"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials.
Hey Barack, don’t let that hopey-changey thing penetrate too deeply into that over inflated psyche of yours now that Egypt has turned the tide of change and hope honestly.
The Egyptians stole your slogan and actually acted upon it. Not like you who bastardized it. You have totally abandoned your message of hope and change that was so inspiringly delivered in the halls of Minnesota.
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment that we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
Was he kidding on that day back in 2008 as he spoke in St. Paul when he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination?
Then later, during his State of the Union speech, he said, “We’re the nation that put cars in the driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.”
Those points were true, but most of Americans are either working at low paying jobs, are underemployed, or unemployed, or working part-time, or filling the most recently hired 36,000 service worker jobs spread out around the nation. 36,000 is small potatoes Barack. Is this how we now make our living? Is this the real America, which contradicts the delusional America that you speak about?
The populist revolution that took hold from the ground up, with no leader to march them into the promised land, or through the gates of prosperity was done by oppressed citizens that lived under an autocracy supported by the United States. They did it one person at a time. It was the thousand monkey phenomena being fulfilled. They had patience and determination, as well as a will to win their fight.
I’m sorry Barack, it had nothing to do with your wishy-washy-wordy-thingy that you do. It had nothing to do with your “nicey”, orderly, and genuiney transitiony request of the Dictator from the Nile, Mr. 2011 Pharoah himself, and torturer-in-arms-with the USA, renditiony brother-in-arms that has more than likely disappeared.
This change was a people-thing! It was not done by overweight Cheez Curl eating, recliner sitting, reality t.v. watching sluggish, heart attack-in-waiting under-achieving, flag waving for Glenn Beck sub-literate thinking, and over ego believing American patriots; but, by a group of oppressed Arabs who, once and for all, had enough of the dictatorial, military protected bull-shit. A threshold had been reached, and the people stood with the many in the military, who decided that the best thing for the nation was to escort the Pharoah off of his throne.
From my perspective, I might view you as a Mubarak-lite, in spite of your reign being only 2.5 years long, and Hosni’s beginning during the Reagan period with his dictator loving Ring Around the Hosni and other cozy affairs with Middle Eastern, and Central American dictators.
President Obama believes that dictators deserve an “orderly and genuine transition” when moving the deck chairs all around a sinking Titanic Middle East. He does it here, too, from his Oval Office deck chair. The dictators in the U.S. come from the corporate board rooms, and the pompously decorated elite offices of CEOs, and CFOs of our corporate and financial oligarchs, and keptocrats.
It is singing Koombya with such palsee-whalesee Tea Party loving Republicans holding their leach collared Democrats at their heels. Republicans love being the Dominatrix’ of the nation.
Having a democracy that serves the best interest of a sustainable society is NOT part of the plan of this American President--Get-hosedkne--Obama. The plan has been to further extend the LilboyBush presidency.
- We were lied into war and the war criminals are still free, writing books, giving lectures, and making appearances. No large scale investigation of the war, and its planning processes have been independently investigated by a body with legal authority.
- These two particular wars are draining the nation’s economic resources as they are funneled into the war profiteering machine. One reason the price of oil rises is because the US uses massive amounts of fuel and oil products in the war theaters, as well as during naval battle ship maneuvers, and on the number of bases the military has built around the global. This entire military conglomerate has drained the nation of what it requires to protect its citizens from starvation, freezing to death, illness, domestic jobs development and more.
- We continue to live under a state of emergency, which was declared, 10 years ago, under the rule of LilBoyBush. Living under such a state of emergency interferes with the flow of a free market, as was pointed out in Washington’s blog piece, “We Cannot Separate Economics and Politics. And Those Who Speak Out Against Bad Policy Are Helping The Economy, 2-8-11. These ongoing lies are destroying our free market, which is decreasing the value of our money, and investing more risky and precarious.
