Tuesday, December 04, 2012

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: TRANSITION HISTORY

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States; a commentary...

From the American initiative to use private security companies to protect Iraq’s oil infrastructure to the much hyped Iraq reconstruction projects [The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reported frauds in the initiative and led to conviction of many top officials]; from the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, where the prisoners were subjected to unspeakable torture [Amnesty International’s 2005 report confirmed the same], to Sergeant Samuel Provance [who reported the sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl by two interrogators]; from US Attorney Alberto Gonzalez [under his regime, the Justice Department and the FBI have illegally used the US Patriot Act to uncover personal information about US citizens] to Bernard Madoff [arrested on charges of the biggest accounting fraud in history that led to investors losing $50 billion]; from all this to much more, US has left much to answer for its ‘achievements’ in the last eight years, be it the response to Hurricane Katrina, or Saddam Hussein’s structured execution, or America’s conspiratorial and deliberate support to promoting the recession, or the Wall Street melt down, and of course, Bush’s failure to capture Osama bin laden!

But perhaps Bush is playing to the past, where previous Presidents have mirrored his lack of commitment to promises. Woodrow Wilson promised to keep the US out of World War I; and ended up pushing the US into the same war. Then came Herbert Hoover’s 1928 famed pledge to end poverty – he gifted US ‘The Great Depression’. Franklin D. Roosevelt met with aplomb his 1932 pledge to maintain balanced budgets and to keep the US out of World War II. He ‘atom’ bombed Japan and his government’s spending increased from 8.0% of GNP to 10.2%. The national debt doubled from 16% to 33.6%. Nixon promised resolutely in 1968 to ‘quickly’ resolve the Vietnam War. If not the war, he at least ended the drought of box office hits in Hollywood where innumerable movies kept on crapping about US heroism in Vietnam.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPMMalay Chaudhuri

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