Bill Sykes' - In Retrospect XIV.
(November 2008)

Bill Sykes looks back in retrospect at material which has been published in previous editions of "View from America", in an attempt to determine whether the subject matter written then is still applicable in today’s world.

Introduction to Article #14.
Thank goodness that the United States Presidential election is all over - well it will be when the new President is sworn in. The voters have spoken and the new President of the United States will be Barack Hussein Obama.
The swearing in ceremony traditionally takes place at United States Capitol building’s west front portico, located in Washington D.C, on the 20th of January 2009, with the Chief Justice of the United States administering the oath.
The oath states, "I do solemnly swear, (Or affirm), that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, protect and defend the United States Constitution".

My last newsletter, "Bill Sykes’ In Retrospect" - XIII Edition, October 2008, which can be found upon the Huddersfield One website, will give the reader a preamble of the Presidential race prior to the national vote taking place.

Enough is Enough
We, the general public of the United States, have suffered through at least 21 months of 24-hour daily political news and views which have been distributed on at least three of the United States major news channels, with every Tom, Dick, Harry, and their female counterparts, giving their views as to which of the two Presidential candidates, (or the Vice Presidential candidates), are considered to be the current favorites to become President/Vice-President.
Of course the American people have always considered that they the people choose their President, which of course is a misnomer as the American general public have little or no say in the matter of choice, as it is big business and big money that "Select", (Not Elect), the candidates for President and the people vote for one of the two people who have been selected.
These so called loquacious experts trot out their propaganda charts and diagrams, (which change frequently), in order to influence the unwary viewers into believing that their particular candidate is winning, (or worse still losing), the Presidential race.
Twenty one months of this hourly rubbish - as I said: "Enough is enough!".

Some thoughts on the current holder of the Presidential Office and his confederates in crime.
In eight long years in office, as the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and his close associates have placed this country in an enormous amount of financial debt, and from an overseas point of view the people of this country have become some of the most disliked people in the world.
President Bush has threatened many sovereign nations by naming them as the "Axis of Evil", and he and his administration have started two on-going un-winnable wars by issuing lies and false statements in order to propagandize the American people into supporting such wars.

After the terribly brutal killing of over 3,000 people on American soil by Middle East terrorists, on the eleventh of September 2001, many of the American people are said to have been eager to seek revenge and President George W. Bush catered to their hatred by initially selecting Iraq as a target for American aggression even though the people of Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. To condone a war against Iraq he publicly stated that Saddam Hussein had chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, which was later proven to be totally false, and that members of al-Qaeda were being harbored in Iraq, which also was totally false.
In fact it was later proven that at least fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who were involved in the attack upon American soil were initially from Saudi Arabia and had being trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The terrorists commandeered at least four American Passenger Aircraft, two of which were used as flying bombs to destroy the World Trade center in New York, and one destroyed a portion of the Pentagon in Washington D.C. It has been suggested that the fourth aircraft, a Boeing 767, which crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was possibly shot down by the US Air Defenses.

Coincidentally, believe it or not, the CIA financed and trained the Taliban in Afghanistan in an effort to oust the Russian armed forces, and guess what happened, as soon as the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan a contingent of American armed forces were shipped over there, to do what, well to fight the Taliban of course and apparently find, (or not find), Usama bin Laden.
Apparently the old expression still exists, "Today’s friends may be tomorrow’s enemies, or vice versa". 

My assessment of the assets and liabilities of the present contenders for the Presidency of the United States.
This is probably a little belated seeing that Barack Obama has been elected President, but never-the-less one should be made aware of the what I considered to be  the assets, and or liabilities, of the two candidates who were vying for the 44th Presidency of the United States.

Barack Obama. (Democrat).
For those people who have problems with the color of Barack Obama’s skin, I must remind them that Barack Obama is half white and half black, as he was born the son of a white mother and a black father and was brought up from a young age by white grandparents.
I think that the time is long overdue when Americans citizens should call themselves just that, "American", not white American, black American, Irish American, or any other kind of American,
Barack Obama may not be the most experienced politician in Congress, but he is very well educated, intelligent, an excellent speaker, and one who apparently can sum up problems and appears to have the capability of solving those problems, and if he surrounds himself with experienced people of a similar intelligence capability he may be able in time to get us out of the terrible mess that George W. Bush and his cronies have got us into during the last eight years of his Presidency - but it will not be easy.

