Like President Obama, I have been pleased with the performance of the new administration, but I am not content. Obama has done much to chip away at the Orwellian policies of the Bush/Cheney years, but he has also made some key errors, in my view.
The good news is that in the first 100 days President Obama has:
1) Frozen White House staff salaries in a time when most Americans are earning less.
2) Tightened lobbying rules for congress.
3) Loosened Freedom of Information Act disclosure standards.
4) Closed Guantanamo and banned cruel interrogation, calling it what it was--"torture."
5) Closed secret CIA prisons overseas in the Bush/Cheney Gulag Archipelago.
6) Lifted seals on Ex President documents to quash all the secrecy.
7) Lifted prohibitions on stem cell research.
8) Promoted equal pay for women.
9) Tightened compliance regulations for banks and financial institutions.
10) Imposed limits on executive salaries.
11) Launched a bold, yet hugely expensive stimulus plan.
The bad news is that the team governing economic policy, (Bernanke, Geithner, Summers), is a clique of wealthy Wall Street insiders who have largely pursued a policy of saving the big banks at all costs--and the cost so far has been enormous. Why is it that only multi-millionaires are called to serve the nation? They live in a world so vastly different from rank and file Americans that their ideas seldom consider the wellbeing of the little guy. It's all about saving the other Rich Dads out there, while the Poor Dads go hungry. No real transparency has been enforced, and the entire effort to date has been to re-start the securitization game banks have been playing the last decade.
James Kunstler was so correct when he stated that Obama should have focused on managing this historic downscaling and contraction of our life styles in a way that served the public, and not on restoring the old, and obviously unsustainable, status quo on Wall Street.
Change.Gov has failed us profoundly on that score.
The good news is that in the first 100 days President Obama has:
1) Frozen White House staff salaries in a time when most Americans are earning less.
2) Tightened lobbying rules for congress.
3) Loosened Freedom of Information Act disclosure standards.
4) Closed Guantanamo and banned cruel interrogation, calling it what it was--"torture."
5) Closed secret CIA prisons overseas in the Bush/Cheney Gulag Archipelago.
6) Lifted seals on Ex President documents to quash all the secrecy.
7) Lifted prohibitions on stem cell research.
8) Promoted equal pay for women.
9) Tightened compliance regulations for banks and financial institutions.
10) Imposed limits on executive salaries.
11) Launched a bold, yet hugely expensive stimulus plan.
The bad news is that the team governing economic policy, (Bernanke, Geithner, Summers), is a clique of wealthy Wall Street insiders who have largely pursued a policy of saving the big banks at all costs--and the cost so far has been enormous. Why is it that only multi-millionaires are called to serve the nation? They live in a world so vastly different from rank and file Americans that their ideas seldom consider the wellbeing of the little guy. It's all about saving the other Rich Dads out there, while the Poor Dads go hungry. No real transparency has been enforced, and the entire effort to date has been to re-start the securitization game banks have been playing the last decade.
James Kunstler was so correct when he stated that Obama should have focused on managing this historic downscaling and contraction of our life styles in a way that served the public, and not on restoring the old, and obviously unsustainable, status quo on Wall Street.
Change.Gov has failed us profoundly on that score.
