It's the sort
of thing which happens when we have a President who blocks all accountability,
a President who protects all of the really powerful, "respectable,"
crooks, both inside the Government (the top office-holders in government,
including bum federal regulators, who recycle themselves, at greatly expanded
pay, into their regulated industries), and inside the private economy (the
top-level mega-bank and mega-corporate executives). It's a virtual (but
certainly not virtuous) privatization of government "from the masses to the
classes," which slowly strips the public of the benefits of government
services, such as regulation of the safety of foods and other products, and
which simultaneously increases the ability of private corporations to transfer
those losses (from poisons, toxic effluents and foods, dangerous products,
polluted air, etc.) off onto the public, by making the public sicker, etc., who
will thus be bearing the costs, for which those victims (and not the
Government) will bear the burdens, and the mega-crooks will enjoy the gains
from those takings. More and more companies become more and more empowered to
poison consumers and to cheat investors; and, as those "freedoms" (in this
libertarian society) for executives rise, any company that fails to join their
race to the bottom by taking advantage of that opportunity to transfer all of
their losses off onto the public, will be losing out in the economic
competition they'll be encountering from the executive psychopaths who do
take advantage of their
increased executive "freedom" -- freedom not "of conscience," but "from
conscience" (since there is no law-enforcement against them).To increase the
freedom of the top 1% is thus to reduce the freedom of the bottom 99% -- notwithstanding the
aristocratically funded "libertarian" myth to the contrary (which lie, so
profitable to them, says that there's no such trade-off). (And yet Americans want less, not more, economic regulation;
they want more poisons in their foods, more dangerous products, more polluted
water, and more MBS and other toxic assets to invest in. They've swallowed the
propaganda.)
Here is how the great economist Michael Hudson (one of only 28 economists worldwide who had predicted years in advance the 2008 economic crash and who accurately described why it would occur) explained Obama's economics: the Administration he said
"is proposing to take bad debts onto the public-sector balance sheet, printing new Treasury bonds to give the banks -- bonds whose interest charges will have to be paid by taxing labor and industry. ... Bad private-sector debt will be shifted onto the government's balance sheet. Interest and amortization currently owed to the banks will be replaced by obligations to the U.S. Treasury. It is paying off the gamblers and billionaires by supporting the value of bank loans, investments and derivative gambles, leaving the Treasury in debt. Taxes will be levied to make up the bad debts with which the government now is stuck. The 'real' economy will pay Wall Street -- and will be paying for decades."
Since Hudson is one of only 28 economists whose predictions (based on his track-record on the 2008 crash) are worth considering as even possibly constituting expert economic opinion, he asserted that with authentic scientific expertise. Moreover, he was predicting this on 17 February 2009; and the weak 'economic recovery,' which has been non-existent for the lower 99%, has already confirmed his prediction. His headline there also captured perfectly Obama's economic record: "The Oligarchs' Escape Plan -- at the Treasury's Expense."
Under President Obama, not only do the top executives avoid accountability (though their investors might need to fork over a few bucks to pay fines for those executives' violations of laws and of regulations, so that the corporations and not the crooks who run it pay the fine), but also government executives and members of Congress are above the laws, as those laws are being enforced (and selectively non-enforced) by this President.
It's party-time for the mega-crooks (both on Wall Street, and off) under Obama, at least as much as it was under Bush.
Really, there was no meaningful Presidential election in 2008, nor in 2012, because the Bush Administration just continued with changed personnel, much as it would have under McCain or Romney.
CONCLUSION
Under both Bush and Obama, this has been a nation in decline, except for the richest 1%, who are partying with regal impunity, while the public over whom they exercise their enormous financial and political powers suffer their pervasive criminality. The victims are, to Obama, just "pitchforks," to despise, not citizens, to provide honest and crucial service to.
That's what he called us: "pitchforks." That's the term he used for us, when he told the banksters that he would protect them, from us, rather than prosecute them, for us. He doesn't like the "pitchforks." He likes the banksters.
This man is supposed to be a 'liberal.' How long will he keep making fools of liberals? Aren't his policies (real, not verbal) just as conservative as Bush's were? What's the net-difference, actually, other than the rhetoric? The reality is: This is George W. Bush's policies, continuing in office, under liberal rhetoric, with Obama playing the "good cop," to the Republicans' "bad cop," while congressional Democrats have suffered the political losses as Democratic voters are becoming increasingly alienated from their Party as a result of the 'Democrat' Obama's moving America's political center farther and farther to the right via that "good cop, bad cop" game, which makes the entire Democratic Party seem fake, like he is. He negotiates with congressional Republicans, while he sometimes even ignores congressional Democrats; and then he delivers a slightly watered-down Republican "compromise," without so much as having even tried to use the White House as a bully pulpit from which to lambaste the harms that Republicans were demanding to be placed into law. (If he were to do that bully-pulpit routine, congressional Republicans would not be nearly so far to the right as they have become; they'd be more moderate in their initial demands, because they'd then know in advance that their extremism could subsequently come back to embarrass them, in their next general election. That's what two-Party politics is supposed to be like, but Obama short-circuits it.) And, on many matters, Obama is so very far to the right in his initial position, so that congressional Democrats slam him even at the outset, and they tell him that they'll kill the legislation if they need to, in order to prevent him from starting so far to the right. But now, with Republicans in charge of both houses, congressional Democrats will have no power at all. Obama will have a field day signing Republican legislation, though he'll keep up the rhetorical front and veto a few bills so as to sustain the atmospherics of 'democracy.'
Obama is the most effective conservative President since Ronald Reagan, especially on account of his being a 'Democrat,' which is the very thing that especially enables him to move the political center toward the right. (Similarly, Nixon moved the political center toward the left when he recognized China.) In at least one important matter, he has even been outright nazi (racist-fascist), which is unheard-of for a Democrat; and, of course, on that issue, he has had far more Republicans than Democrats supporting him in Congress.
As Obama drags America farther to the right (which he has been doing since at least 16 January 2009, four days before he became President), his nominal Party -- the one that's supposed to be the liberal party -- thus becomes a smaller and smaller political camp. Yet, for some reason, Democrats in Congress don't repudiate the Republican 'Democrat' who (at least nominally) leads them. (They're often fighting him, but only in private. If they had done it in public, perhaps they wouldn't have lost the Senate.)
Obama even blatantly violates laws that are passed and signed by himself; yet nobody holds him to account for it. He was and is required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to appoint a Vice Chairman for Supervision at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, to monitor the Fed's compliance with other provisions of the Act, but he has simply ignored it for four years.
Obama blatantly violates his Oath-of-Office, but both Parties in Congress think that that's okay, to such an extreme extent there's not even a single member of the House of Representatives, in either Party, who introduced a bill of impeachment against him, for his continuing and exacerbating Bush's crimes by serving as the key after-the-fact accessory to those crimes. And the public accepts it, too: there are no hundreds of thousands of Washington demonstrators demanding their individual Representative to introduce a bill of impeachment against him.
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