Barack Obama also chose wisely in selecting his running mate for Vice President, (Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware), who has many years of Senatorial experience, (from 1978 onwards), and currently is the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,
At 47 seven year of age, Obama will of course make history when he becomes the first black President of the United States.
My one hope is that he and his Administrative associates will be able to solve with expediency some of the many problems which have been created during the Bush Presidency and bring America and the American people back to their previous state of financial stability and worldwide acceptance.

John McCain. (Republican),
John Sydney McCain, the 3rd, was born of American parents in the Panama Canal Zone.
His father, a four-star Admiral, was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone at the time of John’s birth on the 29th of August 1936.
On October 26th, 1967, during John McCain’s 23rd aircraft bombing mission over north Vietnam, his aircraft was shot down and he was taken prisoner and spent five and a half years in a Vietnamese POW camp, three and a half years of which was in solitary confinement.

Due to circumstances which I consider to be applicable to John McCain’s loss of the Presidency, I’m afraid that I  have to include what I consider to be a major reason for his loss and this means that Sarah Palin  will get more publicity in this assessment than candidate John McCain.
Sorry about that John, no hard feelings, but I still insist that you, or your advisors, made a very bad choice when selecting Sarah Palin as your running mate.
John McCain and his advisors made several mistakes in his campaign to become President of the United States, but I consider the biggest one, (which probably lost him the Presidency), was when he/they selected Sarah Palin, the young Governor of Alaska as his running mate. I suppose the general idea fostered by either John McCain or his advisors was that quite a high percentage of the female votes that Hilary Clinton had gained during her campaign against Barack Obama would possibly transfer their votes to the McCain Presidential ticket if he included a female as his running mate.
The whole thing drastically backfired!

The choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate in my opinion was a complete and utter disaster and the voters recognized that if the 72-years-old John McCain, who apparently is not in the best of health, should become President and succumb to a terminally illness, then the undistinguished, Governor of Alaska, who appeared to be sadly lacking in basic general knowledge would inherit the Presidency.
Here is a woman, who was provided with $150K to upgrade her clothes closet and what did she do, of course off she went to the very expensive Fifth Avenue type shops in order to obtain such finery, and besides that she hired a very expensive personal make-up assistant.
Obviously this did not go down very well with the American female voting population.

Sarah also circulated a few contentious opinions; One being that she declared herself to be an anti-abortionist and was against a woman’s rights to choose abortion as a means of terminating a pregnancy.
That also did not go down very well with quite a large number of the female population.
 It was reported that another complete gaffe that she made during an interview was when she was asked a question about South Africa she said it was a small country. Apparently she had no idea that Africa was a continent and that South Africa was located in the lower southern part of that continent.
It was also reported that she did say, that she knew where Russia was as she could see the land mass from her home in Alaska. I’m given to understand that she has only had a passport for a couple of years or so and has only traveled outside the United States a couple of times - which of course does not make her a knowledgeable world wide traveller.

Question: Would you want a person with such an obvious lack of worldly knowledge to become President of the United States?
See what I mean John, Sarah Palin took a lot of the publicity away from you during her addition to your campaign - and many people were beginning to think that perhaps she was the one who was running for President.
I would suggest that the time has now come for Sarah Palin to return to her previous state of political anonymity and stay there.

America’s Future.
I’m afraid that I’m not a Nostradamus character and my crystal ball grows a little dim these days so all I can say is that I sincerely hope that President Barack Obama and his Administrative choices are able to pull us out of the quagmire that President George W Bush and his Administration has got the American people in to during his eight years in office as the President of the United States.
The new President and his administration have an enormous and unenviable task in front of them to even make the slightest inroad into the dreadful morass that this President Bush and his Administration will leave behind them.
There are so many problems that I’m at a loss to know where to start. So many things have to be corrected to get the people of America back on their feet and it will take more time than most people think and a miracle of great proportions in order to get this great country back to where it was before President Bush appeared upon the scene.

