NAVIGATION: WEB JOURNAL - FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL - ESSAYS - OTHER CONTENT

- FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL - Follow The Money - Redux I have made it something of a tradition in this space, when a new president takes office, to make predictions for what I see happening under the new president, and review the predictions I made for the last one, and see how they panned out. Well, the time has arrived; we have a new president, and the national nightmare of the last eight years is finally at an end. And it is time to review my predictions and see how they turned out - and make predictions for at least the next four. So, back in December, 2000, just after the elections of that year, I made some predictions in this space, and it is time to see how I did: 1. I predicted that corruption would flourish, even worse than in the Reagan presidency. Well, I was right about that one. Remember how 24 billion dollars of Iraqi money literally vanished without a trace, after much of it was literally handed out on the streets of Baghdad from the back of pickup trucks as if it were so many shopping coupons? And how soldiers were even playing football with shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills? Or who could forget Katrina, the Mother of All Corruption Scandals, where more than $78 billion simply couldn't be accounted for? 2. I predicted that Junior would exhibit an authoritarian streak that would have embarrassed even Richard Nixon, and that the Nixonian "enemies list" scandal would be far exceeded. I was dead on about that one, too, when it was revealed in the Washington Post that there was not just an enemies list, but an actual "enemies" computer under the control of the Republican National Committee that maintained a list of not just a couple of dozen names, as did Nixon's list, but had more than 10,000 names in it. And when asked about it, Dick Cheney actually had the testicular fortitude to tell the Washington Post reporter, "you f**k with us, we'll f**k with you!" They certainly did. I was personally driven into exile, and underwent two assassination attempts, two kidnapping attempts, endless interrogations and breakins. And my experience was hardly unique. And it wasn't just that enemies computer, either - virtually anyone who publicly condemned the Bush administration found themselves unable to get on an airplane and go anywhere. Third party officials, even members of congress. To this day, I still can't just get on a plane and go somewhere. In the end, one person in 300 in the United States found themselves on this supposed list of terrorists. 3. I said that Junior would be the bufoon who would be the titular head of state, but Dick Cheney would run the government, and would do the bidding of the religious right, including such men as Richard Mellon Scaife. That Junior was enthralled by the religious right goes without saying, given his knee-jerk support of Israel, his antipathy towards any policy that did not reflect his fundamentalist religious beliefs and his enthusiastic acceptance of far right religous hatemongering and control-freak social policies. And indeed, the day to day affairs of the government were, indeed, run by Dick Cheney until his screwups led to a change of policy after the disastrous (for Bush) elections of 2006. 4. Any Supreme Court vacancies would be filled with only hard-core right-wing ideologues, and I was proven right - the Supreme Court took a hard lurch to the right with the Bush appointments, and has overturned or seriously undermined many long-standing social protections, such as reproductive freedom, Affirmative Action, school segregation, etc. 5. I predicted that Bush would use the power of his office to line the pockets of his cronies. Remember how Vice President Cheney's not-so-ended relationship with Halliburton led to that company's doubling and tripling its profits each year for several years after Cheney took office? Or how the crony capitalism of the Bush years made the "revolving door" of business-government relationships in Washington all but become a two-way street, so much so that it no longer even elicited a comment? Junior wasted no time in fulfilling this prediction (see the Dick and Dubya Scandal Chart, "Junior Gets Things Done") - of the dozens of quid pro quos sought by his principal campaign contributors, I could find only one that was not fulfilled within two years of his taking office. And those are only the ones I could find - how many more escaped notice? And who could forget the revelations of what happened with the Katrina relief money? 6. I listed what I figured would be the big winners for corporate welfare: the defense industries, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, utilities, mining and chemical industries, and Big Pharma. I was right on every single one - "defense" benefited from the largest military budgets in the history of the planet, including support for two wars of empire, Big Oil was the big winner when global warming denial became a hallmark of the administration, and the administration did nothing to stop an asset bubble in the energy sector, Big Tobacco won by a Dept. of Justice subversion of the vast liability lawsuit judgment against Big Tobacco that was won by the states, utilities also benefited by a systematic subversion of green energy, denial of science, and subversion of pollution controls, mining won big with plans to lease sensitive federal lands and blocked reform of the Mining Law of 1872, chemical industries won by his subversion of environmental controls and product liability lawsuits, and Big Pharma was the only real winner from his expensive Medicare Drug Benefits Program, while the ability of Americans to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada by mail order was steeply curtailed. Of course, there were many more corporate welfare winners, but those are just the ones I predicted. 7. I said that the "war on drugs" would get bigger, more futile and even more counterproductive than it already was. Well, it is up to $12 billion a year now, up from the roughly $2 billion when Junior took office. Afghanistan went from an insignificant player in world opium/heroin markets to by far the world's largest producer, all while Bush's army was occupying it. Meanwhile, the human rights abuses by the Colombian government, supposedly in the name of the war on drugs, gets routinely swept under the carpet, while the largely nonexistent human rights abuses by the Venezuelan government get blown all out of proportion. All the while, the U.S., it now turns out, incarcerates by far the largest proportion of its population than any other nation on the planet due largely to the drug war, and of course, cocaine on the street is purer, cheaper and more readily available than it has ever been. And the cocaine addiction rate in the U.S. is increasing, and is now nearly twice what it was before cocaine was made illegal in the 1920's. 8. I predicted that there would be no meaningful election law reform. I badly underestimated this one - the "Help America Vote Act" proved, in three subsequent elections, to simply take the Florida, 2000 abuses and put them on the road - and make them a national phenomena. They swung the elections by falsifying the vote in several states, notably Ohio, in 2004. Only a wholesale economic collapse prevented another right-wing Republican ideologue from getting elected in 2008, in spite of the fact that the outgoing Republican president had become the most unpopular president in more than a century. 