Ted Auch

Given the recent announcement by President Obama that he will be upping the ante by 30,000 troops in Afghanistan I was left to ponder for what seemed to me a logical question: Mr. President what in your portfolio of beliefs and objectives is worth losing an election for? Do you not have any ideologies that you feel so passionate about that you are willing to sacrifice all or most of your political capital to steward such beliefs across the finish line? I voted for you sir and I am not sure at this point whether you have any convictions you feel so strongly about that you would put your political neck on the line for. That is quite disheartening to me because when I saw you speak on the steps of the Ira Allen Chapel here in Burlington, Vermont in March of 2006 I was convinced that you were a man with a spine, conscience, and an intellect unsurpassed in modern day politics. I still believe that the latter is true but as for your spine and to a lesser degree your conscience I am left wondering what you stand for and what you will fight for to the very end, whether it means political suicide or not.

Show us some fight sir! Show us that the issues you campaigned on are part of your very fiber and not simply the populist rhetoric you knew would get the vote of people like myself. It is beginning to feel like you are ashamed that the left supported you and your “progressive” agenda. That is not the man I saw speak in 2006. That is not the man I promptly told my friend Dennis Ailor would win the presidency in 2008. And that is most assuredly not the man I thought was capable of thinking through some of the most complex issues ever to face an incoming president. Sure you were handed a mess but are you going to continue to compare your administration to the one that preceded you? I would caution against such comparisons given that the bar could not have been set any lower.

Sir you know that the right would gladly fall on their sword for issues like abortion, the sanctity of marriage, gun rights, and the military industrial complex. That is a given and that for better or worse is one thing I respect about the neoclassical and neoconservative movement. When they give speeches in Portland or Corpus Christi you know what you’re gonna get and they make absolutely no apologies for their beliefs. It is time you get a little neocon in you Mr. Obama and by that I mean pick an issue any issue, whether it be health care, climate change, FISA, bank reform, or torture and go to the wall for it. Own the issue sir. Take back any one of these issues from those in your party that are self-hating Democrats. Just like Iraq and Katrina will define George W Bush (and no one else!!) one of these issues will define you and it would be a shame if you let the spineless wing of your party co-opt your presidency.

I and many like me – and I would hasten to guess those on the right – are anxiously or should I say nervously waiting and wondering if you will ever stand up and be accounted for with respect to some of the aforementioned issues. I would suggest firing Geithner, Summers, et al as a start. The left rightly sees them as an extension of the Greenspan-Rubin virus that has infected the nation’s financial services regulations for far too long now and the right won’t support them because….well who cares they just won’t because you do and that is reason enough for them.

Apologizing for our hegemonic history and bowing to Emperor Akihito shows that you are sensitive to our fragile status as a global power and more importantly the proper way in which you interact with others when on their turf. However, tacitly apologizing for being liberal or in any way concerned with the appalling trend in wealth, health, and education distribution in this country makes those of us on the left wonder if we were sold a bill of goods and those on the right question your leadership capabilities, both from a foreign and domestic perspective.

You may be wondering at this point why we don’t have your back on some of these crucial issues? Well all is not lost and believe me if we see fight emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue we will most assuredly get in the ring with you but until then you’ll have to rely on the likes of the Blue Dog Democrats. BTW how’s that working out so far?

Quite simply it is the nasty and bullying nature of the Democrat establishment in New York. The party bosses are doing all they can to line the path for Kirsten Gillibrand the default junior Democratic senator form NY who took the spot vacated by Hillary Clinton on January 19th, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/nyregion/31nyc.html?ref=todayspaper).

It seems as though we are throwing coals in the fire that doesn’t want to confuse folks with the facts but rather distract them with bluster, pandering rhetoric, fiction, and more often than not outright fiction.

