General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I woke up today and President Barack Obama is still President of the United States of America [View all]jtuck004
(15,882 posts)But you are correct, it started long before him. In the early 1900's, when Democrats, and Gompers of the AFofL, and others helped business kill off the people who thought the power should be with the people, that what was good for business (i.e. the greedy capitalist) was good for America. For several decades, as long as there were natural resources and people to easily exploit, countries to rebuild that we had bombed into oblivion, or countries that stayed in the past, that worked to our advantage.
But about the time Carter came along, while telling told us that we needed to grow up and take control of our economy and act like adults, quit spending so freely, the world started exerting itself. Americans forgot what had gotten them to the point they were at, threw it all out the window, rejected Carter and put RR in the WH. And the time of living on the plantation began in earnest.
Bill Clinton signed NAFTA,a horrible piece of legislation which shut down factories all over the place and began a wholesale process of replacing good jobs with shitty ones, too preoccupied with blow jobs from an intern to tell the country that it would require 20 or 30 times the investment we were going to make in retraining and retooling to simply stay competitive, which is partly why tens of millions of people are vying for even fewer McJobs today. Even worse, he then signed the Securities Modernization Act, on the advice of Larry Summers. That legislation allowed the banks to hide the transactions which ultimately led to our current financial crisis.
Clinton acknowledges that error. From an interview "I asked former President Bill Clinton if he thought he got bad advice on regulating complex financial instruments known as derivatives from his former Treasury Secretaries, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. He acknowledged that he was wrong to take the advice of those advising him against regulating derivatives." He said he regretted Larry Summers' advice. I am guessing a hundred million other people regret it too.
So back to your question. Obama? Knowing what we know, and after putting Ben Bernanke into place, who protected the banks and the assets of the billionaires we call the 1% to the clear detriment of tens of millions of people, Obama now wants to appoint Larry Summers to that same job, giving this person who was directly responsible for destroying the lives of millions of people the keys to our economic future.
It, perhaps, didn't have to be this way. He could have told the banks that helped him get elected that their money wasn't going to keep him from staffing the FBI with forensic accountants (which he could have called for) and investigating the same criminal behavior which sent S&L officers to prison just a few years ago. He could have chosen to stand in front of the American people and tell them they had been snookered, but that he was going to work on their side. That he knew it was going to be hard, but that the alternative was that, just like Abraham Lincoln was afraid of and warned, the finance people, (banks back then), would take over our lives and turn us all into slaves. He could have called for a hundred million people to take to the streets and take their lives back from the bastards that now own them.
It would have been the greatest community organizing project of all time, and we would have been unstoppable.The bankers would have been in jail, people would be in school learning new things, people would be working, this terrible and costly inequality would be far less the tragedy that it is, and we could have shown the world our promise. But he didn't. Instead he cashed the checks, makes his speeches, and our economy is clearly and without question markedly increasing the wealth of those with the most, on the backs of those with the least. In so doing he gave away the power that it would have taken to get sensible gun control, to keep women's health clinics open, to jail the criminals that we are paying billions in profits to keep them fat and happy, to take a leadership position in addressing the global climate issues (which, if the latest information coming out is any indication, may make all this moot within the lifetime of the children I see on the playground across the street). It also gave new life and vigor to the Republican Party, and the lever they needed to bring most any progress forward to a screeching halt.
Are there some people that are better off because of some of the things that have been done during these past few years, Unquestionably. Is the price worth it? That's the question. Some people will certainly get health care that didn't have it before, but the insurance companies, judging by their stock performance, stand to make a killing. (Back to What's Good for Business is Good For America). And the reason that profit flows to the insurance companies instead of in benefits to the people, as Social Security did, is because the power, that could have been seized at the beginning of this presidency, wasn't. Better rights for the LGBT community, a few other things - he can take some credit for no longer standing in the way, but most of that groundwork was done by other people. Unemployment is a disaster - ask the DUer in the other forum who has been out of work for 3 years - and there are tens of millions of families and individuals just like him, and their future is very likely to be living in near poverty on a part-time job, or a full-time position from which there will be very little to help fund any kind of investment in our country as was done in past decades, so a gradual decline. Compared to what could have been done, had we started repairing the people instead of building outwards from the boardroom of Goldman Sucks, I mean $achs, some of the accomplishments seem almost like those balloons that businesses put on roofs, that must be filled with hot air to look as large as they do.
The reason people hold Obama responsible is because of the decisions he has made, and is making. It is the direction he stand up and talks about every time he speaks. As in the speech last night, others make excuses and point fingers in a vain attempt to explain away what could have been, and what we are left with.
I get that this is how some people do politics, and they fervently believe this is how it must be. But I think they are only convincing themselves, and we are smaller for it. The history books won't include their point of view, and I think it will look much different in retrospect.
But hey, I just help people with dogs...