- We continue handing out basically free money to the bankstas who were responsible for the economic collapse, unemployment, and foreclosures, while the Fed mops up their Treasuries and toxic bonds. None of these bankstas have been forced to testify before a Grand Jury with legal authority, or at the least, expose and make transparent all of their toxic securities (MBS), and the number of foreclosed and abandoned homes that have been returned to them.
Obama SotU: “At stake right now is not who wins the next election -- after all, we just had an election. At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else. It's whether the hard work and industry of our people is rewarded.”
The new jobs and industries are growing in China, and elsewhere, allowing Walmart to become their supply chain into the US.
ObamaSotU: “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.
Thanks to the tax cuts we passed, Americans' paychecks are a little bigger today. Every business can write off the full cost of new investments that they make this year. And these steps, taken by Democrats and Republicans, will grow the economy and add to the more than one million private sector jobs created last year.”
Yes Mr. Obama, Middle America has received little in their paychecks, while the elite have received millions more in their paychecks.
Obama SotU: “And now it's our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”
Why was the nation allowed to fall behind? Why did Congress and presidents allow the corporate elite to sell out and sell off our jobs in the first place?
Barack Obama is engaged in a full out assault against working people as did LilBoyBush. He has abandoned organized and unorganized labor. The organized laborers in Wisconsin are fighting for dear life to retain collective bargaining rights. We are seeing an organized effort by neo-liberals and Tea Bagging Shit-Throwing Republicans funded by labor-hating corporate “Royalists” to bring workers to their knees and become American serfs.
Obama has thrown these supporters under the bus. Be Afraid. Be Afraid people your Medicare, or Medicaid, or Social Security, or your pension are all the reasons why the nation continues to collapse economically. IT IS YOUR FAULT for wanting to save a little money and pay your bills and send your kids to college. IT IS YOUR FAULT for having trust and faith in the system that allowed the American corporation to grow so large that they could become multi-national in strength and power; and in doing so, have benefited hugely from the economic and political Nanny State created for them via laws, patent rules, trade laws, foreign worker exploitation, off-shoring, and tax hiding clauses in the law.
Here is what Dr. Dean Baker wrote in his piece titled Greenspan's Incompetence Badgers Wisconsin's Workers.
“[T]he number of jobs now stands at 7,700,000 below its pre-recession level. Furthermore, no one is projecting that this gap is about to be closed in the next several years.
There should be zero doubt: this downturn is the reason that Wisconsin has a budget crisis. Perhaps Wisconsin's leaders can be blamed for not recognizing that the economy was being managed by complete incompetents - and planning accordingly - but this is the story of the state budget crisis.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the economy is operating at more than 6.4 percentage points below its potential level of output. If Wisconsin's state economy was 6.4 percent larger, and its revenues increased accordingly, it would have more than $4 billion in additional revenue in its coffers over the next two years.
This increase in revenue would easily cover the projected deficit. This is even before we add in the savings from lower payouts for unemployment insurance and other benefits that would follow from a return to normal levels of unemployment. In short, there can be little dispute that Wisconsin's budget crisis is Alan Greenspan's work.
The allegations of the union bashers can easily be shown to be nonsense. Wisconsin's public sector workers are paid no more than their private sector counterparts. They tend to get somewhat better pensions and health care coverage, but this is offset by lower pay for comparably skilled workers. Nor has there been an explosion of public sector employment under the period in which Democrats governed the state [or most other states].
How does it change anything if we know that Greenspan (last seen being feted at the Brookings Institution) is the real villain in the Wisconsin budget crisis? First, it should turn the heat where it belongs: Washington.
The problem of the downturn is a lack of demand. A lack of demand is solved by spending money. We have to get our elected representatives to ignore the shrill whining of the Wall Street deficit hawks. We need sufficient stimulus from the public sector to overcome the falloff of more than $1.2 trillion in spending from the private sector that resulted from the collapse of the housing bubble.