This is an amazing example of how we in this country have come to view political power as a game and not a responsibility. I have nothing against Ms. Gillibrand other than her apparent Blue Dog predilections. She is I assume loyal to her constituents in upstate New York. However, the likes of Chuck Schumer are determined to hold her hand in 2010. Do we really want someone representing us (ie New York in this case) that can’t fend for themselves in a primary battle? We have a similar predicament here in Vermont where Patrick Leahy are 6-term (soon to be 7) has essentially been unopposed throughout his tenure, with the exception being the yeomen effort of Fred Tuttle (http://www.newenglandfilm.com/news/archives/98october/fredtuttle.htm; http://www.vtonly.com/loresep8.htm).

These are just 2 examples of the inability of the Democratic Party to set aside it’s collective ego and acknowledge it’s broader identity. Until they do this folks like myself and skeptics writ large will align with folks like Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, and Russ Feingold. You can say voting for the former is a wasted vote….and I could just as easily invoke the same when noting the supposed neoliberal capitulation to the Democrats.

I for one do not? Does that make me an advocate of Big Brother type big government advocate? Nope. I don’t want government to be looking in our bedrooms or bookshelves or email or tapping our phones. Rather I want them to do with our precious tax dollars what they should be doing…..fixing stuff, supporting those in need, and fueling innovation. You may ask what does it mean to starve the beast? (bartlett_starve-the-beast)

Well “starving the beast” is a term originally coined in a WSJ article by Paul Blustein (http://www.wordspy.com/words/starvethebeast.asp) and adamantly preached by the neoconservative wunderkind. This theory reduces taxes on the upper 2% via reduced capital gains, estate, and income taxes, primarily by allowing the elite to declare income as capital gains, which reduces taxable income from 34-38% to 15%. A classic example of this is Warren Buffet noting his personal assistant coughs up a greater percentage of her annual income in taxes than he does, because most of his income is declared as capital gains.

The starve the beast argument foments outright hatred of government by conflating taxes with socialism and the near and dear gun rights of this nations many cowboys. Of course this plays to the underlying fears of an already petrified nation. The last thing this country needs is another thing to be afraid of as we now have climate change, Iran, the Taliban, North Korea, China, Russia, lawyers, unemployment, diabetes, etc. Yet, given all this neocons feel the best remedy is adding to rather than ameliorating these fears. What a bunch of great folks? They must be true patriots.

However, I ask of those interested in an anorexic beast: Do you drive a car or better yet do you like smooth drivable roads? You do? Of course you do we all enjoy our asphalt alleys winding their way through urban centers and rural outposts alike. Well there is a price associated with that privilege and it is a privilege when compared to developed and undeveloped nations alike. Congress has been forced to bailout the fund that pays for the various interstate transportation projects this country takes on every year. Don’t worry its just $7 billion which pales in comparison to things like defense spending (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/us/31brfs-TRANSPORTATI_BRF.html?ref=todayspaper).

Starving the beast is a convenient and short-term method of consolidating wealth, is completely counter intuitive, and a theory that we should hope is entering the twilight of its relevance.

Very simply as it relates to mushroom clouds, ticking time bomb scenarios, the war on terror, what is and is not torture, the definition of the word implement (Seriously check this one out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1GT-BZvhrw), semantics associated with legal definitions of cruel and unusual punishment (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B5BNeWNShs), enhanced interrogation techniques, actionable information, blah blah blah blah we could shut up for at least 5minutes hopefully forever Fatso and Slickster very easily.

All we have to do is acknowledge that Nancy Pelosi and former Florida Senator and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair (2001-2003) Bob Graham were informed on some level of enhanced interrogation techniques being used and that waterboarding while not being used at least came up in conversation. In acknowledging this we would bring them forward along with their respective counterparts at the time Porter Goss and Richard Shelby. This aquiescing to the Bush administration was clearly a bipartisan effort as is evidence in the words of Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy when asked by Jonathan Mahler about his arrival in DC as a “Watergate Baby”

“There was a sense inside the Senate among both Republicans and Democrats that the government had gotten off course and that we had a responsibility to find out what happened” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09power-t.html?sq=John%20Warner%20Leahy%20Specter&st=cse&scp=4&pagewanted=all)

We have reached a similar crossroads here in the US resulting from the irresponsible, cruel, and myopic Bush administration policies. Yet, they could not have accomplished what they did without the approval, tacit or otherwise, of the Democrats. We must reverse course immediately or we will be going at it alone on all fronts in the future. The only way to guarantee credibility and more importantly shut-up the neocons and idealogues on the way right is if we treat all that knew about the clandestine operations of the CIA, special ops, and to a lesser degree the FBI equally. I mean give me a break Ms. Pelosi sent a staff member to these meetings with the folks at the CIA? A STAFF MEMBER!? Seems like whether or not we are torturing captives is something she should want to hear with her own ears.