9. Public education, I predicted, would continue its sad decline under Bush. Well, of course, the "No Child Left Behind" act enshrined the practice of teaching to the test, rather than teaching for learning - and, once again, I was dead on. Educational levels continue to decline relative to the rest of the world. 10. Labor law, I said, would be diluted or eliminated through lack of enforcement. Spot on with this one, too. Virtually no discrimination complaints were ever investigated by the Labor Dept. during the Bush years, in spite of the fact that the complaint rate increased, and Bush's Supreme Court appointments were the deciding votes in court decisions that essentially gutted pay discrimination protections. H1-B visa programs were greatly expanded, forcing many well-qualified U.S. engineers into unemployment, while engineers from the third world were brought in, housed in cheap dormitories and paid as little as $6,000 per year to do highly intricate engineering work. Working condition scandals became rife, and, as I predicted, little was done to stop it until farm workers in California were discovered to be dying in the fields because it was found they were not being allowed to stop long enough to simply have a drink of water. Immigration law came to be abused in some of the largest immigration raids in history to break up attempts to unionize illegal immigrants trying to stop their abuse by employers. Human trafficking became a national scandal, and little was done to stop it. 11. And last, but hardly least, I said that you should expect the boom to gradually end. Even I didn't figure that this man was going to start a full-blown depression, but that is how it worked out. Things are looking pretty grim out there, far worse than I had ever expected. And, as I predicted, the policies instituted or advocated by this man were the direct cause of this slump in economic activity. So, there they are. You be the judge of how well I did. And with that in mind, what are my predictions for the incoming Obama administration? Wish I could be sanguine, but I am not. Here is my list of predictions for Obama: 1. Obama will have a hard time getting his legislative agenda through Congress, in spite of Democratic control. The Republicans have become past masters at rallying their troops to push their spectacularly failed ideological dogmatism, and the Democrats in Congress will behave as if their priority is bipartisanship more than getting anything done. As a result, the increasingly militant Republicans will continue to arrogantly behave as if they are in charge, and as a result, they will be. And Obama will be clueless about how to neutralize Republican dogmatism, and why it is important to do so, and the feckless Democratic leadership in congress will barely understand what hit them. 2. Obama will lose control of Congress in 2010. The Republican playbook, which brilliantly succeeded in capturing control of Congress in 1994, is being repeated almost word for word, and the Democrats, including Obama, are fecklessly playing their parts very well. The Republican playbook succeeded then and it will succeed again if Obama fails to figure out what is going on, and so far he appears to be clueless. 3. The recession will deepen into a depression, and Obama will get the blame. The Republicans, who have learned well from generations of fascist propaganda efforts, will effectively pin the blame on Obama in spite of the fact that it started on their watch and it is their doctrinaire ideology that will have made it worse. But, as Hitler observed, all it takes for a lie to be believed is for it to be repeated often enough - especially if it is a big lie, and the Republican lie machine will do a very good job just as it has for the last eight years. 4. Obama will not roll back the human rights abuses and "unitary executive" privileges usurped by the preceeding administration. Don't expect the Patriot Act to be rolled back in any meaningful way, nor the domestic NSA or FBI spying to end. The CIA will continue its extraordinary rendition program, will continue to secretly torture prisoners, and the Obama administration will not lift a finger to stop it. If/when investigated, it will be discovered by human rights campaigners and investigative journalists that the reason why is that Obama is sympathetic with and beholden to the intelligence community. When his employment history with a CIA front company is investigated, it will become apparent that the old adage that "once CIA, always CIA" applies to him. My fellow exiles, who are gleefully moving back to the U.S., will discover that their decision to return from exile was premature. 5. This supposedly liberal Democrat will, just like Bill Clinton before him, eventually come to be viewed as "Republican Lite" by his base - the left-of-center portion of the Democratic party, because, like Bill Clinton before him, he will have largely implemented the Republican agenda. Analysts will see this to be the consequence of his being beholden to business interests in getting elected in the first place, and they will be right. As a result, he will have a hard time rallying his base to get re-elected, and will not be. 6. Obama will become a one-term president, who will be largely seen (in the near term, at least) to have failed, much like Jimmy Carter, mostly because he failed to implement his vision (to the extent that he has one). Actually, like Jimmy Carter, he will be a far better president than will be generally believed, but such is the power of the Republican spin machine, that he will be stigmatized unfairly. He will be spun as a symbol for the failure of liberalism, when, in reality, he would have failed because he compromised too much his original vision and integrity. 7. The Republicans, who view the Congress and the White House as rightful Republican property, will resume control in 2012, and this time, they won't give it up, because the doctrinaire ideologues will have, by then, taken complete and uncontested control of the party. Republican control of the U.S. government will become permanent this time, and their secretly held contempt for democracy will become nakedly apparent, as the United States becomes a one-party state in all but name. U.S. moral authority and influence will be at an end. The American experiement in democracy will be over. Scott Bidstrup, Tobosi de El Guarco, Costa Rica, February 12, 2009 Click on your browser's RSS icon or put this link in your RSS reader for automatic updates of this editorial and other content on this site:

