It's Worse than you Think

You know, I was going to write a piece on what President Obama needed to do now. And my solution was to invoke the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution, which speaks on the idea of not questioning the validity of all debts. Clearly not extending the debt ceiling would be to dishonor our debts and obligations. President Clinton has urged President Obama to invoke the fourteenth amendment and bypass this whole congressional nonsense alltogether. That's obviously the sensible thing to do, but this President is obviously stupid or something. You know he could have saved himself this whole Tea Party problem if he'd just waited on Health Care till he got relyable poll numbers on the subject. The second thing he should have done is to have gone after the just passed Bush Administration. The third thing he should have done is to press for indictments of the bank officials responsible for the financial crisis of September of 2008. The fourth thing he should have done was to release a "clean" copy of his long form birth certificate, and done it immediately as soon as the topic was raised. The fifth thing he should have done, failing all this, was to announce that he would not run again in 2012. This would have diffused the Tea Party bomb and taken the air out of their balloon and sapped their resolved. But clearly this President is an idiot. But it might be worse than this. He might be some kind of a conservative plant in the White House have often times exceeded the offenses of his immediate predicessor, George W Bush. Below are some remarks lifted from another blog, and I hope he won't mind, but I find them interesting, even though I don't fully understand the implications of all of them. But just for a reality check, can you picture ANY previous President of the United States allowing this silly crisis going on for one second?

But first I'd like to address another issue. And that is those who resent referring to Christianity as a violent religion, or that "real Christians don't commit violence" as though the Church, which according to St. Paul is the "Body of Christ" has sponsored many a war. But some say that Jesus taught love and peace. The character Jesus did in the gospel. But he is not the real Jesus. St. Paul spoke of the falocy of "knowing Jesus after the flesh" meaning - trusting in that historical man who walked the earth for a few years. Jesus didn't get called sinless because everyone examined his life and found it to be perfect from birth. Rather Jesus was FIRST called God, and then it was inferred that he was perfect. Do you remember what our government said to justify dropping the Atomic Bomb on Japan. They said "It saved a lot of lives in the long run". Do you think the events Jesus is perported to have endorsed, such as the Roman wars against the Jews- - do you think these did not save but actually COST lives? Not just of those Jewish patriots, but of countless Jews who were persecuted through because of Church bigotry and hatred against the Jews and of course we have Hitler and the extermanation camps. You know, one trait that real Heroes have is that they don't like bullies. And we all know bullying when we see it. You may hold high office but you still don't earn brownie points by closing your eyes and looking the other way when you see wrongs. Don't say "well I'm above all, I'm too Christian for that regular nitty gritty stuff" Or say "My passivity will get me brownie points and help me rise in the polls". I doubt those would have died had Jesus been just a little more jucidious in his use of words. Everything that was placed in the gospels, allowed to be there, was crafted to incite maximum hatred of the Jews. No, I am not going to give the Church a free pass on this one.

PRESIDENT OBAMA - - THE ULTIMATE POLITICAL FRAUD

My philosophy is "either lead, follow, or get out of the way". President Obama has not done any of these three things. It's not in his nature. He has other ideas.

The accusations imply that Obama is on our side. Or was on our side. And that the right wing is pushing him around.

But the evidence is clear that Obama is an often-willing servant of corporate interests -- not someone reluctantly doing their bidding, or serving their interests only because Republicans forced him to.

Since coming to Washington, Obama has allied himself with Wall Street Democrats who put corporate deregulation and greed ahead of the needs of most Americans:

• In 2006, a relatively new Senator Obama was the only senator to speak at the inaugural gathering of the Alexander Hamilton Project launched by Wall Street Democrats like Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and deputy secretary. Obama praised them as “innovative, thoughtful policymakers.” (It was Rubin’s crusade to deregulate Wall Street in the late ‘90s that led directly to the economic meltdown of 2008 and our current crisis.)
  

• In early 2007, way before he was a presidential frontrunner, candidate Obama was raising more money from Wall Street interests than all other candidates, including New York presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
  

• In June 2008, as soon as Hillary ended her campaign, Obama went on CNBC, shunned the “populist” label and announced: “Look: I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.” He packed his economic team with Wall Street friends -- choosing one of Bill Clinton’s Wall Street deregulators, Larry Summers, as his top economic advisor.
  