Ms. Pelosi and Senator Graham were privy to the same information as Mr. Goss and Mr. Shelby. If it smelled, looked, and felt like torture it probably was torture. Yet, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Graham fearing being portrayed as soft betrayed their senses and in my opinion, while not as guilty as Cheney et al, deserve to be reprimanded. This is not the common view of many in the MIC including almost everyone at MSNBC and The Times, but it is the only way an inquiry into torture will be seen as credible, both on the right and the left. No one is above reproach in the real world and no one should be above reproach in DC. That includes Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Graham. Their rhetoric carries no weight unless they acknowledge their own responsibility. Democrats try to come across as “Of The People By The People”, but a similar brush to that used for Republicans could be used to paint their portraits. There is a way to change that but it will involve a very harsh and large mirror!

It appears that the Obama administration is going to hand over the reigns of their Public Private Investment Program (PPIP) to the money manager BlackRock, which is on the surface awfully similar to handing over the security responsibilities in Iraq and Afghanistan to a private contractor. Wait that did happen and boy has it turned out swimmingly (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/scahill; http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070528/scahill) with the outsourcing approved by the Bush administration and lucrative contracts given to companies like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and KBR (ie Kellogg Brown and Root a subsidiary of Halliburton). If the actions of Blackwater in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in September of 2007 are any indication of what happens when the government privatizes crucial responsibilities we had better get ready to duck! (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/world/middleeast/21blackwater.html?scp=2&sq=Blackwater%20Nisour&st=cse).

Privatization is increasingly the trend with the federal government and it is exactly the remedy for what ales Grover Nordquist & Co. vis á vis describe in their “Starve the Beast” complex (becker_2001_starve-the-beast-article1; bartlett-2007_starve-the-beast1; http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/the-tax-cut-con.html?scp=1&sq=Tax%20cut%20con&st=cse), which simply states we should gradually or suddenly reduce all taxes, which would force the Federal Government to shrink. This will be the case if the the debt to GDP ratio in the U.S. continues it’s dramatic upward trajectory from 58% at the start of the Bush administration to a historical high of 70% last year. Yeah I know fiscal conservatives will argue that big government = big deficits and that is the downfall of democracies. Well not according to none other than Dicky Cheney who in meeting with the administration’s economic team in 2002 stated “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” WAIT Cheney said that? The Dick Cheney? The same Dick Cheney who Mr. Nordquist presumably idolizes? Yep. Yep. And Yep! Turns out he was talking about short-term impact according to William A. Niskanen then of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and now at the Cato Institute (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26402-2004Jun8). Of course we should have know that it was short-term, why would any neocon think about the long-term health of anything let alone the federal government? If we privatize our tax dollars via Blackrock-like partnerships as Mr. Geithner’s PPIP is suggesting than we de-insentivize the private companies responsibility. Our indebtedness to China will go up while the folks at Blackrock and PIMCO will get off scot free. Classic heads I win Tails You Lose scenario!

The reason why this % increases is not so much a function of government spending as many Adam Smith and Milton Friedman economists would have us believe but rather a result of increasingly smaller tax revenues. Again we are not talking about the regressive idea of increasing payroll taxes (ie poor folks suffering disproportionately) but rather the drastic cuts we have seen in income, inheritance, and capital gains taxes all of which lead Warren Buffett to conclude that his secretary hands over a greater % of her income than he does.

