Eric Arnow link page

Eric Arnow has his own web site now. For years I've been putting his letters from Asia here. From now on they'll go on his site, the Bumble Buddhist which also now has all the previous ones from cuke and photos more. - dc

Eric Arnow writes to Barak Obama.

October 23, 2009

President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,N
Washington, DC 20500-0004 

Dear President Obama: 

There is a saying in Asian culture that sometimes a little bird will fly to the ocean to fill its beak with water, and then fly back to douse a roaring forest fire. It seems an exercise in futility, but the point is to do what we can. Indeed, Gandhi himself said, that what we do may seem insignificant, but it is still very important that we do it. 

In that spirit, I would simply like to offer my observation that as a person and as President, you are going in the WRONG direction. You are in a far better position than I am to put out that raging fire of war and injustice and financial criminality than I am. But you do not. WHY, may I ask? 

First, I will simply say that you lost my vote in August, 2008, when you were challenged by McCain for being irresponsible for planning to attack Pakistan. You replied correctly that he was irresponsible for joking about “bomb bomb Iran”.  

Yet your reply was, that you would consider carefully the best approaches including diplomatic, before doing anything with the military. You were actually saying, “Of course I plan to attack Pakistan, after providing diplomatic cover for our aggression.” 

And I was asking, “Why are we in Central Asia AT ALL”, other than to enrich the arms industry, give careerist military officers more stripes, and indulge our blood lust? Oh and the oil, and control of resources. Which we could have bought in a fair free market, as the Chinese have done, while we waste our money on wars. 

Sure enough, shortly after you took office, you initiated yourself as President by ordering attacks in Pakistan that killed yet more innocent people and created yet more justified resistance to our presence.  

Meanwhile, while exhausting ourselves as a country in these wars that only create more suffering, while enriching the Masters of War, the economy is wrecked.  

Instead of bailing out your banker backers, you could have done what Ben Benanke once said he would do. Drop money out of helicopters. Let the people spend the money, rather than have the banks hoard it. Or simply send the fraudulently obtained loan money back to the homeowners, on condition they then send the money to the banks, to pay off their mortgage.  

By sending the money directly to the banks, they get paid twice. Once for the unpaid fraudulent loan, and again, when they get the house back in foreclosure. 

Your approach to the whole health insurance debate is, forgive me for saying so, pathetic. Most of my income as an insurance agent comes from health insurance commissions. Yet, I would be happy (unlike most greedy insurance agents) to pass up that money, in exchange for a SINGLE PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM. You disingenuously said that it would be impossible to create such a system from the ground up. But Medicare is single payer. Why not Medicare for all, just like it is in every other industrialized country? 

Nowadays it is frankly embarrassing and humiliating to be a US citizen. 

I am staying in the People’s Republic of China right now. One of my classmates at a Chinese language program was telling me about the system in his country, the Cape Verde Islands. This tiny island country off the coast of Africa can afford a government health care system. He was shocked to hear that the big wonderful rich USA doesn’t have one. Yet you collude with the corporations to deny something that would cut costs by the 30% overhead and commissions charged by the Cignas and United Healths and all the other vampires. 

My Chinese friends love America. They study Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin and Jefferson in that “controlled society”. But they legitimately ask, “why does America fight these unjust wars?” What is the answer? The answer is that the system is corrupt and broken. People have elected you and the Democrats to stop the wars, and you defy the will of the people. What then is the difference between my country, ruled by an elite, and China? 

In China or Thailand, you can walk into a pharmacy and buy many medicines like antibiotics for about 10% -20% of the cost in the USA, which the drug companies import and then mark up for huge profits at prices most of the public can’t afford to pay. Yet the law says that, even though a corporation can import drugs wholesale, it is illegal for the average person to do so. So where is the “free market”? It is all a sham. You know it, too. 

I told all my friends that you would disappoint and so you have.  

So the existential question I would like to pose is, given that somewhere buried beneath all the compromises and manipulations that you yourself have suffered in order to get the backing of the utterly corrupt forces that propelled you to office, there is a real person, who knows better, knows enough to at least say the right thing once in awhile, as you did in pointing out the US role in overthrowing democracy in Iran in 1953. 

Where is the REAL Barack Obama? 

 Who actually  stands for truth and justice, for the people of the US, for the Palestinians (I come from a Jewish background but long ago saw through vicious selfserving Zionist propaganda). 

Who knows that, by investing BILLIONS into making new nuclear weapons and star wars strategies, it is the US that is violating the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Who knows that it is Israel that has obtained nuclear weapons illegally, that spits in the face of the Nuclear Non proliferation treaty, and not Iran, which is a signatory and complies with the NNPT. 

Who knows that the country is being driven into bankruptcy by the bankers and insurance industry and war makers, and drug companies and all the other huge corporations that are like cancers on the body politic. 

WHERE ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? 

If you now realize, having attained office, that you are just a puppet of these people

(Rahm Emanuel, an apparent agent for Israel, and son of an Irgun terrorist as YOUR chief of staff), Bob Gates, who is documented as having recruited Osama Bin Laden, not to mention all the people in Wall Street’s revolving door regulating their old buddies, an obvious conflict of interest. A former Monsanto executive as head of Department of Agriculture, while you have an organic garden! These are just a few of your controllers. 

If you see this, then you have only two choices. Fire them and put in people who will act in the public interest. Or resign. 

What the people of the USA need the most is the truth. 

As in, The WTC 7 collapse was announced on the BBC BEFORE IT COLLAPSED, in an obvious controlled demolition. That military grade explosive residues have been found in the WTC debris. These are just two examples. That Israeli agents were seen dancing for joy as they watched the WTC towers collapse. Why do you persist in allowing the real perpetrators of 911 get away?

 Or that the USA has a population of about 300 million out of about 7 billion of the world population, but its military budget of roughly $700,000,000,000 is ½ of the entire amount spent on the military by  the rest of the world combined.. In rough numbers 20 times more is spent for each US citizen than by citizens in other countries, in the dirty business of killing and intimidation, falsely dubbed, “Defense”.

 NO WONDER WE ARE BROKE!!! 

Please fix these problems. You have come too far as a person in life, to end up wasting your whole life as a servant of warmongers and financial criminals.

Sincerely, 

Eric Arnow 

PS. In the history of India, there was a famous emperor, named Asoka,  who, because of his many military campaigns, was known as Asoka the Cruel. But finally, at a certain point, it dawned on him that he was doing WRONG. He stopped the wars and spread peace. I invite you to do the same. His legacy is still evident today. He made change we could believe in. And you could also earn the deep gratitude of the whole world, if you too, stop the wars, and help the people.