If members of Congress are too intimidated to do what is needed to fix the economy, then Wisconsin's [and all other state] legislators should do what common sense dictates: follow the money. Rather than taking pay and benefits from schoolteachers and firefighters, it makes sense to take money from the people who have it. This means taxing Wisconsin's wealthy and its corporations. The tax increase only needs to be temporary, since the state budget should be fine once the economy recovers.
Of course the wealthy and the corporations will claim that they will leave the state and stop hiring, but these are not people who are known for their truthfulness. They are known for their money.
If these big winners in the downturn are forced to share more of their wealth until the economy recovers, then maybe they will put more pressure on Congress to support the sort of stimulus needed to get the economy back on track. This would be a real win-win for just about everyone.”
In Washington’s Blog piece he brings up a very important point of view when examining the well-being of a political system. When our representatives, president, military, justice department, congress have broken the circle of trust they must deliver to its citizens, then our economy, our political system, and our social fabric can no longer maintain its integrity.
This is what was written: “Being able to trust people might seem like a pleasant luxury, but economists are starting to believe that it’s rather more important than that. Trust is about more than whether you can leave your house unlocked; it is responsible for the difference between the richest countries and the poorest.
Above all, trust enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth….Confidence is like the gasoline, without it the machine won’t move.
Trust is gone: there is no longer trust between counterparties in the financial system. Furthermore, confidence is at a low. Investors have lost their confidence in the ability of shares to provide decent returns (since they haven’t).
As trust declines, so does Americans’ willingness to invest their money in the financial system….Public distrust of bankers and financial markets has risen dramatically with the financial crisis. [The] loss of trust in the financial system played a critical role in the collapse of economic activity that followed. To undo the damage, financial regulation needs to focus on restoring that trust.
Dr. Baker went on to dispel the Be Afraid of Entitlements in his piece The President as Storyteller-in-Chief.
The center-right story centers on government excess: large budget deficits, overpaid public employees and bloated government social programs. Just as was the case with President Reagan's stories, these stories are not true.
The large budget deficits were an outcome of the crisis: Tax collections plummeted and spending on countercyclical programs like unemployment insurance rose. The deficits in the years preceding the crisis were actually relatively small when measured against the size of the economy.
[W]e have the story of out-of-control social programs. There are a number of programs focused on helping low-income people that even collectively don't amount to a hill of beans in terms of the total budget. We can stop paying for nutrition for poor children or buying heating oil for low-income seniors, but even zeroing out these programs entirely barely makes a dent in the budget.
Then we have the universal programs, like Social Security and Medicare. These programs cost a lot of money, but people are willing to pay for them. Furthermore, the story of exploding growth in these "entitlements" stems entirely from our broken health care system.
If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, we would be looking at enormous budget surpluses, not deficits. Everyone in Washington knows this, but they are scared of the drug companies, the insurance companies, the doctors' lobbies and other powerful interest groups, so instead they push for cutting these essential programs.
In short, the center-right story's can easily be shown to be nonsense. However, President Obama has put up nothing to counter it. He has backed away from telling the public the truth: The country faces an enormous economic hole right now because the financial industry ran wild over the last decade and the Fed and other government regulators let them.
It would not be difficult to come up with salacious images of people like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide or Robert Rubin of Citigroup living the good life, while tens of millions of people suffer unemployment and/or foreclosures because of the fallout from their greed. President Obama could also highlight the incredible incompetence of top economic officials like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who let the $8 trillion housing bubble grow unchecked.
This would provide a compelling and truthful narrative to focus the nation's attention. Polls consistently show that the public has an intense dislike of Wall Street. What better place to direct people's anger than on those who are actually responsible for the economic crisis?
However, President Obama has opted to go in a different direction. He has instead embraced the false narrative pushed by the center-right, actually implying the problem is somehow out-of-control government spending, as though the housing bubble was not the source of the economic crisis. This may endear him to the Wall Street crew, but this narrative is a disaster for those who care about putting people back to work, providing workers with a secure retirement, and protecting the gains that unions have helped to secure for workers in both the public and private sector.”