Now what does this all have to do with Blackrock? Well Blackrock just happens to be 47% owned by Bank of America and it seems that The Great Timmy Geithner has figured out a way to give Ken Lewis & Co. the $33.9 billion his bank will need to proceed according to Mr. Geithner oh so stressful “Stress Tests” (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/05/07/business/0507-bank-stress-test.html). He will do this not by directly handing over the capital to BofA but rather letting Blackrock’s oracle Laurence Fink invest it for him seeing as how Geithner and Mr. Fink are quit chummy back to the former’s days as the head of the NY Federal Reserve Bank (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269131342732625.html).

It is amazing how many people Timmo is friends with or has done favors for I feel like he is to the financial services industry what George Bush was to the Military Industrial Complex and Religious Right. Anyway you might ask well why doesn’t Geithner just give the money to BofA? Well besides the fact that they have already been given $45 billion and are 6% owned by Joe The Taxpayer (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/business/17bofa.html?scp=1&sq=Bank%20of%20America%20government%20aid%20total&st=cse) there is a little something called AIG, which really didn’t go well for the Feds.

In bailing out the giant insurer we found out in March that much of the money went towards foreign banks like Société Générale and Deutsche Bank ($12 billion each), Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion), Merrill Lynch ($6.8 billion), and the aforementioned BofA ($5.2 billion). This incident demonstrated the incestuous nature of the financial services industry, the power of Goldman Sachs, and that these companies operate with incredible degrees of hubris and impunity two characteristics not so coincidentally used to describe Blackwater (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/business/16rescue.html?dbk). We’ll see if the general public catches on to the hypocrisy of going in on an investment in toxic assets with a company almost half owned by BofA.

This type of blurring of the lines that should clearly separate the public and private sectors can be traced back to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall (1933) Act via Phil Gramm and Jim Leach’s Gramm-Leach Bliley Act of 1999. More importantly and much earlier the taxpayer was made the prime guarantor of all Savings & Loan (S&L) deposits, while allowing S&Ls to lend more aggresively (ie predatory lending) via the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. These crucial laws had broad bi-partisan support. However, I would imagine if they were given to the public to vote on without the DC double-think and -speak we would have laughed them away outright.

As for Blackwater they were a result of a President and VP who were in bed with the Military Industrial Complex (On Steroids!) and the Oil Companies and why shouldn’t they be they stood to profit greatly upon returning to the private sector where much of their blind-holdings are undoubtedly in the $1.16 trillion industry.

Blackrock will likewise benefit greatly from only putting up 7cents for every dollar of investment, while we will invest 7cents and the FDIC will loan the remaining 85 as non-recourse loans to the banks, meaning if they aren’t happy with the way things are going they can just walk away. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that with student loans? This company has $1.3 trillion in assets or 9% of US GDP in 2008. You would think with all these assets and a 47% stake BofA could fund their own damn bailout? Unfortunately if you had such a crazy notion you would be dead wrong.

SO as I think we now know what Rahm Emanuel meant when he said “Never let a serious crisis go to waste!”. It essentially means, in DC parlance, that when a crisis comes down the shoot it is time to convince folks that preemptive war is good, torture is necessary, action without thought is patriotic, and…….. giving money to those that least deserve it is necessary to avoid Armageddon. Oh yeah what about privatization of our military and our tax dollars? Well you’ll thank us later! I think not and I think we have an administration now that is dangerously close to being changed rather than being the agent of change! Bush had his Blackwater scandal and I think if Obama ain’t careful he’ll have an equally if not greater hubbaloo with Blackrock.

The answer is George Bush et al. (that means you as well Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Reid, and the rest of you supine Democrats)! For that President Obama we as a nation wish we had handed you something with a little more pizazz, but we didn’t. In the words of the the NYT’s editorial board “We do not envy President Obama as he tries to undo George W. Bush’s illegal and shameful detainee policy.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17sun1.html?ref=todayspaper) However, you volunteered Mr. Obama and I don’t think there was anything about this job and it’s myriad obstacles you had not been well versed in. You have the intellect of the last 10 presidents combined, but it appears that it escapes you every time you ponder Pakistan and your policy towards “resolving” the conflict. As press reports have recently discussed 14 terrorists have been killed by predator and reaper drone strikes in Pakistan’s northern tribal regions. If you combined that with Pakistan’s estimate of 700 civilians you get 2% efficiency. Okay I know you would reply that the military’s civilian casuality numbers are much lower. How much lower? A third? Well that still leaves us at 6% efficiency, which by my qualitative assessment would require that we not even use the word efficient when discussing remotely piloted drones in Pakistan. According to Kilcullen and Exum “…every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html?ref=todayspaper)

