Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

More Thoughts about Obama’s Budget Deal

August 7, 2011

The raucous debates that preceded the budget deal have led some to the conclusion that the U.S. ruling class is in a state of crisis. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have not gone they way they hoped. The recovery from the last recession has been extremely weak. They are desperately trying to find a way to increase profits while maintaining the empire, but they are divided on how to do it. Some, like the Koch Brothers (the driving force behind the Tea Party), want to simply destroy whatever is left of workers’ living standards, effectively making the U.S. into a “Third World” country. Others favor less drastic measures. The people at Standard & Poor’s are trying to impose their own ideas on the government by downgrading their credit rating. None of these people seem to see unemployment as a problem, even though the more intelligent members of the ruling class must realize that chronic unemployment will eventually lead to social unrest. (The Wisconsin uprising may be a foreshadowing of this.) Yet they are unwilling to accept any New Deal-type reforms that might assuage public anger.

Again, what we need is a movement of unemployed people.

Posted in Capitalism, Democrats, Imperialism, Obama, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

Obama’s Budget Deal

August 4, 2011

Readers of my blog know that I have never been keen on conspiracist thinking, but I’m starting to get a bit paranoid after these recent budget negotiations. Watching them was like watching that old magician’s trick, in which the audience is made to look in one direction while the important thing that’s happening is in the other direction. For weeks we listened to one Tea Party Republican after another talk about how they must wreak the economy just to spite Obama. Meanwhile, few noticed that Obama actually proposed making cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Think about it, and the conspiracy makes sense. First, find the stupidest members of the white middle class. Tell them that Obama is a socialist and a fascist and a Muslim. Then organize them into demonstrations and let them make fools out of themselves. So the rest of the country gawks at these people and no one pays attention to what Obama is doing. They don’t realize just how conservative Obama is, and how he is waging war on the working class and the poor.

It is becoming clear that the ruling class have decided that they can live with a permanent state of high unemployment. Indeed, they may even view that as preferable. And if it is fine with them, it is fine with Obama.

What we need in this country is a movement of unemployed people.

Posted in Capitalism, Conspiracy Theories, Democrats, Obama | Leave a Comment »

Liberal Fear-mongering

December 11, 2010

I was reading the Register-Guard – Eugene’s laughable excuse for a hometown newspaper – and I saw this cartoon. It shows a fat, bald man, labeled “The Left”, watching Sarah Palin being sworn in as president. A though balloon over the man’s head reads: “Guess we showed Obama!”

Never mind that polls show that most Americans don’t think that Palin is qualified to be president. This is a typical example of liberal fear-mongering. The message is that we had better keep our mouths shut and let the Democrats screw us over, lest one of those awful Republicans gets into the White House. Of course, this merely guarantees that the Democrats will continue screwing us over.

Obama’s so-called “tax cut compromise” is actually an attack on Social Security. As Michael Hudson has pointed out in CounterPunch:

    …the tax giveaway includes a $120 billion reduction in Social Security contributions by labor – reducing the FICA wage withholding from 6.2 per cent to 4.2 per cent. Obama has ingeniously designed the plan to dovetail neatly into his Bowles-Simpson commission pressing to reduce Social Security as a step toward its ultimate privatization and subsequent wipeout grab by Wall Street….

    “The bottom line is that after the prolonged tax giveaway exacerbates the federal budget deficit – along with the balance-of-payments deficit – we can expect the next Republican or Democratic administration to step in and ‘save’ the country from economic emergency by scaling back Social Security while turning its funding over, Pinochet-style, to Wall Street money managers to loot as they did in Chile….

The Democrats are not on our side.

Posted in Democrats, Obama | Leave a Comment »

Inside Job

November 19, 2010

It is generally accepted that the 2008 financial meltdown was due to criminal behavior by the banks and by Wall Street investment firms, yet no effort is being made to bring these people to justice. Indeed, it is well known that the people responsible for the crisis have gotten richer, while millions of people who lost their jobs are still without work.

