REALITY: OBAMA IS COLD AND CALCULATING. HIS THEME OF “CHANGE” WAS
GENERATED BY AN AD AGENCY AND HAS NO REAL RELATION TO BARACK OBAMA.
BEFORE HE WON THE WHITE HOUSE, THIS ACTOR HAD ALREADY ACCUMULATED PILES
OF BIG BANKSTER MONEY, IN PARTICULARLY ARCH-BANKSTERS GOLDMAN SACHS WHICH HAS
DONE QUITE NICELY FROM THEIR INVESTMENT IN OBAMA.
OBAMA, ALWAYS LISTED ON JUDICIAL WATCH’S 10 MOST CORRUPT, FIRST BROUGHT
IN BUSH’S ARCHITECTS FOR BANKSTERS RAPE, PILLAGE, BONUSES AND NO (REAL)
REGULATION. THEN HE SURROUNDED HIMSELF WITH THE MOST CORRUPT OF THE BANKSTERS’
BOUGHT WHORES, INCLUDING FEINSTEIN, BARNEY, AND DODD. THEN HE SPEND HIS FIRST
YEAR SERVICING BANKSTERS WITH EVERYTHING THEY WANTED AFTER WHICH OBAMA DECLARED
THE NATION IN RECOVERY, BUT ALSO THAT THERE WAS NO MONEY LEFT FOR JOBS. DESPITE
THE JOB CRISIS, OBAMA STARTED HIS NEXT SELLOUT FOR WALL ST: AMNESTY! 38 MILLION
ILLEGALS IN OUR COUNTRY, ALONG WITH THE CRIME WAVES, AND THE LA RAZA DEMS WANT
TO SELL US OUT ALL OVER AGAIN.
DO YOU REAL BUY INTO THE CURRENT PERFORMANCE OF OBAMA’S PLAY “CHANGE”? ACT 11 “THE POPULIST”????
*
THIS IS OBAMA’S REAL “CHANGE”
January 25, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Bernanke Conundrum
A Republican won in
Massachusetts — and suddenly it’s not clear whether the Senate will confirm Ben
Bernanke for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman. That’s not as strange
as it sounds: Washington has suddenly noticed public rage over economic policies
that bailed out big banks but failed to create jobs. And Mr. Bernanke has
become a symbol of those policies.
Where do I stand? I
deeply admire Mr. Bernanke, both as an economist and for his response to the
financial crisis. (Full disclosure: before going to the Fed he headed
Princeton’s economics department, and hired me for my current position there.)
Yet his critics have a strong case. In the end, I favor his reappointment, but
only because rejecting him could make the Fed’s policies worse, not better.
How did we get to the
point where that’s the most I can say?
Mr. Bernanke is a superb
research economist. And from the spring of 2008 to the spring of 2009 his
academic expertise and his policy role meshed perfectly, as he used aggressive,
unorthodox tactics to head off a second Great Depression.
Unfortunately, that’s
not the whole story. Before the crisis struck, Mr. Bernanke was very much a
conventional, mainstream Fed official, sharing fully in the institution’s
complacency. Worse, after the acute phase of the crisis ended he slipped right
back into that mainstream. Once again, the Fed is dangerously complacent — and
once again, Mr. Bernanke seems to share that complacency.
Consider two issues:
financial reform and unemployment.
Back in July, Mr. Bernanke
spoke out against a key reform proposal: the creation of a new consumer
financial protection agency. He urged Congress to maintain the current
situation, in which protection of consumers from unfair financial practices is
the Fed’s responsibility.
But here’s the thing:
During the run-up to the crisis, as financial abuses proliferated, the Fed did
nothing. In particular, it ignored warnings about subprime lending. So it was
striking that in his testimony Mr. Bernanke didn’t acknowledge that failure,
didn’t explain why it happened, and gave no reason to believe that the Fed
would behave differently in the future. His message boiled down to “We know
what we’re doing — trust us.”
As I said, the Fed has
returned to a dangerous complacency.
