera’s to get him closing Gitmo and locking it behind him.

He’s imposing stricter regulations on auto emissions… sort of. He’s actually allowing the states to enact policy ‘which does not exceed the governmental policy’ 4 years earlier than the Fed is planning on doing it. So that means that instead of the Bush plan to raise efficiency from 27 mpg to 35 mpg in 2020, he’s allowing the states that feel so inclined to require that change by 2016. Is this what change looks like? What about the California Clean Air Act of 1995 which required automakers to create ZERO EMMISION cars and market them such that 10% of their cars would be as such within 5 years. That would make a huge difference in the amount of greenhouse gas created, and foreign oil burned—this new law does nothing but speed up the timeline on a miniscule alteration—is increasing average car efficiency by a few mpg the radical change this country so desperately requires?

The Stimulus plan is possibly the worst part—he should be sending our country into debt in order to stave off a major meltdown in the short term … but you can’t do it with Reagan Era tax cuts. Every time they talk about the plan, it becomes more tax cuts and less infrastructure—Josh commented on my last piece to inform that the plan is less than 20% infrastructure at this point. We need to put people to work, we need to fix our aging country. We don’t need to give tax cuts to people whether they need them or not.

Don’t let the symbolic change distract you from the static nature of greater picture—Washington is still doing business as usual, its just launching a new Brand.

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