Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Disabuse Your Illusion: Weighing Obama in the Balance of Reality
by Chris Floyd
Hope, said Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers, a tough little bird that sounds sweetest in the midst of a storm. It's a commonplace by now, but no less true, that Barack Obama's winged words of hope have borne him up to the high place where he stands now, on the threshold of the White House.
And these words shine all the more brightly against the torrent of filth that the Bush Regime has rained down upon the American people for years. Thus it's no surprise that millions of people have been inspired by Obama – including a million who have put their money where their hope is, in the most remarkable grass-roots funding campaign in U.S. political history.
It can't be denied that an Obama presidency would be better in
many respects than the Bush regime – if only for the replacement of the
thousands of fanatics, cranks and witless apparatchiks with whom Bush
has packed the federal bureaucracy. The ouster of these cadres will
make an appreciable difference, on the ground, in the lives of many
people.
To cite just one instance, it is likely that an Obama
administration (or a Clinton administration, for that matter) would
restore the funding to family planning services and health clinics in
the poorest regions of the world that Bush has maliciously – and
murderously – cut off to please the religious extremists in his
political base. That alone would save thousands of lives each year.
But
to make this observation is not an endorsement of Obama's candidacy,
nor a call for "lesser evilism." It's simply a statement of fact. As
we've said here before, echoing Noam Chomsky, even small mitigations in
the operation of vast power structures can translate into benefits – or
alleviations of suffering – for substantial numbers of people. Again,
this is an observable fact, not a value judgment. Whether these
mitigations of injustice and suffering in certain instances outweigh
the cost of participating in – and thereby to some extent legitimizing
and perpetuating – a system that inevitably produces injustice and
suffering on a massive scale is a question that each person must decide
for themselves, in their own individual conscience.
And this
question is certainly pertinent in the case of Barack Obama. For by the
choices he has made in picking advisers to help him shape his policies,
he has given every indication that while his presidency might represent
a better management and presentation of the current system, it will in
no way overturn or even seriously challenge it on any essential point.
In other words – and bearing in mind the type of not-insubstantial
mitigations noted above – he will keep doing what Bush has been doing,
only more competently, less radically, with a greater care for the
long-term viability of the power structure. And what is that structure
that Obama seeks to refine and extend? It is an imperial system based
on militarism and the exaltation of elitist profit and privilege above
all other concerns.
(It should be noted that this
profit/privilege motive is not always elevated to the exclusion of all
other concerns – civil rights, health care, disaster relief, education,
et al. There are horrors enough in this system without having to
pretend that it is operated at all levels and at all times by inhuman
monsters. In fact it is, like every system of power, all too human; it
partakes of the same chaos, contradiction, selfishness, ignorance, and
bestial impulses that afflict us all. Yet because the system is made up
of human beings, it also contains traces of the empathy, awareness and
striving for transcendence that flicker inside us from time to time.
But however much these higher concerns might occasionally animate
various individuals – or even larger factions – within the system, they
are always, in the end, subordinated to the pursuit of elitist
aggrandizement. Measures that attempt to address these other concerns
are not allowed to hinder elitist profit and privilege in any serious
way; indeed, these reforms are often designed – or forcibly perverted –
in such a way as to make them serve this rapacious, relentless pursuit.)
We
know that one of Obama's principal foreign policy advisers is Zbigniew
Brzezinski, an incorrigible Great Gamester and one of the unsung
architects of the modern world. It was Brzezinski who, as Jimmy
Carter's National Security Advisor, devised the strategy of arming and
funding violent Islamic extremists in order to destabilize Afghanistan
and bait the Soviets into a military intervention to bolster their
client regime in Kabul.
Brzezinski can thus lay claim to being one of
the fathers of the global Jihad that has spawned – and been used to
justify -- so much death and suffering….and so much profitable
permanent war.
We know that Obama has called for the American military
to be even larger and more powerful, more ready to strike anywhere in
the world with overwhelming force whenever the nation's "interests" –
defined solely by the elite – are "threatened."
We know that his plan
for "withdrawing" from Iraq involves leaving an undetermined number of
troops in the conquered land, carrying out the same "missions" which
they are supposedly conducting now: training Iraqi security forces,
fighting terrorism, protecting American assets and personnel, bringing
"stability to the region," etc.
And as Jeremy Scahill points out,
Obama's plans could also lead to an increase in the number of private
contractors – mercenaries – in Iraq. Obama has refused to support
legislation banning the use of these volatile hired guns in war zones.
In
all of this we can see that Obama is a "safe pair of hands" for the
militarism that underpins the never-ending quest for America's "full
spectrum dominance" over world affairs. The "hope" for genuine change
in this regard is a tragic illusion, a hope projected onto, not
embodied by Obama.
At least in the case of militarism, there is
not a great deal of hypocrisy involved on Obama's part. His allegiance
to the imperial project is fairly open. The domestic front, however, is
a different matter. Here too Obama has become a blank screen onto which
the hopes of millions for some kind of rectification of the
ever-worsening economic and social injustices in American society are
being projected. And again, while an Obama presidency would not be as
openly radical and predatory as the Bush Regime in the pursuit of
elitist profits, his choice of advisers gives every indication that his
actual policies would differ largely in management and presentation,
not in essence. Yet unlike the case with Obama's unabashedly militarist
statements on foreign policy, the dichotomy between his progressive
rhetoric on socioeconomic justice and the agenda of some of his top
advisers and backers means he cannot escape the charge of hypocrisy.