Oh yeah and the fact that the title of an article about your new COO in Afghanistan Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is “MAN IN THE NEWS; General Steps From Shadow” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04E2DA113FF930A25756C0A96F9C8B63) really ain’t very assuring or indicative of the change you said was heading towards DC. I wonder is this shadow that McChrystal emerged from like a beacon in the night the same one that former VP Cheney referred to a week after 9/11 with Tim Russert

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” (http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20010916.html)

Unfortunately by these folks Mr. Cheney meant Gen. McChrystal and his boss Donald Rumsfeld, along with the convenient advice of folks like John Yoo, David Addington, and current Federal District Judge Jay Bybee. This statement by Cheney is often cited as the tacit acknowledgement that torture was going to be used and more importantly was deemed well within our right as a nation under attack. Torture! Well it seems Mr. Obama is placing his eggs in the centrist to right of center basket on this one as well. Why? Well it probably has something to do with the Democrats feeling as though they have to flex their muscle Hulk Hogan style with respect to terror. Obama is dangerously close to having complete ownership of the war in Afghanistan and the quagmire that is Iraq (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06herbert.html; bybee-torture-memo; bybee_to_rizzo_torture_memo)

Instead of choosing the 4:1 diplomacy:military ratio suggested by the Progressive Caucus the Obama administration is going to continue to rely on the 1:10 ratio employed by the hawkish policy makers in the previous adminstration (http://www.truthout.org/052109A) This will get us nowhere fast and will facilitate the creation of jihadist and anti-American sentiment where there was none. Gen. McChrystal who was the commander of the Pentagon’s Join Special Operations Command (JSOC) an ultra-covert crew of heavies not proned to diplomacy but rather brute force. According to Tom Engelhardt it was Cheney in endorsing the super-general that said “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.” The general’s crews use of force clearly bordered on if not blatantly stepped over the line of torture in Baghdad specifically Task Force 6-26 according to Engelhardt (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-engelhardt/going-for-broke_b_206438.html).

So anyway Bush didn’t make his bed and for that he will be perpetually tarnished, but you Mr. Obama don’t need to make things worse, because if you do your name will find an equally unflattering fate. Use your superior intellect and immense resources to severe ties with the previous administration. That includes aborting predator and reaper drone attacks and the employment of an Afghanistan COO whose heavy-handed and borderline Geneva violating past will only fuel the insurgency and spawn generations of jihadists. Oh yeah and try giving the people of Afghanistan a viable alternative to poppy rather than simply scolding them for growing one of the only crops that could survive in AfPak.

I think it is about time we salute the beacon of light that is Glenn Fine the Justice Department’s pugnacious Inspector General. You see folks while we were all looking forward to January 19th, 2009 he was working diligently to bring some semblance of respect back to the department that risks losing its title. Mr. Fine has gained bi-partisan support from Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy for staying above the morally corrupt fray in the DOJ. When the entire department looked like it lacked even a modicum of scruples Mr. Fine reminded us that some were worried about their reputation and alas upholding the law. This man’s pragmatic and methodical internal investigation, while not really uncovering anything salacious, did buttress claims from those in the know at the ACLU and elsewhere and those who smelled a rat without actually seeing one like yours truly. We can only hope that Eric Holder need not be raked over the IG’s coals like Alberto and Mr. Mukasey. However, after this brief congratulatory note it is worth asking the question of the aforementioned members of the judiciary committee: If you have such high praise for Mr. Fine and virtually jumped up and hugged Mr. Holder when he agreed that waterboarding is torture why sirs did you do nothing about it? You’ll get reactions from both and others on the committee that they did in fact work tirelessly to quell the heinously biased activities of Alberto & Co, however, I would contend the filibuster option with respect to Mukasey was available and you chose against it. Why because former Senator Bill Frist said that if you employed it the Republicans would change the law? You know what we should have seen who blinked first on that one gentleman. The filibuster is one bedrock tools of our democracy and when most assured that you were right you coward in the face of Rove’s spin machine, which would have immediately labeled you as unpatriotic. So, you left it up to Mr. Fine’s diligence and lucky for us he had a spine and was not willing to sacrifice his integrity for secrecy and illegal dealings of his colleagues. I hope that when something like this comes up again those in the senate will do the same, because if we can’t depend on them then the next stop is an imperial presidency. Oh yeah that worked real well!

