Dear President Obama: My New Year's Wish

This is not a fan letter. Neither is it hate mail. It's a wish, a hope, a dream for the next three years of the Obama Administration.

It's no easy job you took on. It's complicated by an uneasy legacy from the past administration, one which has weakened our international reputation, increased the mistrust Americans have of our politicians.

You campaigned on change. It was the centerpiece of your platform. Simply by being who you are, being a very different style of president, you've delivered.
But not the way many of us who supported you hoped for.

You promised to bring our soldiers home. Instead, you're moving them to Afghanistan. Is it a strategically logical move? Perhaps, in traditional thinking. But it's no change. Change would have been to put a small, well funded group of covert ops experts to work on the terrorist problem, and divert the rest of the massive funds we spend on computerized warfare to humanitarian aid.

Shore up the education system. Rebuild the countries. Establish reliable food and water systems. Be the good guys. Make it impossible to argue we're not. Win hearts and minds in a real way, not with a few half-hearted efforts to understand the culture. Despite the enormity of the job, I'm betting it would still cost a fraction of what we're spending on our wars and it would be a godsend for our own country; allowing the thousands of our own soldiers whose lives we're maiming to instead believe in the possibility of their own futures again.

Your first months in office have been a big disappointment to me and many others who hoped for real health care reform.

You're accomplishing something - yes. Is it better than nothing? I have my doubts.
It discriminates against women, against gays. It doesn't offer health care to all. It gives the bloated health insurance industry what IT wants. It doesn't give us what WE wanted.

Sadly, it appears this half-assed health care is what you envisioned all along. That isn't what you told us. We didn't make up the promise of the National Health Insurance Exchange. You told us you intended to create it.

You promised you'd open the doors to prescription drugs from other countries, lowering the cost of medication for millions. That door is shut tight.

The winners here are the establishment - the insurance industry, the pharmceutical companies. The American people lose again. Because we allow ourselves to be ignored.

You took office in a financial crisis. You bailed out your administration's cronies on Wall Street, bailed out the firms that created the crisis, bailed out the auto industry. A bailout for Americans losing their homes? Lip service.
Loan servicers make more money if they pursue foreclosure. So they say they're participating in HAMP, but in truth they far prefer to foreclose.

I've been in the midst of that process, taking that proactive position we were all told to pursue. Staying current on my payments, watching my savings disappear, filing form after form, mailing file after file to IndyMac bank in hopes of getting a loan modification. It's been well over a year. They're still asking for more paperwork, pretending they don't have forms they've had on file for months.

Meanwhile, they got bailed out by the feds and bought out by OneWest. Fannie Mae, which owns my mortgage, is a bottomless pit of fiscal mismanagement which has a limitless budget of bailouts from the taxpayers. That would be me.

I've given up. There will be no cushion for me and for millions of others who are selling their homes, short selling, losing them.

Where is comprehensive financial reform? Where is the oversight?

I live in New York. My state is slashing funding, delaying payments to localities, and they're forced to try to make up the difference. Who will pay for this? I will. My neighbors will. We are the source of all the funding that government demands. Don't you see it? And yet jobs are disappearing, salaries have been flat for years while costs have risen so quickly that our dreams of a home of our own, a car that has fewer than 150 thousand miles on it, our hope of retirement are gone.

My children must borrow money to go to college. I cannot afford to pay their tuition. They will graduate with massive debts, which I will only be able to pay for them by winning the lottery.

We spend billions on a war that we cannot win. We will spend billions to bail out businesses that have cheated their way into near-bankruptcy. We will spend billions on a health care plan that won't cover everyone. And the next generation is lining up at community colleges, hoping to get a seat at the only affordable higher education opportunity there is, knowing that a four year degree means borrowing tens of thousands of dollars.


Don't you see how backwards this is?

Is America truly leading the way in developing sustainable energy? Is it developing a sustainable, growing economy? Are we moving forward or backwards?

There is a deep well of righteous indignation all over this country but you don't see it. You may find it swallows you whole in the next election.


Mr. Obama, I haven't given up on you. I think you're a decent man. I think you really want to create a legacy of positive change. You need to reconsider your course.

Your advisors are Washington insiders; the very people who've created the corrupt, old-boy network that's given us every abuse of power for the past twenty years or more. Their loyalty is to America's corporations. They're the wrong people at the helm.