And then there’s
unemployment. The economy may not have collapsed, but it’s in terrible shape,
with job-seekers outnumbering job openings six to one. Nor does Mr. Bernanke
expect any quick improvement: last month, while predicting that unemployment
will fall, he conceded that the rate of decline will be “slower than we would
like.” So what does he propose doing to create jobs?
Nothing. Mr. Bernanke
has offered no hint that he feels the need to adopt policies that might bring
unemployment down faster. Instead, he has responded to suggestions for further
Fed action with boilerplate about “the anchoring of inflation expectations.”
It’s harsh but true to say that he’s acting as if it’s Mission Accomplished now
that the big banks have been rescued.
What happened here? My
sense is that Mr. Bernanke, like so many people who work closely with the
financial sector, has ended up seeing the world through bankers’ eyes. The same
can be said about Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers,
the Obama administration’s top economist. But they’re not up before the Senate,
while Mr. Bernanke is.
Given that, why not
reject Mr. Bernanke? There are other people with the intellectual heft and
policy savvy to take on his role: among the possible choices would be my
Princeton colleague Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman, and Janet Yellen,
the president of the San Francisco Fed.
But — and here comes my
defense of a Bernanke reappointment — any good alternative for the position
would face a bruising fight in the Senate. And choosing a bad alternative would
have truly dire consequences for the economy.
Furthermore, policy
decisions at the Fed are made by committee vote. And while Mr. Bernanke seems
insufficiently concerned about unemployment and too concerned about inflation,
many of his colleagues are worse. Replacing him with someone less established,
with less ability to sway the internal discussion, could end up strengthening
the hands of the inflation hawks and doing even more damage to job creation.
That’s not a ringing
endorsement, but it’s the best I can do.
If Mr. Bernanke is
reappointed, he and his colleagues need to realize that what they consider a
policy success is actually a policy failure. We have avoided a second Great
Depression, but we are facing mass unemployment — unemployment that will blight
the lives of millions of Americans — for years to come. And it’s the Fed’s
responsibility to do all it can to end that blight.
*
August 9,
2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Is Obama Punking Us?
By FRANK RICH
“AUGUST is a challenging time to
be president,” said Andrew Card, the former Bush White House chief of staff, as
he offered unsolicited advice to his successors in
a television interview last week. “I think you
have to expect the unexpected.”
He should
know. Thursday was the eighth anniversary of “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in
U.S.,” the President’s Daily Brief that his boss ignored while on vacation in
Crawford. Aug. 29 marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s strike on
the Louisiana coast, which his boss also ignored while on vacation in Crawford.
So do
have a blast in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama.
Even as
we wait for some unexpected disaster to strike, Beltway omens for the current
White House are grim. Obama’s poll numbers are
approaching free fall, we are told. If he fails
on health care, he’s toast. Indeed, many of the bloviators who spot a fatal
swoon in the Obama presidency are the same doomsayers who in August 2008 were
predicting his Election Day defeat because he couldn’t “close the deal” and
clear the 50 percent mark in matchups with John McCain.
Here
are two not very daring predictions: Obama will get some kind of health care
reform done come fall. His poll numbers will not crater any time soon.
Yet
there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent,
anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s
supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best
articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front
page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s
changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She
cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still
“act like they’re broke.”
But
this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great
Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during
the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged —
that, as the president
typically put it a month after his inauguration,
the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest
few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.
No
president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more
quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often
beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions
is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or
manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as
trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive
as the news media.
As
Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings
convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in
spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for
corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the
screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the
former Congressman Dick Armey, now a
lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines
Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more
than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.
But the
Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the
moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet
and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the
first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties
supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.
Then
there are the 52 conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who have balked at the public
option for health insurance. Their cash intake from insurers and drug companies
outpaces their Democratic peers by an average of 25 percent, according to The
Post. And let’s not forget the Democratic Senate
Campaign Committee, which has raked
in nearly $500,000 from a single doctor-owned hospital in McAllen, Tex. — the very one that Obama has cited as a
symbol of runaway medical costs ever since it was profiled in The New Yorker this spring.