Unfortunately, the public’s trust in government as a whole, the justice system, bankers, and the corporate media are at all-time lows. Why? Because the government has been caught lying. The government repeatedly said about the subprime crisis, banking crisis, debt crisis, mortgage crisis, and other economic crises [are contained and under control. And, that our experts in government and in the Fed are going to fix it]. It wasn’t, and they didn’t…and so, the people have lost trust in the government.” (Washington’s blog piece noted.)
The piece went on to say that it isn’t just the economic crisis that has caused a breech of trust, but it goes deeper. There was a lack of honesty and truth surrounding 9/11: weapons of mass destruction, that it was unforeseeable; that government doesn’t spy on its own people; it doesn’t torture, or engage in rendition with dictators; the citizens haven’t seen honest and non-partial investigations around any of these overwhelming factors that impact our nation and the trust of our representatives.
Abusive financial practices have gone unchecked and the individuals responsible for them have actually been rewarded instead of prosecuted. “The public will need to hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible, [and] will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again.” (Washingtonsblog.com)
Yet, today our president continues to surround himself with those who have been within the circle of those responsible for our financial disaster while he repeatedly wants us to believe that they can be trusted to repair a system that is collapsing from within.
Obama has said to us that his “mission has to be to accelerate hiring and accelerate growth.” How when tax cuts to the rich, two wars continue, outsourcing is the norm, and the bankstas have been recapitalized and the upper 10% have had a wealth resurrection? I don’t trust his words.
Obama has brought on even more banksta people. William Daley, the son of the late Mayor Daley of Chicago--one of the biggest mayoral machine-makers in history. William Daley, is now Obama’s Chief of Staff. He came from JPMorgan Chase, as a chief operational officer. His job was to push government away from regulation and reform, and he ignored the dangers that would eventually come from unbridled corporate power.
Professor Michael Hudson wrote in Obama’s New Chief of Staff Sought to Loosen Post-Enron Corporate Reforms, “It makes you pause when you see people who worked in the banks that caused the problems---people who lobbied for positions that would have done even greater damage to the economy---being recycled into government.” (Rheingold, Center for Public Integrity).
Daley pushed for Sarbanes-Oxley to be made more impotent, and hoped to see greater protections for corporate auditors by making it harder to sue or investigate them. He also worked inside the Clinton administration, therefore, is one of those Clintonestas who helped bring about NAFTA and other destructive worker policies we refer to as neo-liberal.
Even in 2007, he was against excessive oversight in the world of international markets, which doesn’t sound like he was supportive of domestic workers getting protections from these neo-liberal policies.
Daley also spent three years at SBC Communications, which acquired AT&T. And, “when White Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called a top JPMorgan executive to ask for the bank’s support in creating a new consumer-protection agency, the executive---former Commerce Secretary [under Clinton] William Daley---said no, according [to as source].”
Other Clintonestas surrounding Obama are Gene Sperling, economic overseer, and budget director Jacob Lew.
When Americans see that President Obama works his hardest to hire those who were involved in practices that helped destroy our economic, which is not recovering for tens of millions of working and unemployed people, there is nothing else we can feel but that our trust has been killed. This is why many of us fully relate to the populist revolutionary movement choreographed by the Egyptian people, and which is now spreading to Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and all points global.
It is unlikely to happen here because too many are fattened up on Cheez Curls and to engrossed by fantasy television, while enjoying their self-loathing Social Security and Medicare checks.
President Obama has turned his back on real reform and the average working American and the retirees, who worked to make this nation great. He has turned to face the Rightwingers, Tea Partiers, and corporate oligarchs. There is no reason to trust a single word he speaks. The lame duck is now walking badly.
Thanks for reading, jerry
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
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