Searcher44
Gold Member
When I posted what I thought would be part 1 last night it was late, past Trump Twitter hours even so I thought I would do a part two at some point. Reading it this morning though it sounds like I was going to re-tell the entire story of his Presidency in way too much detail, so fuggitabout that.
Short and to the point. I have been a more-or-less sheep like admirer/defender of Obama since day one, I started backing away from him several months ago. A month or two before his nomination of Merrick Garland to SCOTUS, which I fairly accurately predicted. Not the name but the type - too Republican, too conservative for my taste. Why go that far in trying to get to an appointee Republicans should have jumped at? Usually Democratic presidents consider the position important enough to put some political capital on the line and hold out for someone whose judicial philosophy is closer to the democratic mainstream.
Anyway, from last night I'll bold the essentials in that post and move on to a quick ending.
Did he join the Dark Side? I'm not ready to say that right now. I have to review some things first. Why he didn't make much of an effort to close Guantanamo ? He'll say he tried, couldn't get by Republican Resistance-(RR). Completely stop torture? -(RR) Renditions -(RR) Dark Prisons -(RR). To some degree the excuse has some legitimacy, on the night of the first inauguration a group of Republicans Dons and Godfathers had a summit to decide how to stop what they thought might be an Obama Tsunami smashing through the Status Quo in D.C. Turns out they didn't need to worry. He was much better at selling neo-liberalism to his adoring masses than the Republicans could ever hope to be. (He is) A veritable Master of Propaganda. Fooled an old lefty workhorse like me with no problem. Even being a foreign Americanophile watching from the sidelines I shed a few tears Election night. A Black President! Hallelujah! The whisper of a haunting Amazing Grace seemed to play in the electrified environment. The Union Redeemer with the sword of righteousness in his hand. I couldn't believe it, never thought I would live to see such a miracle. A Black President. A conquering Black knight to lead the left from the wilderness. I'm not exaggerating by much what I was feeling.
Of course soon there were events that should have sobered us up like a pail of cold water in the face perhaps. The great economic advisors of his campaign, what happened to them ? Where did Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich go? How did you get Tim Giethner as Treasury Secretary? And fuck, did Tim walk through the Golden Revolving Door when he returned to Wall St. Here's how CommonDreams describes it:
"Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."
In an interview Joseph Stiglitz laid it out a little more...
Stiglitz: "But those of us who looked at the data, people like Bob Shiller who studied the housing market, said no, there'd been a bubble. You've been living in fantasyland, and the price declines that you've seen are not going to be reversed any time soon"."Unfortunately it appears as if the Obama administration paid more attention to those who were the dreamers that the market would come back [than] to the realists who said no there'd been a bubble, and you've done some pretty bad lending, and now you're going to have to face the consequences."
"Now we're four years after the breaking of the bubble, and housing prices are still down 30 percent, 35 percent below what they were at the peak. Some places 50 percent. In some areas housing prices are continuing to fall. So that was a very fundamental misjudgment that had implications for everything that went on after."
"One of the implications was they never put together a program to address the Americans who were losing their homes. They never did very much to stop the foreclosure movement. A small program, $75 billion was set aside, $2 billion was spent to help homeowners. It was clear that it wasn't given the priority. ..."
Question: That led to what?
"That had both economic and political consequences. The political consequences were that a very large fraction of America came to the view that the Obama administration was on the side of the bankers and not on their side. How can you give all that money to the bankers who caused the crisis and not help a lot of ordinary citizens who were the innocent victims of predatory lending, of all these shenanigans? ..."
More from Commondreams;
"Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. [I've been warning about this for a while now] At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval - and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals".
SO that was last night. Today I'm not going hunt down the names of a bunch of Obama's appointments who wouldn't fit into any administration with a Progressive agenda. It should be obvious to all that Obama, if he ever intended to proceed progressively he gave that up very early. What many will say his major accomplishment - Obamacare - is a messy gift to Big Global Pharma and the Hospital and Health insurance Industries, e.g. "Profits at HCA Holdings Inc., the largest publicly traded hospital chain, jumped 18% to $1.7 billion for the first nine months of 2014 "
To say I'm disillusioned is an understatement, his record says he's more in the pockets of the JPMorgans and Chase and Wall St. than Hillary. All the Cons who attack him relentlessly with statistics on the Middle Class, the poor, and the plight of Blacks especially in his economy cannot be called liars, they are right. What the fuck has he done to stop the ALEC plan to disenfranchise blacks and everyone else? Since SCOTUS cut out the heart of the Civil Rights Act to make it easier to pass anti-voting acts disquised as voter id laws or whatever what has Obama done? Has he used the bully pulpit to educate the American People to what's going on? Almost silence.
What a weak legacy he has left compared to the greats of the civil rights era when so many suffered so much and even gave up their lives. I've said it before, he had the mantle of greatness within his reach, a chance to put his name up there with the Lincolns and Kings and FDR's . Instead he settled for a golden handshake with Wall Street.
That $30 million dollar deal with some publisher is only a few months away. The million dollar speeches to the likes of GoldmanSachs, well maybe he can just borrow Hillary's transcripts, they won't care, he's already fulfilled all the promises. He will go down in history I predict, as the richest ex-president ever - thanks to his willingness to sell his soul.
I can't finish without mentioning Obama's Assassination policy. Sure he hasn't started major wars like Bush did. The "Obama Doctrine" of remote control murder is just as morally indefensible. "Signature Strikes" are a new war crime in a new era of the American Empire of Blind Force. There is an entirely new concept of war being developed under Obama. One with a "small footprint" but with a long reach. Take a look at this map of Africa with all the new American outposts. Some of them just large enough to supply reconnaissance teams or to land and fuel Drones. 99% of the American public have absolutely no Idea what is going on.