Of course the Democratic party, (although not holding a majority during the Bush reign), must also shoulder some of the blame for not challenging the very dubious and many times unilateral decisions that this President made.
At least five major problems require President Obama’s immediate attention when he gets into office.
Solving the current economic problem, (ie: reducing the current national debt), upgrading the American health care system, re-instituting full time employment, solving the housing mortgage problem, and above all else bringing the American troops out of the Iraqi, Afghanistan, quagmire that we have got into, and also reducing the number of American troops that are stationed in numerous other countries throughout the world that we are so say protecting.
Finally he must try to reinstate the reputation of the American people that has been sadly destroyed due to the actions and blunders of the past eight years.

I would suggest that items shown below require immediate attention and of course the immediate application of corrective action, when the new President and his Administration take over.

Item #1: The two wars currently being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, The time has long since come and gone when the American and Coalition troops should have been pulled out of both of those countries as we have nothing to gain in fighting two un-winnable wars, only the deaths of many more American and Allied troops.

Item #2: Our current national debt is enormous and growing by the day, and I’m sure that does not take into account the billions of dollar bailout schemes which are so say intended to aid banks, and companies, etc, that are going under. May I suggest that maybe these billions of dollars are going to the wrong people and the wrong companies, such as General Motors, Ford Motors, Chrysler and the AIG insurance company, to name but a few.
GM and Ford for a number of years have kept on producing the expensive gas guzzling large SUV type automobiles whilst the foreign automobile companies such as Toyota, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, have been producing more efficient less expensive vehicles.
I’m not sure if both GM and Ford are unionized, but if so I would assume that the wages and salaries of their employees would be higher than their overseas competitors therefore that factor would lower the GM and Ford profit margins. But there again - please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m given to understand that GM and Ford are still, (even as they are slide into bankruptcy), considering giving out the usual Christmas bonuses and stock options to the top management individuals, (even whilst they are laying off the factory workers), on the pretext that those monetary give-away programs have already been accounted for in a previous budget statement. 

I would suggest that GM and Ford got themselves into their own financial predicament and it’s not up to the Government to use the American people’s tax dollars to bail them out, which appears to be what they are intending to do.
When it comes to bailouts, the Government’s priorities seem to me to be all wrong as the bailout money appears that it may be going directly or indirectly to the apparently incompetent and grossly overpaid management staff of the companies that are now failing. Their incompetence has caused their companies to become insolvent and untold numbers of workers have become unemployed. So why shouldn’t the working people who have been laid off due to the negligent overspending of the parent companies, get the same priority as the companies and their management personnel when it comes to sharing out the bailout money?
For instance, how about the Government making sure that the mounting numbers of unemployed American people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, (when their companies started cutting back employee budgets and laying off their workers), get some priority when it comes to the bailout money in order to assist them in refinancing the homes that they have lost due to bank and financial mortgage institution foreclosures, when the unemployed workers did no longer have the momentary means to pay the monthly mortgage payments on their homes.
Of course the previous statement does not apply to people who gambled on making large profits from the homes that they bought with little or no down payments and short low percentage loans.

The initial costs of the Government’s economic bailout efforts sent the U.S. budget deficit for October 2008 soaring to a record $237.2 billion, putting the deficit on track to reach the once-unfathomable sum of $1 trillion for the year.

             U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK
The outstanding public debt as of 11 Nov 2008 at 09:30:40 PM GMT is:

The estimated population of the United States is 305,076,515 so each citizen's share of this debt is $34,869.92.
The national debt has continued to increase an average of $3.98 billion per day since September 28, 2007!

Item #3: (A follow up to item #2), The unemployment rate in the United States for October 2008 alone, has risen by 240,000 to 6.50% and the total number of unemployed has reached 2.80 million in the last twelve months

Item #4: I would surmise that the current world monetary crisis was initiated by the greed of some of the American Banks, and some of the real rstate mortgage companies, and also the prospective home buyers who sought and received no down payment, low percentage loans, in order to purchase houses which were far beyond the borrower’s financial means.
Eventually the bubble burst and house prices took a severe downturn which left the house purchasers with a property which was worth less than their mortgage, and as the house purchaser could not pay the monthly mortgage, the banks and mortgage institutions foreclosed on the property and the home owners were without accommodation.
Seeing that many of the American house mortgages were packaged and sold to numerous worldwide investment companies they also became victims of the too good to be true potential excessive profit gamble, hence the daily turmoil on many of the international stock exchanges.