• A year into his presidency, in a bizarre but revealing interview with Business Week, Obama was asked about huge bonuses just received by two CEOs of Wall Street firms bailed out by taxpayers. He responded that he didn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus to J.P. Mogan’s CEO or the $9 million to Goldman Sachs’ CEO: “I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen,” said Obama. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

• After any review of Obama’s corporatist ties and positions, the kneejerk response is: “Yes, but Obama was a community organizer!”

  He WAS a community organizer. . .decades before he became president. Back when Nelson Mandela was in prison and the U.S. government declared him the leader of a “terrorist organization” while our government funded and armed Bin Laden and his allies to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. That’s a long time ago.

  It’s worth remembering that decades before Reagan became president, the great communicator was a leftwing Democrat and advocate for the working class and big federal social programs.

  The sad truth, as shown by Glenn Greenwald, is that Obama had arrived at the White House looking to make cuts in benefits to the elderly. Two weeks before his inauguration, Obama echoed conservative scares about Social Security and Medicare by talking of “red ink as far as the eye can see.” He opened his doors to Social Security/Medicare cutters -- first trying to get Republican Senator Judd Gregg (“a leading voice for reining in entitlement spending,” wrote Politico) into his cabinet, and later appointing entitlement-foe Alan Simpson to co-chair his “Deficit Commission.” Obama’s top economic advisor, Larry Summers, came to the White House publicly telling Time magazine of needed Social Security cuts.

Marshall Auerback argues:

The debt ceiling dispute is not forcing a compromise on this President, but is instead is viewed by him as a golden opportunity to do what he’s always wanted to do.

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Unlike President Hoover, who inherited the foundations of a huge credit bubble from the 1920s and found himself overwhelmed by it, this President is worse.

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The predictable result is of his current stance is that, even as he claims to recognize the interlocking nature of the problems facing us and vows to “solve the problem” once and for all via a “grand bargain”, Obama is in fact tearing apart most of the foundations which were tentatively initiated under Hoover, but which came to full fruition under FDR. If he continues down this ruinous path, $150 billion/month in spending will be cut. Such economic thinking isn’t worthy of Mellon, let alone Herbert Hoover.

Glenn Greenwald writes:

Obama ... has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses – even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.

This dynamic has repeatedly emerged in numerous contexts. Obama has continued Bush/Cheney terrorism policies – once viciously denounced by Democrats – of indefinite detention, renditions, secret prisons by proxy, and sweeping secrecy doctrines.

He has gone further than his predecessor by waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, seizing the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process far from any battlefield, massively escalating drone attacks in multiple nations, and asserting the authority to unilaterally prosecute a war (in Libya) even in defiance of a Congressional vote against authorising the war.

And now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The silence from progressive partisans is defeaning – and depressing, though sadly predictable.

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Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right – attacks on the nation's social safety net – into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders.

Progressive economist Michael Hudson writes:

The most reasonable explanation for [Obama's] empty threat is that he is trying to panic the elderly into hoping that somehow the budget deal he seems to have up his sleeve can save them. The reality, of course, is that they are being led to economic slaughter. (And not a word of correction reminding the President of financial reality from Rubinomics Treasury Secretary Geithner, neoliberal Fed Chairman Bernanke or anyone else in the Wall Street Democrat administration, formerly known as the Democratic Leadership Council.)

It is a con. Mr. Obama has come to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to save them. This was clear from the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission, headed by avowed enemies of Social Security Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and President Clinton’s Rubinomics chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Mr. Obama’s more recent choice of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats be delegated by Congress to rewrite the tax code on a bipartisan manner – so that it cannot be challenged – is a ploy to pass a tax “reform” that democratically elected representatives never could be expected to do.

The devil is always in the details. And Wall Street lobbyists always have such details tucked away in their briefcases to put in the hands of their favored congressmen and dedicated senators. And in this case they have the President, who has taken their advice as to whom to appoint as his cabinet to act as factotums to capture the government on their behalf and create “socialism for the rich.”

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Usually a crisis is needed to create a vacuum into which these toxic details are fed. Wall Street does not like real crises, of course – except to make quick computer-driven speculative gains on the usual fibrillation of today’s zigzagging markets. But when it comes to serious money, the illusion of a crisis is preferred, staged melodramatically to wring the greatest degree of emotion out of the audience much like a good film editor edits a montage sequence. Will the speeding train run over the girl strapped to the tracks? Will she escape in time?

The train is debt; the girl is supposed to be the American economy. But she turns out to be Wall Street in disguise. The exercise turns out to be a not-so-divine comedy. Mr. Obama offers a plan that looks very Republican. But the Republicans say no. There is an illusion of a real fight.