Friday, April 1, 2011

OBAMA, The Passive President - LET THE BANKSTERS OPERATE HIS "CHANGE" PERFORMANCE

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com


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OBAMA IS REALLY RONALD REAGAN IN DRAG. LIKE REAGAN, OBAMA SIMPLY LETS THE SPECIAL INTEREST RUN THE NATION, HIS BANKSTERS, WAR MACHINE FOR MUSLIM DICTATORS, AND THEN HISPANDERS FOR ENOUGH OF THE ILLEGALS VOTES TO GET REELECTED.

OBAMA IS A DEEPLY CYNICAL MAN THAT SEEMS TO TRULY HATE THIS NATION.

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Obama's 'Where's Waldo?' presidency

By Ruth Marcus

Wednesday, March 2, 2011; 12:00 AM

For a man who won office talking about change we can believe in, Barack Obama can be a strangely passive president. There are a startling number of occasions in which the president has been missing in action - unwilling, reluctant or late to weigh in on the issue of the moment. He is, too often, more reactive than inspirational, more cautious than forceful.

Each of these instances can be explained on its own terms, as matters of legislative strategy, geopolitical calculation or political prudence.

He didn't want to get mired in legislative details during the health-care debate for fear of repeating the Clinton administration's prescriptive, take-ours-or-leave-it approach. He doesn't want to go first on proposing entitlement reform because history teaches that this is not the best route to a deal. He didn't want to say anything too tough about Libya for fear of endangering Americans trapped there. He didn't want to weigh in on the labor battle in Wisconsin because, well, it's a swing state.

Yet the dots connect to form an unsettling portrait of a "Where's Waldo?" presidency: You frequently have to squint to find the White House amid the larger landscape.

This tough assessment from someone who generally shares the president's ideological perspective may be hard to square with the conservative portrait of Obama as the rapacious perpetrator of a big-government agenda. If the president is being simultaneously accused of overreaching ambition and gutless fight-ducking, maybe he's doing something right.

Maybe, or else Obama has at times managed to do both simultaneously. On health care, for instance, he took on a big fight without being able to articulate a clear message or being willing to set out any but the broadest policy prescriptions. Lawmakers, not to mention the public, were left guessing about what, exactly, the administration wanted to see in the measure and where it would draw red lines.

That was not an isolated case. Where, for example, is the president on the verge of a potential government shutdown - if not this week, then a few weeks from now?

Aside from a short statement from the Office of Management and Budget threatening a presidential veto of the House version of the funding measure, the White House - much to the frustration of some congressional Democrats - has been unclear in public and private about what cuts would and would not be acceptable.

By contrast, a few weeks before the shutdown in 1995, Clinton administration aides had dispatched Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials to spread the message that cuts in education, health care and housing would harm families and children. Obama seems more the passive bystander to negotiations between the House and Senate than the chief executive leading his party.

He performs best on a stage that permits the grandest sweep. He rises to the big occasion, from his inspiring introduction to the public in his 2004 Democratic convention speech to his healing words in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings.

The president has faltered, though, when called on to translate that rhetoric to more granular levels of specificity: What change, exactly, does he want people to believe in? How, even more exactly, does he propose to get there? "Winning the future" doesn't quite do it.

My biggest beef is with the president's slipperiness on fiscal matters. Obama has said he agrees with some of his fiscal commission's recommendations and disagrees with others. Which ones does he disagree with? I asked this question the other day of Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Here's what I got: "The view espoused by some of the . . . commission that we ought to do Social Security 100 percent off of benefit cuts for sure he doesn't agree with." But of course, the plan that 11 of the commission members endorsed did nothing of the sort.

I was unfair to Goolsbee because I asked him a question he didn't have the leeway to answer. You can't blame the aide for ducking when the boss fudges.

Where's Obama? No matter how hard you look, sometimes he's impossible to find.

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OBAMA SPENT HIS FIRST TWO YEARS IN OFFICE SERVICING HIS BANKSTER DONORS! THEY’VE DONE FINE BY HIM! EVERY PENNEY THEY INVESTED IN OBAMA HAS REAPED BILLIONS!



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New York Times columnist worries over Obama’s “credibility gap”

By Jerry White

27 January 2010

New York Times editorial page writer Bob Herbert penned a column Tuesday entitled “Obama’s Credibility Gap.” Written a week after the Democrats’ electoral debacle in Massachusetts, Herbert, a liberal supporter of the president, expresses concern over growing popular opposition to the administration. He warns that its new rhetoric about “fighting for the middle class” will do little to dampen anger over the economic crisis and the president’s embrace of Wall Street.

Herbert begins by asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” If Americans don’t get the answer soon, or don’t like the answer, he warns, “the president’s current problems will look like a walk in the park.”

What follows is a concise summary of the contrast between the expectations encouraged by Obama’s “campaign mantra of change” and the reality of the first year in office.

Herbert writes: “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.”

The president, Herbert warns, is “creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.”