Short and to the point. I have been a more-or-less sheep like admirer/defender of Obama since day one, I started backing away from him several months ago. A month or two before his nomination of Merrick Garland to SCOTUS, which I fairly accurately predicted. Not the name but the type - too Republican, too conservative for my taste. Why go that far in trying to get to an appointee Republicans should have jumped at? Usually Democratic presidents consider the position important enough to put some political capital on the line and hold out for someone whose judicial philosophy is closer to the democratic mainstream.
Anyway, from last night I'll bold the essentials in that post and move on to a quick ending.
Did he join the Dark Side? I'm not ready to say that right now. I have to review some things first. Why he didn't make much of an effort to close Guantanamo ? He'll say he tried, couldn't get by Republican Resistance-(RR). Completely stop torture? -(RR) Renditions -(RR) Dark Prisons -(RR). To some degree the excuse has some legitimacy, on the night of the first inauguration a group of Republicans Dons and Godfathers had a summit to decide how to stop what they thought might be an Obama Tsunami smashing through the Status Quo in D.C. Turns out they didn't need to worry. He was much better at selling neo-liberalism to his adoring masses than the Republicans could ever hope to be. (He is) A veritable Master of Propaganda. Fooled an old lefty workhorse like me with no problem. Even being a foreign Americanophile watching from the sidelines I shed a few tears Election night. A Black President! Hallelujah! The whisper of a haunting Amazing Grace seemed to play in the electrified environment. The Union Redeemer with the sword of righteousness in his hand. I couldn't believe it, never thought I would live to see such a miracle. A Black President. A conquering Black knight to lead the left from the wilderness. I'm not exaggerating by much what I was feeling.
Of course soon there were events that should have sobered us up like a pail of cold water in the face perhaps. The great economic advisors of his campaign, what happened to them ? Where did Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich go? How did you get Tim Giethner as Treasury Secretary? And fuck, did Tim walk through the Golden Revolving Door when he returned to Wall St. Here's how CommonDreams describes it:
"Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."
In an interview Joseph Stiglitz laid it out a little more...
Stiglitz: "But those of us who looked at the data, people like Bob Shiller who studied the housing market, said no, there'd been a bubble. You've been living in fantasyland, and the price declines that you've seen are not going to be reversed any time soon"."Unfortunately it appears as if the Obama administration paid more attention to those who were the dreamers that the market would come back [than] to the realists who said no there'd been a bubble, and you've done some pretty bad lending, and now you're going to have to face the consequences."
"Now we're four years after the breaking of the bubble, and housing prices are still down 30 percent, 35 percent below what they were at the peak. Some places 50 percent. In some areas housing prices are continuing to fall. So that was a very fundamental misjudgment that had implications for everything that went on after."
"One of the implications was they never put together a program to address the Americans who were losing their homes. They never did very much to stop the foreclosure movement. A small program, $75 billion was set aside, $2 billion was spent to help homeowners. It was clear that it wasn't given the priority. ..."
Question: That led to what?
"That had both economic and political consequences. The political consequences were that a very large fraction of America came to the view that the Obama administration was on the side of the bankers and not on their side. How can you give all that money to the bankers who caused the crisis and not help a lot of ordinary citizens who were the innocent victims of predatory lending, of all these shenanigans? ..."
More from Commondreams;
"Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. [I've been warning about this for a while now] At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval - and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals".
SO that was last night. Today I'm not going hunt down the names of a bunch of Obama's appointments who wouldn't fit into any administration with a Progressive agenda. It should be obvious to all that Obama, if he ever intended to proceed progressively he gave that up very early. What many will say his major accomplishment - Obamacare - is a messy gift to Big Global Pharma and the Hospital and Health insurance Industries, e.g. "Profits at HCA Holdings Inc., the largest publicly traded hospital chain, jumped 18% to $1.7 billion for the first nine months of 2014 "
To say I'm disillusioned is an understatement, his record says he's more in the pockets of the JPMorgans and Chase and Wall St. than Hillary. All the Cons who attack him relentlessly with statistics on the Middle Class, the poor, and the plight of Blacks especially in his economy cannot be called liars, they are right. What the fuck has he done to stop the ALEC plan to disenfranchise blacks and everyone else? Since SCOTUS cut out the heart of the Civil Rights Act to make it easier to pass anti-voting acts disquised as voter id laws or whatever what has Obama done? Has he used the bully pulpit to educate the American People to what's going on? Almost silence.
What a weak legacy he has left compared to the greats of the civil rights era when so many suffered so much and even gave up their lives. I've said it before, he had the mantle of greatness within his reach, a chance to put his name up there with the Lincolns and Kings and FDR's . Instead he settled for a golden handshake with Wall Street.
That $30 million dollar deal with some publisher is only a few months away. The million dollar speeches to the likes of GoldmanSachs, well maybe he can just borrow Hillary's transcripts, they won't care, he's already fulfilled all the promises. He will go down in history I predict, as the richest ex-president ever - thanks to his willingness to sell his soul.
I can't finish without mentioning Obama's Assassination policy. Sure he hasn't started major wars like Bush did. The "Obama Doctrine" of remote control murder is just as morally indefensible. "Signature Strikes" are a new war crime in a new era of the American Empire of Blind Force. There is an entirely new concept of war being developed under Obama. One with a "small footprint" but with a long reach. Take a look at this map of Africa with all the new American outposts. Some of them just large enough to supply reconnaissance teams or to land and fuel Drones. 99% of the American public have absolutely no Idea what is going on.