"The Cool Page for Queer Teens" is my effort at helping gay teens avoid some of the misery I faced growing up gay... "My Child is GAY! Now What Do I Do?" is a page that is designed to help parents cope with the unsettling discovery that their child is gay. It's also available in Spanish... Wallpaper Images From The U.S. Southwest I've been having a lot of fun with my digital camera over the last couple of years. Here are some nice pictures of the Southwest (and a couple from Africa), suitable for your desktop wallpaper image... Wallpaper Images From Costa Rica I did what every landscape photographer dreams of - I took a trip to Costa Rica, and in just two weeks got more and better wallpaper images than I had before... The News: Finding Out What's Going On is a brief compilation of resources, both print and electronic, that can help you become and stay informed about what's going on - news and information that the powerful in Washington or the corporate media have neglected, or worse, actually suppressed... Putting A Stop To Telemarketing offers a simple, easy way to deal with the problem, and some practical advice for serious telemarketing abuse problems... "Cool Stuff" is a collection of fun things I've found on the web over the years... My Professional Resume (in Word format) in case you're here to offer me the big bucks...

---

This Gay Cowboy Ring site owned by Scott Bidstrup. To learn about / join the Gay Cowboy Ring, just click here. [ Previous 5 Sites | Skip Previous | Previous | Next | Skip Next | Next 5 Sites ] [ Random Site | List Sites ]

---

Citizens and Residents Of The United States and U.S Persons - USA PATRIOT Act Notice: You are hereby notified that under the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, you may be placed under electronic surveillance while viewing this or any other similar web site by intelligence or law enforcement agencies at any time or for any purpose for which they may deem fit, without your knowledge or permission and without the order or supervision of any court of law, regardless of the provisions of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. constitution. As the provisions of the Act strictly prohibit, with fines and imprisonment, the managers of this site from disclosing such surveillance should it be known to us, you should assume that you are under surveillance while viewing this or any other similar web site, electronic mail or any other form of electronic communication related thereto.

Copyright Rights Notice: This document and all documents maintained at this site are copyrighted under the laws of the United States of America and the Republic of Costa Rica. Use of email addresses included in this document or any other documents maintained at this site or within this domain, whether displayed or contained within the document source code, for any purpose without the written permission of the copyright holder is expressly forbidden and may subject the violator to criminal and/or civil penalties. The display, reproduction or use of documents or portions of documents contained on this site elsewhere on the Internet or in print, whether for educational or commercial purposes, without the written permission of the copyright holder is also expressly forbidden, with the following sole exception: Permission is granted to reproduce documents on this site solely within the confines of fully accredited and functioning educational institutions including public schools and public and private universities for educational purposes only, for a maximum of one hundred copies, provided that the source URL and copyright notice at the end of the document being reproduced, appear on each page on which the reproduced material appears. Persons desirous of obtaining other permissions are required to seek authorization from the copyright holder.

Source URL: http://www.bidstrup.com/index.htm

Copyright © 1997 - 2008, Scott Bidstrup, todos derechos reservados
Email: Scott Bidstrup