I am starting to realize (finally!) that the institutional forces at work in the Democratic party are as nefarious and opaque as those that guided the outgoing administration (see Pelosi, Reid, et al) (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/opinion/13divoll.html?scp=1&sq=Congress%E2%80%99s%20Torture%20Bubble&st=cse; http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20090515.html). Their inability to look in the mirror erodes at their credibility in the eyes of those of us on the left that don’t walk lock-step with their rhetoric. This further buttresses the idea that institutional Democrats are complicit in tactics aimed at, in the words of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan “defining deviancy down” (http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/formans/DefiningDeviancy.htm).
It is clear that the Obama administration is not the Obama campaign and that deceit vis á vis language is still the coin of the realm. This surficial change in how DC presents their case is as petty as not using “surge” when referencing the 21,000 troops being sent to Afghanistan, or changing the war on terror to “overseas contingency operations and terrorist attacks to “man-caused disasters”. Or this notion that it is really hard to convey to the American people why bailing out these financial institutions is so important. I have an idea why such an explanation is so difficult. I simply recall back to my teenage years when I came home late or went into NYC when I wasn’t supposed to. Well it was much easier at the time to tell my parents a boldfaced lie then the truth at the time and that is what Treasury Secretary and Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers are perpetuating right now with their PPIPs, non-recourse loans, and loosening mark to market regulations (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/the-geithner-summers-plan_b_183499.html). They know that telling us the truth should and potentially will lead to nationwide revolt (Peacefully of course!) so they have instead chosen the path of least resistance, which is the legerdemain and shenanigans they and the rest of DC have grown so accustomed to shoving down our throats. This is a cross-the-aisle issue and was initiated with Grover Nordquist’s “Starve the Beast” paradigm that seems to have infiltrated every fiber of the Republican party. It is now being escorted through some pretty difficult times by the party of Roosevelt and for that the Democrats, specifically Christopher Dodd, Charles Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid should be ashamed of themselves. What I ask makes Geithner and Summers more qualified then say Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, or Dean Baker? The answer is the unabashed love of the former for Wall Street dogma (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/opinion/30krugman.html?scp=1&sq=America%20the%20Tarnished&st=cse). Sure I know academics don’t live in the real world and would therefore not construct plausible alternatives. Well from where I sit the guys at Treasury absolutely don’t live on this planet. If you want capitalism you have to be willing to let it bust at times and you have to accept scorched earth. If you want to come into the White House as a proponent of change please don’t tell us how your AfPak solution is so novel and your willingness to surrender the power accrued by the Bush administration is genuine (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/opinion/17tue3.html?scp=3&sq=On%20Signing%20Statements&st=cse; http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/16/nsa/index.html). Remember Democrats you are entering an office at an all-time low with respect to credibility here and abroad. Show us that you are listening President Obama don’t just tell us, because seeing is believing and aside from some very insightful and encouraging rhetoric you seem quite comfortable with the bed that Bush/Cheney made for you and that to someone who is awed by your intellect is quite upsetting. The country needs your sincerity and transparency. We know that you see much substance in the words of people like Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul now embrace this sector of the political spectrum. DC needs the political/intellectual equivalent of a Rainbow Coalition, it needs it now, and there is no one more qualified to lead in this regard than the current president. President Obama could start by increasing the overall transparency of the government via full disclosure of Congressional Research Service reports (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12tue3.html?scp=1&sq=Sharing%20congress%27s%20research&st=cse)