The documentary filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, is one person who refuses to accept this state of affairs. His film, Inside Job, is a thorough examination of the events leading up to the meltdown. One of the things I liked about this film is that it is unsparing towards the Obama Administration, pointing out, among other things, that it has done virtually nothing to address the problems that led to the crisis. (This is a refreshing change from the fatuous celebration of Obama’s election victory in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Years from now, people will watch that film and wonder what the hell Moore was talking about.) Another thing that I liked is that the film goes after academia, exposing the cozy relationship between university economics departments and private corporations.

One thing there could have been more of in the film is a discussion of the impact the crisis had lives of ordinary people. There is a brief segment on a couple who were conned into getting a mortgage they couldn’t afford, but no more than that. Then again, since audiences have lived through the economy of the last few years, perhaps they don’t need to be told this.

The film talked about my former employer, Countrywide Home Loans. I worked for them briefly at the time when the company was raking in money. (I didn’t last long there, I’m proud to say.) I worked in an office they had at the foot of the beautiful Santa Suzannah mountains in northwest Los Angeles. I was with a group of about thirty new hires who were being trained. A top executive from the company came to speak to us. She told us that the company’s entire income came from charging late fees on mortgage payments. (I will never forget the expression of glee on this woman’s face as she told us this.) Perhaps I was in a state of denial, but it wasn’t until I left the company that I began to put two and two together. If all their income came from late fees, they had to be luring people into getting mortgages that they couldn’t afford. At that time, Countrywide was being celebrated as one of the great success stories of American capitalism. I remember they had offices all over the Los Angeles area. A few years later they were bankrupt.

The way things are going, it looks as though there will be more Countrywides, another boom and another bust, unless people fight back against this insane system.

I strongly urge you to see Inside Job.

Posted in Capitalism, Cinema, Michael Moore, Obama | Leave a Comment »

Democrats Fall Down, Go Boom

November 3, 2010

I had been planning to write another snarcky post about the stupid e-mails that the Democratic Party keeps sending me, but it began to seem to me like kicking a dead mule. It was clear the Dems were going to take a drubbing, and tonight it has come to pass. The Republicans have taken control of the House and have picked up seats in the Senate. The Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this. After controlling Congress for four years, they have nothing to show for themselves but a a fraudulent health care reform bill and a fraudulent finance reform bill. They made no effort to punish the banksters who wreaked the economy. They did not deserve to win these elections.

What’s sad about all this is that the Republicans truly deserved to lose. Their behavior was utterly contemptible: whipping up hatred of Mexicans and Muslims, claiming that unemployed people are lazy, and so on. They subjected us to the shenanigans of the racist and ignorant Tea Party. We can find some comfort in the fact that some of the dumber Republicans lost, such as Sharron Angle, who claimed that they have sharia law in Dearborn, Michigan. (She says she knows this because she read it in an article somewhere. So far as Angle is concerned, Dearborn might as well be on the dark side of the moon.) Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller also lost. (However, the despicable Rand Paul appears to have won.) Perhaps this will finally lay to rest the idea that Sarah Palin is an important political player in this country, but I fear that the media will find some way to spin it as a victory for the Mooseburger Lady.

Another sad note is that Russ Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act, has apparently lost.

What remains to be seen is what effect this will have on Obama. He has been in office for less than two years, and he’s already beginning to seem as irrelevant as George W. Bush did during his second term. Forget the oil spill, Obama’s Katrina was the health care bill. He used all his political capital to pass an insipid piece of legislation that will actually hurt many people. From that point on, he has been completely out of touch. Last summer he and his family went on expensive and much publicized vacations, while the country was stewing with a 20% unemployment rate. He talks about going after Social Security and Medicare, the two most popular government programs.

With the Republicans controlling the House, my fear is that Obama may be tempted to do something rash in order to regain the initiative, such as attacking Iran or something equally stupid. Whatever happens, it’s not going to be fun.

