Obama likes to party! $170 inauguration!

Status Quo anyone?
I'm glad he's starting the "economic stimulous" early, and I'm really not surprised.

Afterall, "change" has come!

The Right is no longer stealing your money and blowing it on up-armored Cadillacs while the troops scrape by with HMMWV's from the 1980's... the LEFT is! And THAT is change!

All I've got to say is this:

If Obama was Nero, he'd be playing a harp, not having a party.

"Let them eat cake."

The point isn't whether it's going to break the bank, the bank is already broken, it's a matter of principal. Many people have and will lose their jobs this year, states are broke, people are losing their homes, I really don't see anything to party about. Since Obama is being advised by Keynesions and is now the leader of a bankrupt country maybe he is setting an example of spending and consuming, that's how we will solve the problem by doing the same thing that caused it.

 When your planning on spending trillions, a few hundred million is just chump change, but to me it's a bad sign of things to come.

I better start building a guillotine.

Greg

He's just doing his part to 'stimulate' the economy.

When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, he sought to dismantle the evolving Federalist tradition of pomp and circumstance. In a ceremonial sense, royalism seemed to have been restored, or so it appeared to him. As this blogger put it, "Dressed in simple attire, Jefferson walked over to the Capitol with a phalanx of riflemen, friends, and fellow citizens from his home state of Virginia."

In these last days of the American Empire, such austere republicanism would be considered impossibly quaint. Having long ago morphed into Jefferson's worst nightmare, the closer we get to the end, the more glamorous our inaugurals become. The poorer we are, the more millions we'll throw at a ceremony that is really the crowning of a monarch – and not just any old king, but an emperor bestriding the globe.

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=14097

Greg

Here is an interesting article on this matter (see link below).  Turns out the media reports have not included the public costs in the Clinton and Bush inaugurations.  For Bush you need to add 115 million in public costs to the 42 million in private costs to total $157million then inflation adjust it (about 11% for the last 4 years using the low numbers the feds produce) and that is equivalent to $174 million for Bush, bringing Obama in at $4million less!  Now do the cost per participant and get an even better measure of value (just people who showed up, not TV audience, which was world wide for Obama not for Bush).

Bush estimates for 2005 attendance are around 250,000 to 400,000

Obama estimates for 2009 are around 2.5 to 3 million people

Taking the low ball number we get a per participant rate for the 2 inaugurations of:

Bush 2005 =  $696 per person in 2009 dollars

Obama 2009 = $68 per person also in 2009 dollars

Well, when you start comparing apples to apples it looks pretty good for the Obama inauguration and there wasn't any doubt that he actually won (some question about where he was born..)!  

Should the US be spending that kind of money promoting an imperial presidency?  I would prefer that we didn't (especially during this economic crisis), but at least with Obama we are headed in the right direction: less cost!

http://mediamatters.org/items/200901190004

Michelle Cottle at the New Republic defends the extravagance:  
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/01/20/party-on.aspx

"Moreover, I'd
argue that the current anxiety and pessimism people are feeling make a
large-scale, communal moment of celebration all the more important. In
general, during tough times, people crave a little glamour and
escapism. (There
is a reason that the Great Depression spawned a Hollywood glut of
high-society comedies.) More specifically, when there is an uneasy
sense that our nation is
struggling, people need to be reminded of its greatness. We need to
feel like our best times are yet to come. We need spectacle. We need
uplift. We need pomp and ceremony and, yes, silly whistle stop tours
and cheesy speeches that self-consciously remind us how far we have
come. It may not be entirely rational--and perhaps even a tad
counterproductive. But it's also human nature." 

Mike and Greg,

Mike said;

Unfortunately, "don't go into Iraq" would have been a better policy. Without a prolongued presence there, we're going to see radical Islam take root, and it may well be another hotbed for not only anti-westernism, but this fanatical orthodoxy which truly is a threat to global stability.

To use a basic analogy, we've dug ourselves quite a hole in Iraq, and we're filling it with American ideas. Say what you will, but it's a step forward from the regressive doctrine espoused by some of Iraq's neighbors. If we remove our "influence" from the hole we dug, it will allow another violent, dangerous regime to spring up in place; Saddam Hussein himself was a guerilla from an era of similar instability.

To make brief, I think if we leave Iraq, we'll see the same thing we saw with the Taleban after the Soviets left. They brought on a sort of ultra-orthodoxy and ousted the drug runners and criminals, but now women aren't allow to be educated, and the general quality of life is shrinking away.

Ironically, we had a pretty ambitious program to aid Afghanistan via terraforming in the 1970's. Orchards, fields, the whole works. Problem is, when the Soviets invaded, where can you hide?

At any rate, if we stay, we can probably forge an alliance with a government once a solid one takes hold. If we leave now, or in the near future, our puppet government will be under emminent threat of collapse, and all the work we did there (love it or hate it) was a waste of time, lives and money. Ironically, the money should be the least important of the three.

Cheers!

Aaron

Hey David,

Honestly, we seized territory from a soverign nation. This doctrine of "soft" warfare is pure idiocy.
We should have either:
a. Not involved ourselves in Iraq.
b. Taken their resources as our own to pay for the affair.

I know it sounds barbaric, but it's the process of warfare established by oh... a hundred thousand years or so of 'human civilization', if you'll pardon the oxymoron. I see the process as the extended hand of Darwinism. Socieities, once established, function like organisms.

Instead, we're playing by arbitrary, ad-hoc rules set fourth by a defunct organization (the UN via Geneva Convention) and pretending we're not playing conquerer by having Haliburton soak up all the profits.

I don't want to give the impression that I support the idea of sustaining this war - I don't.
So to your question - I think we're in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type of pickle in which no "good" answer exists. I don't really support either option, and all I can really hope for is that future leaders learn from this third mistake of a war.
But I don't think they'll really have the chance.

Ultimately, I think we'll do like the Soviets did and pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq without any significant headway made.
Ironically - the "war economy" is what staved off their collapse, and we'll probably have a similar fate.

However, it should be noted that many of the Balkan nations and Islamic territories in the former USSR saw a dramatic spike in jihadi violence; with the most noteworthy being Shamil Basayev's forces in Chechnya. A structurally weakened USA would almost definately embolden radical, galvanized elements in our current War on Terror.

Thank God for geographic seperation.

Cheers!

Aaron,

Sorry, it wasn't a very fair question--I knew you wouldn't like either option. I agree with you in that there is no good solution if we want to maintain our empire in the Middle East. However, if we really leave that region and stop propping up the repressive regimes we’ve backed or created over the last 40 years (by supporting extremist over modernists, and deposing elected governments) and especially remove our troops from Saudi Arabia and end military aid to many of the countries there, then maybe the terrorists there just might not care about the US anymore—the rhetoric from that part of the world seems to indicate this. I don't think it is our job to bring our version of democracy to the rest of the world and it is not a job we seem to be able to do anyway.

Aaron,

Well, it does look like that is the way we are headed.   I try to be positive about the future, while accepting that the dismal science (the name for economics during the period of Malthus) will probably prove correct.  I hope that this website will do something to help the transition cause less suffering than it seems like it is set to do.  Maybe some of the ideas here will make it through and a fair and sustainable society will have a better chance to form because of it.  Thank you for your contributions to the discussions in this community.  2009 might be a wild ride, it is good to know there are some people that do their own thinking out there.