President Obama’s Economic Failure By Design

The U.S. has approached fighting the domestic economic collapse in the same way it has been fighting the two wars in the Middle East. The TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) was the failed Shock and Awe approach used in the unsuccessful attempt to jumpstart the economy through the recapitalization of zombie banks. The outcome bombed. As with the millions of taxpayer dollars sent over for the Iraqi reconstruction, which was to be used to rebuild a bombed up country, and bring new jobs leading to prosperity, the Federal Reserve and Treasury flooded zombie financial banks with taxpayer dollars, too. The process in Iraq was to design a free market economy, but most of the funding was squandered, lost or hoarded, while the country never stopped finding itself under siege. The same thing happened with the money used to recapitalize zombie banks. It was squandered, hoarded, and used to enrich the banker thieves that were responsible for the economic collapse in the first place, while the country found itself under siege by the affects of the economic tsunami: lost homeownership wealth, lost retirement and investment wealth, job losses, foreclosures, declining or stagnant wages, a drop in consumer demand, shortened work hours, constricted lending, rising credit card interest rates, underwater mortgages, and the list goes on and on.

One might see the 5 largest financial banks in a similar way to the various warring factions in the Middle East, such as unable to get their credit markets working properly due to the lack of trust amongst each other, while at the same time not knowing what they all are hiding on or off their balance sheets. Toxic mortgage debts and credit default swaps being major problems. This is not unlike the Iraqi Parliament, which is unable to bring about any functional level of stability, trust, openness, and transparency to the various sectarian parties, in this case the religious sects. None of the religious warring factions know what is hiding under their enemy’s clothing, stuffed inside their car trunks, or motorbikes.

Among the most powerful financial bankers, one of them has acquired much of the power and wielded considerable influence. It is Goldman Sachs, which could be compared to the Mahdi militia and Maktada al-Sadr, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq. Another U.S. financial banking giant would be Citigroup, which could be likened to the Sunni rival in Iraq. Both sides have infiltrated their governments in order to embed their power. Some have been more successful than others.

But unfortunately, suicide bombings occur nearly daily taking out lives, and property, ruining families, destroying society, similar to the corporate lay-offs, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, and rising unemployment in the United States.

Families end up in chaos. They are afraid to spend. In Iraq, they are afraid to spend, too, as well as venture outdoors to schools or to the marketplaces. The people end up losing trust in the process their government leadership has constructed to improve the instability, danger and the uncertainty the people live with everyday.

They see the billions and trillions of dollars going into the pockets of those who created the disaster and crisis. In Iraq, the religious warring factions end up with payoffs, bribes, or “contracts”. Americans see trillions of dollars going to the banking crime syndicate bailing out their own zombie banks, while the people suffering watch the crisis get worse. They see President Obama’s economic generals fabricate rationalizations in order to keep zombie banks alive, as they design schemes to recapitalize them, while plotting other schemes to remove toxic mortgage debts off their balance sheets.

The same failed strategy goes on in Iraq as bailout schemes were designed to pay off Sunni Awakening Council gangbangers from killing American soldiers, and paying Shia militia fighters to become Iraq’s police force and army soldiers. In addition, this same failed strategy was used to prop up failed Iraqi and Afghani governments, while the common citizen suffers.

The U.S. government has created quagmires with their hegemonic visions, especially driven by the neo-cons within The Project For A New American Century. The quagmires in the Middle East will never be fixed by President Obama’s strategies and interventions because economic and political stability has failed, as well as efforts to suppress the insurgency; therefore, the U.S. superpower has been seen as a crippled giant—an impotent Goliath.

U.S. citizens are seeing President Obama’s economic team in the same way. They are being labeled as Trojan Horses for Goldman Sachs, Citi, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, AIG, and the rest. The economic generals are being tagged as impotent failures who have chosen to side with those who have spent the last 30 plus years eroding the country’s international goodwill and economic prosperity through their greedy speculative and destructive scheming by manipulating the economic and financial livelihoods of working middle class Americans.

This is not unlike the warring religious groups scheming for power and control over their economic, social, geopolitical, and religious conditions of the struggling Iraqi and Afghani societies, which ultimately, brought about desperate and dire conditions all leading toward failure.

Until President Obama wakes up and understands he is using the same strategy to “rescue” the economy as is being used to “rescue” the inherited political policy for Iraq and Afghanistan, he is destined to fail and further erode current conditions.

Fixing Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be done by the United States in the orderly and controlled fashion we fantasize about, since those two countries operate within a very different order and framework driven not by secular structures and law, but by religious order and law, therefore, they have to be left to solve it on their own.

In the U.S., we have order that has been (theoretically) established democratically for hundreds of years, therefore, the “sensible approach” would be to stop funding the failed banks, and let the FDIC take them over, dismantle them, and then, rebuild the country from the bottom up. Or, just let the failed financial banks battle it out amongst themselves, while they work to entice investors that would recapitalize them. This scenario would likely be disastrous and result in huge bankruptcies. The fantasy of the Bush administration was to use a variant of the above “sensible approach” with the three sectarian religious factions in Iraq, dismantling them, taking them over, unifying them into one parliamentary government sharing their chocolates and rose petals, and rebuilding the country from the bottom up as envisioned by the laissez-faire free-marketeers, but it was an insane delusion thought up by the Republican neo-cons embedded inside that administration.

President Obama is not willing to make the commitment to fix our economy in a way that would efficiently work, since he has built his team’s framework using the banking cartel’s own foot soldiers. This is a failure by design.

thanks for reading, jerry