During the election campaign, the Times columnist writes, there was widespread belief that Obama would be “far more in touch with the economic needs of ordinary Americans” and reverse the pro-corporate policies of his Republican predecessor. Upon election, Herbert complains, the president “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.”

With his poll numbers plummeting and the Democrats facing the prospect of electoral rout in the November congressional elections, Herbert continues, Obama is “trying again to position himself as a champion of the middle class.” Every other utterance from the president, he says, is about “fighting for the middle class,” for jobs and “against the big bad banks.” These pronouncements, Herbert warns, ring hollow, especially since the president is about to announce a new budget plan that will freeze spending on vital social programs and exclude any serious expenditures to create jobs.

The Times columnist ends with a plea to the president, saying the most important thing about the upcoming State of the Union address Wednesday night is not its content, but “whether the president really means what he says.” Americans, he continues, “want to know what he stands for, where the 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.”

This is rather banal stuff. Nevertheless, Mr. Herbert’s question merits an answer.

Obama is a representative of the American ruling elite. His reactionary policies are no surprise, but rather the inevitable result of the social and class interests he has defended throughout his political career. Early on, Obama made his services available to the financial and corporate establishment in Chicago, along with the Democratic Party machine, and groomed himself to use his persona and background to better serve their interests.

Obama was picked up in the 2000s by important sections of the foreign policy establishment, including former Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with powerful financial backers, who were dissatisfied with the Bush administration and wanted to give US imperialism a new brand image, while intensifying the attack on the working class. Except for the color of his skin he is and always has been a thoroughly conventional bourgeois politician who has no compunction about carrying out the most right-wing policies against the working class at home and the oppressed masses around the world.

While Herbert expresses shock and disappointment, Obama’s evolution comes as no surprise to the World Socialist Web Site and our readers. The WSWS has been making an analysis of the forces behind Obama since the beginning of the 2008 election campaign.

Whether or not the Times columnist was naïve enough to swallow Obama’s campaign lies or not, the fact is he helped promote the fiction that the Democratic president represented a fundamental break with the militarist and pro-business policies of Bush and the Republicans.

Even as he acknowledges that Obama lied to the American people time and again, Herbert tries to argue that the president is a progressive and reformer at heart, but somehow he has gotten entangled with the wrong crowd of economic advisors. Thus, he asks, “How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?”

This is absurd. Obama chose Treasury Secretary Geithner and chief White House economic advisor Summers―who were both involved in the financial deregulation carried out under the Clinton administration in the 1990s―to protect the financial interests he was selected to serve.

From the multi-trillion bailout of Wall Street, to the attack on GM and Chrysler workers, to the rejection of any serious relief to the unemployed, to the demand for fiscal austerity, Obama has pursued the single-minded aim of making the working class pay for the parasitism and bankruptcy of American capitalism.

Herbert further suggests that Obama’s problems stem from the supposed “mistake” of focusing on health care instead of job creation. The fact is that health care “reform” has been central to the entire right-wing agenda of the administration, from slashing costs for US corporations, to reining in deficits and the national debt, to preparing to gut Medicare and Medicaid. Moreover, the ruling class as a whole has used mass unemployment as a hammer to impose wage and benefit cuts and drastically increase the productivity of workers.

Herbert presents the president’s repeated lies as incidental or the unfortunate product of political expediency. In fact, such duplicity is in the political DNA of the Democratic Party, which has long been tasked by the ruling class with presenting itself as a party of ordinary working people, while upholding the interests of the financial oligarchy. In the end, however, the interests of “Main Street” and Wall Street are not the same―despite the claims of the president―but irreconcilably opposed.

In the final analysis, Herbert’s meek protest and hand-wringing advice are part of an increasing chorus from the president’s liberal supporters who are desperate to find something they can point to, so that they can continue boosting illusions in this right-wing administration.

The problem for them―and, more importantly, for the ruling class―is that Obama’s credibility has already been chiefly shattered. Tens of millions of workers and young people know he is a fake, a con man and a stooge of Wall Street. Herbert and others are now warning that the administration's newly found pseudo-populism will have little effect other than further inflaming public anger and opposition.



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Obama’s 2010 campaign: Fake populism and right-wing policies

By Patrick Martin

22 October 2010

President Barack Obama began his longest campaign swing of the 2010 elections Wednesday, a four-day tour of the West Coast and Nevada to urge a vote for beleaguered Democratic Party candidates. At each stop, he warned that the outcome of the November 2 congressional election would set the direction of the country “for the next 20 years,” making dire predictions of the right-wing policies that a Republican-controlled Congress would carry out.

While his pseudo-populist rhetoric against Wall Street won applause at large rallies in Oregon and Washington, packed with college students, there is little practical difference between the policies the Obama administration is already implementing and the measures the Republicans would carry out if they return to power.

Obama suggested that the Republicans would “cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires,” “cut rules for special interests, including polluters” and “cut middle-class families loose to fend for themselves.” These charges would be a fair summary of the domestic policies of his own administration.