A
new report from Consortiumnews.com puts this in stark relief. It tells
the back-story of the Finance Chair of Obama's campaign: a woman who
was instrumental in devising and pushing the same kind of sub-prime
loans and predatory lending practices that he now routinely denounces
in public. Dennis Bernstein reports:
"[In 2001], 1,406
people…lost much of their life savings when Superior Bank of Chicago
went belly up in 2001 with over $1 billion in insured and uninsured
deposits. This collapse came amid harsh criticism of how Superior's
owners promoted sub-prime home mortgages... But this seven-year-old
bank failure has relevance in another way today, since the chair of
Superior’s board for five years was Penny Pritzker, a member of one of
America’s richest families and the current Finance Chair for the
presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the same candidate who has
lashed out against predatory lending.
"… Though Superior Bank
collapsed years before the current sub-prime turmoil that is rocking
the world’s financial markets – and pushing those millions of
homeowners toward foreclosure – some banking experts say the Pritzkers
and Superior hold a special place in the history of the sub-prime
fiasco.
“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the
Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and
Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by
sub-prime mortgages,” Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial
and bank fraud, told me in an interview. “The sub-prime mortgages,”
Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide
Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many
millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime
lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds.”
"In other words,
if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would
come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago."
As
Bernstein notes, the Pritzkers' move into predatory lending schemes
stemmed from an earlier instance where elitist profit and privilege
were exalted over other concerns: the savings-and-loan scandal of the
1980s (which saw one feckless scion of privilege, Neil Bush, walk away
after costing taxpayers $1 billion to cover for his sweetheart deals
with cronies). The same overriding aim to protect the privileged from
the consequences of their actions was evident throughout Superior
Bank's sorry saga:
"Superior was founded at the tail end of
1988 in the wake of the failed Lyons Savings Bank. The Feds were trying
to keep a lid on the magnitude of the S&L post-deregulation crisis
and were selling failed or failing thrifts for a song, along with a
lucrative package of special benefits. Chicago’s billionaire Pritzker
family and their partners bought Lyons Savings for a quite reasonable
$42.5 million, but were also given $645 million in tax credits. The
kicker was that the buyers only had to come up with $1 million in cash,
and got access to the $645 million, and all the bank’s deposits insured
by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC).
"…In
a 2002 article in In These Times about Superior Bank’s collapse,
business writer David Moberg reported that the bank’s operations were
“tainted with the hallmarks of a mini-Enron scandal…And yet the bank’s
owners, members of one of America’s wealthiest families, ultimately
could end up profiting from the bank’s collapse, while many of
Superior’s borrowers and depositors suffer financial losses.”
"Moberg
wrote that “the Superior story has a familiar ring. … Using a variety
of shell companies and complex financial gimmicks, Superior’s managers
and owners exaggerated the profits and financial soundness of the bank.
While the company actually lost money throughout most of the ’90s,
publicly it appeared to be growing remarkably fast and making unusually
large profits. Under that cover, the floundering enterprise paid its
owners huge dividends and provided them favorable loans and other
financial deals deemed illegal by federal investigators.
“Superior’s
outside auditor, which doubled as a financial consultant, engaged in
dubious accounting practices that kept feckless regulators at bay. Many
individuals —disproportionately low-income and minority borrowers with
spotty credit record s— had apparently been exploited through
predatory-lending techniques, including exorbitant fees, inadequate
disclosure and high interest rates.”
"Anderson said the bank
owners and board members used Superior for their pioneering work in
sub-prime lending, developing the financial instruments that helped set
the stage for the current sub-prime meltdown…
"This is a story
of two Americas with two sets of laws, one for the rich and powerful
and another for the rest of us,” said Clint Krislov, the depositors’
attorney, in a recent interview. “My clients will all be dead, before
they get back their money, given the Supreme Court’s recent decision to
uphold the lower court, which put the predatory owners on the front of
the line, if any money is recovered.”
Obama has now put one
of these "predators" in charge of his campaign finances; doubtless she
– or someone else of that ilk – will be placed in charge of the
nation's finances if he makes it to the White House. Thus once again,
it appears that any hopes that an Obama presidency will produce genuine
structural change in a system designed to perpetuate harsh injustices
on behalf of a privileged elite will also prove to be a tragic and
painful illusion.
And so the question returns to the individual
conscience: do you choose to support the chance – the hope – for some
mitigation of the system's evils? Or do you reject the system
altogether? Again, this is a balance that each person must strike for
themselves. But it should be done with eyes wide open – and no
illusions.
Writings 
Hope, said Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers, a tough little bird that sounds sweetest in the midst of a storm. It's a commonplace by now, but no less true, that Barack Obama's winged words of hope have borne him up to the high place where he stands now, on the threshold of the White House. 
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