Posted in Democrats, Obama, Parliamentary cretinism, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

E-Mail from Obama

August 26, 2010

Recently I’ve found that I have somehow gotten on the Democratic Party’s e-mail list. I don’t know how this happened. I’m not registered as a Democrat. (I’m registered as a Green.) I’ve never given money to the Democrats. (I know better than that.) Nevertheless, I’ve been getting e-mails from people such as Nancy Pelosi. Normally, I just delete these things. Recently, however, I received an e-mail from no less a person than President Barack Obama himself! (Well, at least that what it says, anyway.) I felt deeply flattered that the Leader of the Free World would take time out from his busy schedule to write to such a humble person as I. Naturally, I felt curious as to what he had to say.

The message begins:

    When I took office, we had a big choice to make. We could do what was easy to get through the next election or we could do what was hard – and right – to help the next generation.

I assume that by doing “what was hard – and right”, he means caving in to the insurance industry on health care, caving in to Wall Street on finance reform, and caving in to the Israel lobby on the Middle East. I suppose it can be argued that these were hard things to do, but that doesn’t make them admirable. As for helping the next generation, I take it he means saddling them with debts for the bank bailouts and the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Thanks, Dad.

He continues:

    Our extraordinary House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and my Democratic partners in the House chose to lead.

I think he doesn’t mean “extraordinary” to be sarcastic.

    They chose to do the real heavy lifting to get our economy back on track and to restore the American dream for every American.

Huh? Since when is the economy back on track? We’re still mired in the same recession that was in effect when Obama too office. The “American dream” certainly hasn’t been restored for the millions of Americans who are watching their unemployment benefits run out. If Obama thinks he can make people believe that everything is okay with a lot of happy talk, he is sadly deluded. One of the reasons people respected Franklin Roosevelt was because he frankly acknowledged how serious the Great Depression was and how much people were suffering. This was a welcome change from Hoover’s inane assurances that “prosperity is just around the corner”. Many people have argued that Obama resembles Hoover more than he does FDR. I think the resemblance is uncanny.

Ah, but there’s more:

    Make no mistake about it. Democrats will retain the House of Representatives this year, as long as you continue working to help them win.

Yeah, just keep telling yourself that, Barack. And things are going great in Afghanistan, aren’t they?

    Tuesday marks a critical FEC reporting deadline for my friends at the DCCC, the only Democratic political committee solely dedicated to protecting the House. I’m asking for your help to make their $1 Million grassroots goal before midnight Tuesday to continue the work we’ve only just begun.

Uh, you mean shafting people?

    The steady progress we are seeing toward America’s recovery is no accident. It’s happened because I’ve had Democratic partners in the House and Senate who have chosen to tackle problems that Washington talked about for decades but always just kicked down the road. Not anymore.

No, not anymore! Now they pass phoney-baloney legislation that accomplishes nothing! What an improvement!!!!!

    From the Recovery Act, to health insurance reform, to landmark clean energy legislation, to Wall Street reform, Speaker Pelosi and Democrats in Congress have passed the bills because they put the American peoples’ interests before the special interests.

By “clean energy legislation”, he means building more nuclear reactors and doing more mountaintop removal in Appalachia. The second half of the sentence is apparently not meant to be ironic.

    Now they need your help.

Oh, they do, do they?

    I know what a difference grassroots support can make in a tough fight. In the same way that you helped me defy the pundits and stand strong against the attacks from those who wish to protect the status quo, I need your help to make a difference right now to retain a Democratic House.

This is simply nonsense.

    Contribute before midnight August 31st to make sure that I keep my great Democratic Partners in the House. Your gift today will be matched by a group of generous Democrats.

Since the Democrats receive millions of dollars from corporations (they are currently receiving more corporate money than the Republicans are), why do they need me to toss them some pennies from the piddling unemployment payments that I receive? Does the word “bloodsuckers” come to your mind here?

    There is so much more work to get done. Now is not the time to turn back.

    Now is the time to remind ourselves what we can achieve together with Speaker Pelosi leading a Democratic House for another two years.

    This is our moment to retain a Democratic House and continue America’s progress.