You don't need them. You need to surround yourselves with great minds, open minds, people with ideals who refuse to accept the cynical "business as usual" and "it can't be done" mentality that sucks Washington DC down like quicksand.

You had us. You had our support. You are squandering that incredible privilege and for what - influence? Influence comes from grassroots support. Mobilize the American people and no amount of lobbying can compete. A second term? Look at your poll numbers. No amount of campaign funding is going to get you into office a second time if we don't believe in you.

The Republicans are unifying. They all see a clear threat to their philosophy of government and they will whip their voters into a solid voting bloc. Your base is disintegrating with each disappointment, each wrong turn.

Yours is a young presidency. There is time to change, time to set a new course.

We want to support you. We want to help. And we desperately need your help. We need an advocate in the Oval Office, not an adversary.

You work for us, Mr. President. And I know you know that. That should be the bottom line of every decision you make. Every single one. "Does this make a real, positive difference for the American people?" And coupled with this question should be a second one: "Is there a better way?"

I wish you the very best for the coming year. And I'm hoping you do the same for us.

Very sincerely,

Susan Barnett

A Turning Point for A New President

President Obama will be at West Point tomorrow night. He's expected to announced the deployment of an additional thirty thousand soldiers to Afghanistan.

I'll be there. It's history and sad as it is, I want to witness it.

I subscribe to a very interesting report called Stratfor. It's a subscription-supported intelligence gathering report. It offers in depth analysis of global issues, particularly the developments in politics and the military. It's fascinating reading.

There are already 68 thousand Americans in Afghanistan, fighting alongside 45 thousand soldiers from NATO and other countries. It's the biggest foreign presence since the Russians got whupped there.

Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires...and it's very likely we'll fare no better there than the Russians, the British and even Genghis Khan.

We've enraged the Taliban by our complicity in mass murders. We missed bin Laden when we nearly had him; we decided we wanted Iraq's oil.

Stratfor's analysis is that we cannot get enough soldiers (I refuse to call them 'troops' - it's a way of depersonalizing them. They are people.) across the massive region to do any good, nor can we get them in and out quickly enough to satisfy an American public weary of war. It concludes that what will matter is where the president decides to deploy our soldiers.

I think Afghanistan may prove to be the issue that sinks this president. He came into office with a huge tide of goodwill. Despite an economy more challenging than any in most of our memories, many of his supporters haven't given up on him. His efforts to get health care reform finally done deserves credit. But if he sinks our already-exhausted military into yet another unwinnable war, the Democrats can kiss the White House goodbye.

He is the president. He has a choice. I'll be there to see what it is. And I'm truly hoping he'll surprise me.

Using the Recession to Clamp Down Dissent

I've been stumbling over stories of international human rights abuses for the past couple of weeks. First, I saw the letter from Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo's wife begging for international pressure to win his release. His crime? He's a prominent intellectual who is vocally pro-democracy.

I spoke with Larry Siems of the Pen American Center, with which Liu Xiaobo's been affiliated, and he says the international organization of writers and journalists is hard at work trying to get the word out to put pressure on the Chinese government to release its political prisoners. He said the promise of the Chinese Olympics didn't come to pass - instead of loosening up its strangle hold on dissent, the government actually jailed more dissidents during the Beijing Olympics.

In Zimbabwe, Jestina Mukoko and 17 other pro-democracy dissidents were taken back to jail while recovering from torture suffered during their recent incarceration. Amnesty International's Amy Agnew in London told me all but three were quickly let go again, but it's an indication that there are factions trying to derail the new coalition government. Nondumiso Gasa, a South African human rights activist, says the economy in Zimbabwe has collapsed beyond anything we can imagine. She says soldiers are raping women and children, health care is non-existent, schools are closed there.

Women in Afghanistan are still treated like property. Experts say they believe there is no such thing as a moderate wing of the Taliban.

And I'm told by experts that the world's preoccupation with the economy has allowed these abuses to multiply.

Not only that, we've got our own civil rights issues here in America. Siems says much of Pen American Center's work now concentrates on trying to get the Obama administration to roll back Bush-era changes that put restrictions on freedom of speech and our right to privacy. But that's an issue that's been taking a back burner to the recession in Washington.