Author: R J Adams

We have to face facts; we’re the has-beens. They label us the “baby boomers’ – a reference I find utterly insulting – and prepare to pension us off with as little retirement money as they can get away with. Considering we’ve all paid enormous amounts into the system for sixty-odd years, I find that equally disgusting.

George W Bush and his predecessors have been robbing the Social Security fund for years – “borrowing”, they call it. If any of us had done that we’d have been banged up, and the key chucked in the nearest river.

But then, they have different laws for ordinary people.

Frankly, I think our generation stinks. We’ve looted the planet, stolen from each other on an international scale, filled our lives with material pleasures, polluted the atmosphere, and sold ourselves off to a God far more important – even to the preachers, who should know better – than the one most of us purport to offer allegiance to.

We sold our souls to MONEY.

Judas Iscariot did that. He set us all a fine example. We followed it, unswervingly.

We were the products of our fathers returning from the battlefields; the first thing they did on arriving home. Some say the second thing they did was take off their boots, but knowing my mother she’d never have allowed dirty boots between the sheets, so I’m quite sure that wasn’t the case in our house.

Since that time we’ve managed to virtually destroy the planet.

Our generation got its kicks out of fast cars and cold wars. Television first introduced us to the entertainment value of violent conflict. It wasn’t exactly interactive, but unlike our fathers, we didn’t have to leave our living rooms to experience it.

We marveled at the God of Finance that took us to the moon, then raised the glorious specter of expanding military might into pristine space; the wonder of the nuclear age that gave us bountiful energy, Hiroshima, Chernobyl……and Hell, we’ll bury the waste for our kid’s kids to worry about.

Now, we’re the has-beens, the ‘baby-boomers’ about to break the social security bank. It’s just something else our kids will have to fix.

So, get on with it, you younger generation. If you pull together you may just succeed where we failed.

And, boy, did we fail – en masse!

Choose a leader from your own generation. Right now, there’s only one. Don’t go for Hillary Clinton, she’s a ‘baby-boomer’ too. For God’s sake forget John McCain, he’s old enough to be grandfather to all of you.

You know that old adage: ‘the older you get the wiser you get’? Take a look at us and realize how wrong it is.

You need young leaders, not old has-beens. Barack Obama is your only choice. He can lead you to glory. Maybe, just maybe, with your help he can save the world.

On the other hand, he may let you down. He may sell you down the river as swiftly as the ‘baby-boomer’ politicians did to us. He may fall in with the corporates and poison this planet till it’s as hot, foetid, and uninhabitable as Venus.

But, if he does fail you, if he sells you down the river, you’ll only have yourselves to blame.

It’ll be the one thing you won’t be able to fault us for.

Filed under: Cocked it up

Joseph Stiglitz, find Nobel Prize winner for Economics and once chief economist to the World Bank, medical had this to say recently about the cost of the Iraq war:

“We are talking at least between one and two trillion dollars now. To put that into perspective, cialis President Bush went to the American people at the beginning of his second term, saying that we have a major crisis with our Social Security system. For somewhere between a half and quarter of the cost of the war in Iraq you could have fixed all the problems associated with Social Security for the next 75 years and still have had a lot left over. Put in another way: We are now spending something like $10 billion a month—$120 billion dollars a year—on Iraq. The amount the entire world gives in foreign aid, on an annual basis, is about half that.”

Read the rest of the Mother Jones interview with Joe Stiglitz HERE.

Filed under: Political priorities

As a Brit living in the heartlands of the U.S.A for over five years, I consider myself an observer of life and politics in this country post-9/11/2001.

I came here exactly twelve months after the 9/11 atrocities to find a nation in shock, still reeling from the first real attack on the homeland since the British tried to regain control of the wayward colonies back in the 18th century.

Ever since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Americans have held firm to the ideal of a land impervious to foreign invaders. The aerial attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1942 had been the closest America ever came to an assault on the homeland, but even that held not the significance of those twin towers crashing earthwards after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Even the incident of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon, on that fateful day, lacked the full horror of the WTC towers crumbling to dust, forever vanquished from the lower Manhattan skyline.

The Phoenix that finally arose from the ashes of 9/11 was one of fear. America felt awesomely vulnerable. How could such a catastrophic event be prevented from ever happening again?

By taking advantage of this nationwide aura of fear, George W Bush and his administration was able to invade Iraq, a nation far removed from the events of 9/11, and plunge America into the stalemate situation it finds itself in today.

The invasion of Iraq had nothing whatever to do with the events of 9/11.

Today, that statement is recorded fact, denied by no-one, except perhaps the discredited Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Nevertheless, at a time when the US populace turned to their leaders for support and direction, a majority of those leaders – the United States Congress – voted in favor of a premeditated invasion of a foreign country.

Let us make no mistake on this fact. George W Bush did not go to war against Iraq on his own authority. The United States Congress took the decision to instigate that war against a known innocent country.

Remember the ‘smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud’?

That phrase was deliberately repeated over and over by members of the administration and Congress, to persuade Americans of a danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s government.

The omission, supported by Congress, was the knowledge that any possibility of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction had been nullified by the actions of America and her allies – notably the British – by sanctions and blanket bombings throughout the previous decade.

Barack Obama was not the only Congressional member notable for a stance against the war in Iraq, but he is the only one seeking the presidency in 2009.

Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain threw their Congressional weight behind Bush and his minions over the Iraq issue.

McCain, stubbornly, still insists it was the right decision. The American people are not so stupid as to believe him.

Hillary Clinton no longer supports the war in Iraq, and says ‘if she knew then what she knows now’ she would have voted against it.

Do the American people truly want a president who is only right with hindsight?

Hillary Clinton, along with many of her political colleagues, chose the path of popular support. Americans, in the aftermath of 9/11, needed a scapegoat. Saddam Hussein was the whipping boy. Clinton and McCain were happy to oblige, seeking the popularity of the moment.

Obama, on the other hand, saw the injustice of the time and called for restraint. He argued against the war, but in favor of his conscience.

There are some who would contend that George W Bush similarly acted according to his conscience, yet there is a basic difference between Obama and Bush. The present incumbent arrogantly believed he was carrying out the will of his deity. Even the most religious must now entertain the possibility of that being a falsehood. Events are hardly unfolding in a manner conducive to the belief that American divine intervention in Iraq has produced a society lauding the ‘liberators’.

Barack Obama has, so far as we are aware, no reliance on divinity for his abilities, and instead trusts his own conscience in matters of both foreign and domestic affairs.

In conclusion, my observations of the three front runners lead me to the opinion that a vote for McCain is no more than another vote for George W Bush; allegiance to Clinton is either a desire for a female president at all costs, or a willingness to accept a president who panders to the hysteria of the moment.

Senator Barack Obama may, or may not, be the next John F Kennedy, but so far as much of America – and all the rest of the world – is concerned, he is the best hope for a future that, at best, is bleak if either McCain or Clinton gains control of the reins of power in 2009.

Filed under: An observer’s choice