In this
maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either
party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be
encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana
congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted
to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade
group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for
his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last
week The Los Angeles Times reported — and The New York Times confirmed — that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care
negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the
administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why
the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on
C-Span.
The
making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to
get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike
Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically
did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we
could actually believe in.
His
first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of
Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team,
including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog
role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then
burst. The questions
about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is
still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total
received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50
billion — are awarding a
total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.
It’s in
this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass
in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final
result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned
against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least
reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform
package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on
his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.
The
best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure
of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are
that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have
it backward. The larger fear is that
Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans
do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most
unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this
August would be if the opposition actually woke up.
*
The
Mexican occupation of 38 million illegals depress wages $200 - $300 billion per
year for Americans. These same Americans are forced to pay the staggering
welfare costs of the occupation as well. Welfare paid to illegals in Mexican
occupied Los Angeles, is nearly $40 MILLION PER MONTH. In Los Angeles, 47% of
those employed are ILLEGALS.
*
January 26, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s Credibility Gap
Who is Barack Obama?
Americans are still
looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like
the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk
in the park.
Mr. Obama may be
personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political
map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the
opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the
centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall
Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who
is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.
Mr. Obama is in danger
of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always
be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much
more he won’t be able to close it.
Mr. Obama’s campaign
mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would
change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the
disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very
wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor.
“Tonight, more Americans
are out of work, and more are working harder for less,” said Mr. Obama in his
acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. “More
of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values
plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you
can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”
Voters watching the
straight-arrow candidate delivering that speech, in the midst of the worst
economic crisis since the Depression, would not logically have thought that an
obsessive focus on health insurance would trump job creation as the top
domestic priority of an Obama administration.
But that’s what
happened. Moreover, questions were raised about Mr. Obama’s candor when he
spoke about health care. In his acceptance speech, for example, candidate Obama
took a verbal shot at John McCain, sharply criticizing him for offering “a health
care plan that would actually tax people’s benefits.”
Now Mr. Obama favors a
plan that would tax at least some people’s benefits. Mr. Obama also repeatedly
said that policyholders who were pleased with their plans and happy with their
doctors would be able to keep both under his reform proposals.
Well, that wasn’t
necessarily so, as the president eventually acknowledged. There would
undoubtedly be changes in some people’s coverage as a result of “reform,” and
some of those changes would be substantial. At a forum sponsored by ABC News
last summer, Mr. Obama backed off of his frequent promise that no changes would
occur, saying only that “if you are happy with your plan, and if you are happy with
your doctor, we don’t want you to have to change.”
These less-than-candid
instances are emblematic of much bigger problems. Mr. Obama promised during the
campaign that he would be a different kind of president, one who would preside
over a more open, more high-minded administration that would be far more in
touch with the economic needs of ordinary working Americans. But no sooner was
he elected than he put together an economic team that would protect, above all,
the interests of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance
companies, and so on.
How can you look out for
the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and
Larry Summers in the other?
Now with his poll
numbers down and the Democrats’ filibuster-proof margin in the Senate about to
vanish, Mr. Obama is trying again to position himself as a champion of the
middle class. Suddenly, with the public appalled at the scandalous way the
health care legislation was put together, and with Democrats facing a possible
debacle in the fall, Mr. Obama is back in campaign mode. Every other utterance
is about “fighting” for the middle class, “fighting” for jobs, “fighting”
against the big bad banks.
The president who has
been aloof and remote and a pushover for the health insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, who has been locked in the troubling embrace of the
Geithners and Summers and Ben Bernankes of the world, all of a sudden is a man
of the people. But even as he is promising to fight for jobs, a very expensive proposition,
he’s proposing a spending freeze that can only hurt job-creating efforts.
Mr. Obama will deliver
his State of the Union address Wednesday night. The word is that he will offer
some small bore assistance to the middle class. But more important than the
content of this speech will be whether the president really means what he says.
Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what
he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation.
They want to know who
their president really is.
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