    Thank you,

    Barack Obama

I am tempted to send Obama (or whoever sent this e-mail) a piece of my mind, but since Obama has the same regard for civil liberties that George W. Bush does, I think that might not be a good idea.

Posted in Democrats, Obama | Leave a Comment »

The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace

June 13, 2010

I’ve been intending for some time to write a post about the gulf oil spill, but I’ve been having trouble getting my head around the sheer enormity of what is happening. This is clearly an environmental catastrophe of unprecedented scale, which could have devastating consequences for decades to come. What we are facing is a national emergency. Yet, Obama’s response has been curiously passive. He has pretty much left it up to BP to try to solve the problem (with some help from the Coast Guard). He seems more interested in threatening Iran and persecuting whistleblowers. Obama has only made two trips to the gulf coast. On the second one, he posed for photographers on a beach where he picked up tar balls. The beach was cleaned before his arrival.

I have a suspicion that Obama would rather not think about what is happening in the gulf. This event, more any other, exposes the complete vacuity of neoliberal ideology, which is his religion. The number of oil spills more than quadrupled during this decade. Should this be surprising? For years now, the government has been controlled by people who are ideologically opposed to government regulation. They would rather have the regulators in the Minerals Management Service downloading pornography onto their computers than have them interfere with the magical invisible hand of the marketplace. (I’m tempted here to make a joke about what the MMS employees were doing with their own hands, but I’m just too angry). The MMS helped to make the gulf oil spill possible, just as the inertness of the SEC (where, coincidentally, people were also downloading pornography onto their computers) helped to make the 2008 meltdown of the financial markets possible.

It’s obvious that even by the low standards of capitalism, neoliberalism has been a failure. Yet Obama & Co. desperately cling to its tenets.

By the way, I found this on wikipedia:

    Since 20 April 2010, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers, 27 new offshore drilling projects have been approved by MMS. All but one project was granted similar exemptions from environmental review as BP. Two were submitted by the UK firm, and made the same claims about oil-rig safety and the implausibility of a spill damaging the environment.

The inmates are in charge of the asylum.

Update: it turns out that the Marshall Islands had responsibility for the safety inspections at the Deepwater Horizon. See here.

Tags:
Posted in Capitalism, Obama | Leave a Comment »

No Immigration Bill

May 9, 2010

Obama has indicated that he will not try to pass an immigration bill this year. This should come as no surprise. Obama wouldn’t want to touch a divisive issue like immigration reform during an election year, especially since he failed to politically benefit from “health care reform”. However, this news has provoked dismay among some pundits, who want the federal government to pass an immigration bill ASAP, in order to head off any more toxic state legislation, like the awful bill that was just passed in Arizona. To be honest, I can’t see our government passing an immigration bill that isn’t terrible. As I pointed out in my last post, the only practical solution to this problem is to grant legal status to undocumented workers. Neither of the major political parties is willing to call for this. No one in the mainstream media is willing to advocate for it. Instead, we get endless delusional talk about “sealing the border”.

What’s more, because the Democrats won’t abolish the filibuster rule, the Senate is now virtually controlled by two right-wingers: Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. (Lieberman seems to be going off the deep end. His demands are becoming more and more capricious every day. I’m waiting for him to have his Joe McCarthy moment.) If the Senate ever passes an immigration bill, you can bet it will have all sorts of “anti-terrorism” amendments, vastly increasing the powers of the police.

An interesting side note: according to some reports, the Tea Party movement seems to be on the wane. I don’t think this should be surprising, considering that there’s no real political substance to the movement. I bet some of these people really believed the sky was going to fall if the “health care reform” bill was passed. Perhaps they’re feeling a little foolish right now, as well they should.

