BARACK OBAMA’S STRESS TEST AFTER l00 DAYS IN OFFICE
How Should We Assess the Change Administration: What The World Thinks?
By Danny Schechter
Author of Plunder
How would you do on a “stress test? ” Even as the soundness of banks is supposedly measured—with many expected to show signs of insolvency---the whole stress idea demands a broader focus.
How many of the as many as 20 million Americans out of work could pass a stress test, in flying colors? How many among the millions of families facing foreclosure? Or students defaulting on student loans? What about the reported 31 million maxed out on their credit cards, or the many million more bombarded with “debt consolidation” commercials on their cable TV channels at 3 AM when so many anxious people watch because anxiety keeps them from sleeping?
And now, what about the real threat of a deadly swine flu pandemic? That’s something new to get stressed about.
Ours has become a stressed nation as we assess the impact of the first 100 days of the Obama era. The President is coping with his own stress test. He is already at war, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan but also with the high expectations he himself raised. Another front in that war: an increasingly vicious and contentious right-wing media that is turning its viewers into troops for an uprising against his “tyranny.
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