Continuing the bailout of Wall Street that was begun under Bush, the Obama administration has carried the largest handout of public funds to the wealthy in American history. This was followed up by the enactment last summer of a financial system “reform” bill so toothless that it punishes no one for the greatest outbreak of swindling in history.

The White House assiduously protected oil giant BP from the repercussions of the greatest environmental disaster in US history and last week lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

As for leaving ordinary families “to fend for themselves,” the Obama administration has imposed the burden of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression on working class families, rejecting any serious action as mass unemployment, mass poverty and mass foreclosures have become permanent features of American life.

In the month leading up to the November 2 election, Obama has alternated speeches bashing the Republicans as tools of Wall Street with actions that demonstrate that the Democrats are no less committed to the defense of the financial aristocracy.

On the same day Obama boarded Air Force One to travel to the West Coast, the top administration official in the foreclosure crisis, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, held a White House briefing to declare that “we have not found any evidence at this point of systemic issues” in the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of false legal documents by mortgage bankers.

Donovan rejected any blanket moratorium on foreclosures, claiming, “We are focused on the process early, to keep people in their homes, rather than focusing late, when it is much less likely that people will be able to stay in their homes.” Translated into plain English, the administration policy is to pressure homeowners not to fall behind on their payments, rather than to rescue those who face eviction.

In a column in the New Republic magazine, liberal commentator John B. Judis observed that on the question of home foreclosure, “President Obama’s approach more closely mirrors Herbert Hoover’s than FDR’s.” This was disastrous economically, he argued: “A recovery will depend on increasing consumer demand, not boosting bank capital. And to do that, the administration needs an effective program that will allow working Americans to liquidate their debts without being thrown out on the streets.”

The administration’s indifference was also disastrous politically, he complained, given that the states hardest hit by foreclosures include such electoral battlegrounds as Nevada, Florida, California, Michigan and Ohio. Judis concluded: “It’s the working-class voters who reluctantly backed Obama in 2008, but have been turned off by the impression that the administration cares more about the banks than about them. And there’s little in the administration’s rhetoric to persuade them otherwise.”

In his West Coast speeches, Obama sought to address the mounting economic discontent that is the driving force of the political debacle facing the Democratic Party. He admitted, “There’s no doubt this is a difficult election. It’s because we have been through an incredibly difficult time as a nation.”

This argument fails to explain, however, why the Republican Party has been able to make a political comeback—something it could not do in 1934, two years into the first term of Franklin Roosevelt, although unemployment was far higher than today and living conditions for broad masses of people were far worse.

Obama pointed to the record of the Republican administration of George W. Bush in the eight years that culminated in the Wall Street crash of 2008, but did not explain how, only two years later, this thoroughly corrupted and discredited party is on the verge of recapturing control of Congress.

Unlike Roosevelt, Obama has offered nothing in the way of public works programs to restore employment, or significant checks on the most flagrant forms of Wall Street speculation. This is not merely a personal failing, or, to put more it precisely, Obama’s obvious indifference to the plight of millions of working people is not peculiar to him. It is the attitude of the entire social class, the top one percent in American society, which all the Democratic and Republican politicians represent.

American capitalism is no longer able to provide any significant reform measures. It is an economically declining power, the largest debtor nation on the planet. Consequently, there is no constituency in the American financial aristocracy for economic policies that make any concessions to the masses. Hence the spectacle of record profits and bonuses on Wall Street, while the White House rejects any aid to jobless workers facing foreclosure and eviction.

White House officials concede, albeit not publicly and on the record, that they expect the Republican Party to win control of the House of Representatives, and the president’s main electoral focus has been to safeguard Democratic control of the Senate and of governorships of key states.

There are mounting indications that the administration not only expects to share power with the Republicans after November 2, but that the White House positively welcomes this prospect and is preparing a further shift to the right in both domestic and foreign policy.

In his interview with the New York Times magazine published on Sunday, Obama told reporter Peter Baker that Republican gains would not necessarily be a defeat for him. Baker wrote: “Obama expressed optimism to me that he could make common cause with Republicans after the midterm elections. ‘It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible,’ he said, ‘either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.’”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell responded by telling the Associated Press that he hoped to work more closely with Obama on tax cuts, trade agreements and other economic policies.

White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest cronies, told the CBS program “The Early Show” Wednesday that Obama still held out hopes of bipartisan cooperation with the Republicans. “He’s not going to give up on that,” she said. “He’s going to keep trying, no matter who’s in Congress.”

Another area where bipartisan cooperation is already well established is in foreign policy, particularly in Obama’s continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he has had greater support among congressional Republicans than among some sections of the Democratic Party. Obama retained Bush’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and escalated the Afghanistan war as troops became available from Iraq.

Obama was notably silent on foreign policy in his remarks to the first two rallies on the West Coast, where opposition to the Iraq war has been strong. The word “Afghanistan” did not appear in speeches in Portland or Seattle, and there was only one passing reference to Iraq, when he boasted of having withdrawn 100,000 troops from that country—without mentioning that more US troops are now deployed in the two countries than when George W. Bush was president





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