Posted in Democrats, Immigration, Obama | Leave a Comment »

Republican Lite

March 28, 2010

When Mitt Romney criticized the health care bill, the Huffington Post pointed out that it’s essentially the same plan he imposed on Massachusetts when he was governor there. In their smugness over Romney’s hypocrisy, the liberals are ignoring the most important fact: Obama’s health care bill is a Republican bill. This should not be surprising. After all, Obama has continued most of the policies of his Republican predecessor. However, Obama’s election did result in change, in the sense that political discourse in this country has shifted to the right (although people’s actual views have not.) This is due to the necessity of maintaining the pretense that Obama is somehow liberal or progressive, necessary for the campaign rhetoric of both Republicans and Democrats.

The Republicans’ strategy of appealing to the lunatic right seems to be starting to backfire – just as it did during the 2008 election. Stirring up the troglodytes seems to be the only thing they can think of doing, now that Obama has taken over their agenda. As for the supposed size of the tea bagger movement, only a few hundred showed up for the demonstration during the vote on the health care bill. If that’s all they can do, then they are not truly a mass movement.

Those who think the tea baggers are a populist movement should read this article in Socialist Worker. Among other things we learn the following:

    Of those “active” supporters, 60 percent were male, 80 percent were white, and 66 percent made more than $50,000 a year. In fact, the largest income group of tea party activists (34 percent) was those making $75,000 or more per year. More tellingly, 87 percent said they vote for Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives (as opposed to 46 percent of all respondents), and 77 percent described themselves as “conservative.”

This is the same section of U.S. society that in the past gave us such groups as the John Birch Society (who believed that Eisenhower was a Soviet agent). What motivates these people? Trotsky used to say that the petty bourgeoisie are terrified of being pushed down into the ranks of the proletariat. It seems to me that something similar is at work here. The idea of social welfare is frightening to these people, because they see it as somehow a repudiation of their middle class status. (Although that doesn’t stop these people from accepting Social Security checks or Medicare, perhaps because they see these as part of their middle class privilege.)

The last time we saw such an upsurge in the looney right was during the early days of the Clinton administration. That culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. It remains to be seen where this will go.

Posted in Obama, Republicans | Leave a Comment »

One-Term Obama?

February 20, 2010

A recent poll showed that a majority of Americans think that Obama will only serve one term. This shouldn’t be surprising. Obama’s two biggest accomplishments during his first term were 1) giving billions of dollars to the banks, and 2) escalating the war in Afghanistan, two moves that were both unpopular. He made no real effort to win over voters. His stimulus plan was too timid to have much real effect, and he completely mishandled the issue of health care reform, dropping it in the lap of Congress, who, of course, made a complete hash of it. Obama is starting to look like Jimmy Carter, who wreaked his own presidency to advance the neoliberal project.

The second year of his presidency doesn’t look any more promising. He has announced government loans for building more nuclear reactors. (How about loans for rebuilding New Orleans? At least the Big Easy isn’t radioactive.) He also wants to “reform” Social Security and Medicare. These are two moves that are sure to be unpopular. That second term is looking more elusive every day.

Obama has created a bipartisan commission to review government entitlements. This is a coy move. No doubt Obama is hoping to deflect public criticism by being able to say that he is only carrying out the recommendations of a bipartisan commission (note that magic word, “bipartisan”). Unfortunately, the Republicans are not fully co-operating, much to Obama’s annoyance. Obama’s proposal for a deficit-reduction commission created by Congress was shot down by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans.

Why wouldn’t the Republicans want to do this? Bear in mind, a large chunk of the Republicans’ voter base is composed of elderly voters. You may recall that George W. Bush wanted to trash Social Security, but he had to drop the idea after his fellow Republicans got cold feet. The G.O.P. wants to get rid of entitlements, but they want the Democrats to be the ones who take the heat for it. (An exception here is the certifiably insane Michelle Bachmann, who is waging a campaign against Social Security. No doubt, she believes that Obama’s goal is to herd us all into re-education camps, where we will be forced to collect Social Security checks and receive medical treatment paid for by Medicare. Truly, an Orwellian nightmare.) I have a sinking feeling that Obama may end up doing just what the Republicans want him to do.

Good-bye, second term.

Posted in Democrats, Obama, Republicans | 5 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »