A SHIP OF STATE IN NEED OF A COURSE CORRECTION

Like the oil gushing out of the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama Administration continues on the course of the last administration, sputtering and spouting, the viscous slime from the past is unable to be altered or abated as it poisons, suffocates and kills those who come in contact with it. The problems of gushing oil and drifting unchanging domestic and foreign affairs can to a large degree be related back to Bush era policies of imperialism, greed, single-minded devotion to business interests, deregulation, imperialism and the evisceration of even minimal environmental review. The Obama Administration inherited the policies, but appears helpless to alter them or their outcomes as it continues to drift on the current, taking the nation in the same general direction, as if the former defeated and delegitimized oil-smeared former captain remained somehow tethered to the helm, and the new captain is without the strength, determination, or will to pry the tiller from the old man’s oily grasp.

We had great hopes back in January 22, 2009 when CNN reported on a key promise made by Obama during the election which epitomized the hopw for real change-- the closing of the ill- conceived, infamous Guantanamo Bay Prison. “Promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders Thursday to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration, including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year. The president said he was issuing the order to close the facility in order to "restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism."

What happened to restoring our core values and standards of due process?

Nothing much.

By June 25, 2010, the NY Times was reporting that closing Guantanamo and keeping the prison closing pledge has drifted out of the President’s agenda. In a piece entitled “Closing Guantanamo Fades as a Priority” The Times states “Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013. When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to alter events.” See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat Chair of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee adds:“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Levin. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.

Though we have since learned that the costs of keeping Guantanamo open, obtained from a new Defense Department study of the costs of the facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, show that taxpayers spent more than $2 billion on the prison between 2002 and 2009. Administration officials argue that the cost of operations and personnel could be cut roughly in half – to about $150 million a year – if detainees were instead housed at an Illinois prison. But reason and savings (even in these desperate times) appear not to change many minds. See http://documents.nytimes.com/current-costs-at-guantanamo

So as Tomdispatch reminds us in http://www.tomdispatch.com, closing Guantanamo is just one of the obvious factors that indicate how little things have really changed, “It would have been hard to do then” states Dispatch. But it is even more so now, with the Gulf gushing oil, the economy teetering into a possible second dip, the market behaving uncertainly about its wish to be a bear or a bull, and Obama’s approval ratings dropping like a stone (down to 38% among Independents), as well as a summer heat-wave fogging Congressional minds even more than they are usually.

So what has changed? We do have a black president and a lovely black first family. That is a good form of change. But other than that, and some well-spoken sentiments and oratory from the talented and intelligent Obama, Washington has not changed much since Bush left. Oddly, as if to underscore the lack of change, our nation again suffers with a disaster off the coast of Louisiana—though this time it is worse—with effects both on shore and in the deep waters of the Gulf. On foreign policy, the war in Afghanistan is looking much like it was under Bush---but now with more troops and more fatalities. An examination of who is mostly conducting the War in Afghanistan appears to be not much different had Senator John McCain won. In Iraq that disastrous ill-conceived and conducted invasion and civil war is thankfully slowly atrophying, but at a pace set by its chief designers and avid supporters---of the last administration. No change there. We still have a Bush-style warrior Secretary of State in our inconsequential and ineffective Ms Clinton. We continue to be burdened by Bush holdovers such as Mr. Gates, the Bush era Secretary of Defense, and also National Security Advisor Mr. James Jones who is a close friend of John McCain. So not surprisingly, we are still bogged down in an unending and unsuccessful war in Afghanistan. That gusher has not been “top killed”.

Just to understand how far off course we are, mark this on your navigation chart. In recent testimony concerning our reason for being in Afghanistan Mr. Leon Panetta, Head of the CIA indicated that there are perhaps “50 to 100 Al Qaida in that nation” for which we taxpayers have spent a nearly $300 billion dollars to apprehend and/or neutralize. That is $3 billion dollars for each turbaned head! We are either very inefficient or we are spending these hundreds of billions for some other reason. My old friend Tony would always say…”Check out where the money goes!”

Finally, we have some agencies (I think here of Blackwater or Xe of Bagdhad fame and its recent shameful 200 million dollar Pentagon contract) which are in the war business and operate to see it sustained and expanded. For example our expanding CIA Drone War in bordering Pakistan. The agency continues to generate new Taliban and al Qaida sympathizers with their ill-informed and poorly aimed drone-attacks, often resulting in numerous “collateral” civilian deaths. The spill goes on.
So when are we going to plug that leak Mr. Obama?

THE BIG FLORIDA FROST

It has been a generally cold winter here in sunny Florida. But it was the recent hard frost on January 22, 2009 which caused a lot disruption and for heads to turn. Many of the cold-sensitive plants people unwisely plant too early in their home gardens, like poinsettias, and pansies died on that day. Several hotels along Beach Boulevard stripped bed sheets off their clients beds to cove their outdoor beds of pansies on nights with frosts predicted. The graceful and frost-sensitive larger plant is the banana. They grow tall and green and are popular in gardens. Most winters they loose only a few outer leaves which turn brown and drab, but by March, new green and vibrant growth is back again. But this winter many of the older banana plants, some tall enough to have little bananas hanging among their leaves, froze that cold morning in January and then by the next day, the entire plant had turned an ugly brown.

A few weeks after the freeze, I was driving in a friends car when he committed a very minor traffic infraction. My friend had to submit a traffic report to a policeman. Involved only as an observant passenger I had time to snoop around. After the preliminaries, while we were standing near the patrol car waiting for the officer to complete a report he had clipped to his clipboard, I noticed that the windshield on his vehicle had many prominent scratches on the glass of the driver's side. They were enough to obscure the driver's view. I asked him about them. (After all, I once had to pay a sizable fine for having a similar vision-obscuring crack across my driver's window.)

The office paused and explained that he had to scrape away a thick layer of ice on the morning of the "big frost." By way of excuse, he added," I never have had a frost on my windshield before."

"But, he said, pointing to the scratches and then to his clipboard, "now I know I shouldn't use a metal clipboard to scrape ice off glass--I won't do that again," he laughed.

"No, no no clipboards, 'at's no good," said m friend, who hearing the conversation turn to ice, and who comes from New Hampshire and who knows a lot about ice...but less about Florida traffic laws, felt the need to offer his opinion. He added, "Your best bet fer that kind of ice is a plastic credit card." The officer nodded appreciatively.

"What about those plastic ice scrapers for cars," I asked, my eyes closing down into narrow slits, "didn't you have one of them?" I persisted, my mind still focused on that old ticket I had to pay.

"Oh!, them things?" he snickered, "folks down here, when someone gives them one, they jest bring 'em inside and use 'em to clean out their cat's litter box! We just never have any experience of real ice, before this."

Well, today the temperature was in the low 80s (F) and Home Depot in St Augustine put out a giant display of frost-sensitive plants..like tomatoes, herbs, poinsettias, and and succulent flowers.

I don't think we will see any ice more down here again-- not this year. Finally, it has warmed up and the weather is pleasant. But that 28 degree (F) "great Florida frost" has taught a lot of people a lesson. Perhaps change is really on the way. That Florida frost might be just one sign that the earth is on the cusp of some drastic climatic disruption. But we can't tell now for sure by just a few observations---only time will tell. A big Florida frost in sure to get people thinking though.