Item #5: Health care. The time has long since gone by for a type of a Nationalized health care system to be established, (Ok, I know that most American people do not wish to be associated with what they would claim to be socialized medicine), but there are literally millions of American people who don’t have health care insurance and due to the current financial crisis this number has risen proportionately where the people without health care benefits have to choose between buying food to survive, versus the cost of health care and the associated medications, which they can ill afford to purchase.
Surely it is totally wrong in a country such as America to have less medical care for its citizens than some of the so called third world countries,

Item #6: The shattered reputation of this once great country and the hatred that has been generated against its people by some of the decisions made by this President and his administrative associates is intolerable. What more can I say, the September Eleventh 2001 incident of Muslim terrorist aggression on American soil, and America’s retaliation by involving itself in two Middle East wars, which not only lead to the deaths of many local people both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course the deaths of many American and Allied military personnel who are serving out there.
 The war in Iraq has also generated a contrived worldwide oil shortage which has crippled American and world economies and has lead to a complete financial meltdown in many countries.
Surely that is enough for you the reader to mull over and decide for yourself as to who is to blame for the situation that we the people of America and the people of this world at large now find themselves in. 

Personal Note: By the way for those who may suggest that I’m politically biased, I must inform you that I’m not a Republican, not a Democrat, not a Socialist, not a Communist, or whatever else, I’m just a plain "Independent" and although I was brought up with British socialistic ideals I can still provide an opinion based upon what I see and what I hear. If this can be interpreted by the American readers of this newsletter that I’m still a socialist at heart, then so be it.

I suggest that the country of America, with such a generous and proud background of helping out not only the people of America when times got tough, but also the people of this world in general, is now sadly lacking in its duty when it comes to helping its own people during this recession when things have gone radically wrong, and I consider the few items that I have outlined above to be of immense importance, and attempts should be made to correct them on an expedited basis.

Looking back in Retrospect.
May I suggest that the reader may wish to go to the May 2005 Edition of "View from America" which describes in some detail the American type syndromes.
A: The win at all cost syndrome.
B: The I’ve got to have it syndrome.
C: Corruption in high places.
D: The anything goes syndrome.
E: Another look at religion.

A current movie has just been released.
This movie, directed by Oliver Stone, is named “W” and is supposed to depict the life of George W. Bush from his early days through to his Presidency of the United States. The film certainly does not a flatter the current President and shows Bush as a young hard drinking, boisterous drunk, and an undisciplined not very bright individual who created havoc wherever he went.
It goes on to show a similar attitude during his college days at Yale where he was so say educated, (correct me if I’m wrong but I believe that he finished near the bottom of his graduating class). His entrance to Yale was apparently engineered courtesy of the strings that were pulled by his influential father George Bush Senior who despaired of his son’s attitude and there were a number of times that the couple nearly came to blows.

Of course the existing Presidency appeared to be largely controlled in a number of ways by the nefarious Carl Roe and the very dangerous Vice President Dick Cheney, amongst others of the motley crew that President Bush surrounded himself with. I don’t appear to remember much, or if there was any mention of Donald Rumsfeld in the film.
General Colin Powell who was appointed by President Bush as Secretary of State in 2001 had a reputation as a person of restraint in international affairs and it was made obvious in the film that he had serious misgivings about President Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and shortly after President Bush was re-elected in 2004 Colin Powell stepped down as Secretary of State.
His four year tenure as Secretary of State was marked by many disagreements with other Administration officials over policy decisions, but regardless of these disagreements, he as the good soldier that he always was, remained a loyal and trusted servant of the people of the United States. Unfortunately he appeared to have been coerced into providing false and misleading information to the Security Council of the United Nations with respect Saddam Hussein’s supposed collection of weapons of mass destruction,
He was replaced as Secretary of State by Condoleezza Rice, who appeared in the film to be a "Yes Mr. President, No Mr. President", subservient type individual. Perhaps I was wrong but that is what registered in my mind.

Disclaimer:
Some of the information for this news letter has been gleaned from American and International media sources, (Including the Internet), and as such is quoted as accurately as possible. I try to obtain confirmation on each subject from several outlets, so the text is a mixture of composite news items and my personal comments and therefore the reader must make his/her own judgment as to the reliability and degree of accuracy of the subjects discussed.

Eric (Bill) Sykes. (Southern California).
November 2008.

 We welcome feedback about any of the contents of these articles. Please send all correspondence to bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk