{"id":290088,"date":"2017-01-14T20:40:47","date_gmt":"2017-01-14T19:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=290088"},"modified":"2017-10-21T18:00:55","modified_gmt":"2017-10-21T17:00:55","slug":"obamas-failed-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/obamas-failed-presidency\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama\u2019s Failed Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a former lifelong Democrat, stating here a clear and incontestable fact: Barack Obama is a failed President.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s true not just because of the sad realities such as that \u201cTop Ex-White House Economist Admits 94% Of All\u00a0New Jobs Under Obama Were Part-Time\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u2014 or, as the economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz wrote in the original<\/span><\/a> of that study: \u201c94 percent of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.\u201d (\u201cAlternative work arrangements\u201d referred there to Americans who were involuntarily working only part-time jobs \u2014 they simply couldn\u2019t find full-time, though that\u2019s what they wanted<\/i>.) In other words: Obama\u2019s failure isn\u2019t just<\/i> because of America\u2019s increasingly sales-clerk, and burger-flipping, workforce.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Obama\u2019s failure is also not just because \u201cPoverty Rose In 96% Of U.S. House Districts, During Obama\u2019s Presidency\u201d<\/span><\/a>. (However, that reality turned out to be decisive in Hillary Clinton\u2019s loss to Donald Trump on November 8th, as Nate Cohn pointed out in The New York Times<\/i> on December 23rd, headlining, \u201cHow the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an\u00a0Opening for Trump”<\/span><\/a>. Hillary was running on Obama\u2019s poor record.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s failure is also because of other important reasons. Among them is the uncounted thousands of people who were killed in, and the uncounted millions of people who became refugees from, the places where Obama (or else his installed regimes) bombed and caused the residents to either die or flee<\/span><\/a>. George W. Bush\u2019s destructions of Iraq and even Afghanistan were now being followed by the destructions of Libya by Obama and Sarkozy, and of Syria by Obama and Saud and Thani and Erdogan, who armed the tens of thousands of jihadists and sent them into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad \u2014 and Bush\u2019s destructions were followed also by Obama\u2019s keeping in power<\/span><\/a> the barbaric junta-regime that replaced the democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on 28 June 2009 shortly after Obama entered the White House<\/span><\/a> (and this junta-regime, in turn, caused Honduras\u2019s murder-rate to soar 50% to become the world\u2019s highest, which then caused hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to flee and become undocumented U.S. immigrants, against which Donald Trump campaigned). The Obama regime has thus created far<\/i> more misery outside<\/i> America, than inside it. Failures such as those didn\u2019t cost Hillary Clinton many (if any) votes (because most voters didn\u2019t even know about these foreign-affairs matters), but those failures were actually even bigger than Obama\u2019s failures in purely domestic U.S. policy matters (which voters do know about). Trump campaigned against \u2018illegal immigrants\u2019, but he never even called attention to those people\u2019s fleeing the hells that the U.S. regime had created in not only Honduras but earlier in Guatemala and El Salvador \u2014 coups and U.S.-trained death squads.<\/span><\/p>\n

In noting Obama\u2019s failures, I\u2019m not a Republican; I\u2019m no one who is condemning Obama for his allegedly being a \u2018Marxist’ \u2018Muslim\u2019, or some other imaginary distraction from the reality (a reality which is too Republican for Republicans to be able<\/i> to criticize \u2014 so, they\u2019ve instead ignored<\/i> that reality, and cited fake \u2018reasons\u2019 against him, including \u2018death panels\u2019 and other fabrications, which Republicans then forgot about after their fraudulent allegations against him became clear, to all but insane people, as being just<\/i> Republican lies). <\/span><\/p>\n

Obama is a failure not<\/i> because he wasn\u2019t sufficiently conservative or \u2018Christian’ (as Republicans had constantly accused him of having been), but instead because he wasn\u2019t sufficiently progressive<\/i> (nowhere close<\/i> to being a progressive) \u2014 and, in many ways, he was actually far more conservative than any of his duplicitous campaign-rhetoric had pretended him to be.\u00a0He\u2019s an extraordinarily gifted liar \u2014 he was phenomenally successful at that<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I am not blaming Obama for congressional Republicans\u2019 having been more obsessed with making him be<\/i> a failed President, than they were interested in making America be a successful nation. Republicans lie at least as much as he does, just not nearly as skillfully. (They especially can\u2019t feign compassion as skillfully as he.) This article thus does not<\/i> blame him for what the overt<\/i> Republicans were doing to cripple the little good he had actually tried to achieve \u2014 such as closing Guantanamo. It\u2019s only about Obama\u2019s<\/i> failure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s failure was all his own<\/i> \u2014 it\u2019s not<\/i> because of the good things that Republicans had blocked him from doing; it is instead because of the horrible things (such as his failed TPP, TTIP<\/span><\/a> and TISA trade-treaties, and his successful 2011 killing of Gaddafi<\/span><\/a>, and 2014 coup in Ukraine<\/span><\/a>) that were central to his actual<\/i> agenda \u2014 a conservative, even reactionary, agenda, which favored the interests of the hundreds of billionaires who control U.S.-based international corporations, above<\/i> the interests of the 300+ million<\/i> American people, whom the U.S. President is supposed<\/i> to be serving.<\/span><\/p>\n

I voted for Barack Obama both times, because both of his opponents (\u201cBomb bomb bomb Iran\u201d<\/span><\/a> McCain in 2008, and \u201c#1 geopolitical foe\u201d<\/span><\/a> Romney in 2012) were clearly determined to focus America\u2019s enormous military expenditures away from<\/i> exterminating the jihadists and their Saudi funders, toward instead conquering Iran (McCain) and Russia (Romney), and also because Republicans \u2014 throughout at least the period extending from 1910 to 2010<\/span><\/a> \u2014 consistently had, in fact, produced a record of far less success with the U.S. economy, than did Democrats, and especially<\/i> because neither McCain nor Romney had repudiated the very worst<\/i> President in U.S. history (at least prior to Obama) and his atrocious record of lies and needless bloodshed and invasions: George W. Bush \u2014 Bush\u2019s Party instead reaffirmed that monstrous President<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, consequently, I never expected Barack Obama to turn out to have been, quite possibly, even a worse<\/i> President than Bush. Nobody expected that \u2014 except Republicans, for whom Bush wasn\u2019t bad enough<\/i> to satisfy them (and certainly not bad enough for them to apologize for<\/i> \u2014 so, they did not<\/i> apologize for him).<\/span><\/p>\n

Here, then, is Obama\u2019s astounding record of failure:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a Democracy to a Plutocracy\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cUnderstanding President Obama\u2019s Strategy to Force Cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cObama Finally Lays His Cards on the Table\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBarack Obama Is Now Completing His Long-Held Plan to Subvert the Democratic Party”<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cObama: \u2018I Don\u2019t Care About the Public\u2019s Welfare\u2019\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

As that last one documented, the Obama \u2018Justice\u2019 Department scored an all-time low number both of financial institution fraud prosecutions, and of white-collar-crime prosecutions. Obama came into power immediately after an economic crash that was loaded especially with financial-institution frauds. He protected the banksters. So, financial-executive-fraud prosecutions didn\u2019t soar, like they should<\/i> have; instead they plunged<\/i>. Like Obama told the Wall Street bigs, near the start of his regime, on 27 March 2009, in private, inside the White House: \u201cMy administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. \u2026 I\u2019m not out there to go after you. I\u2019m protecting you.\u00a0\u2026 I\u2019m going to shield you.\u201d<\/span><\/a> \u00a0And that\u2019s what he did. And, on 20 September 2016, Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America\u2019s Future, headlined \u201cBanks Used Low Wages, Job Insecurity To Force\u00a0Employees To Commit Fraud\u201d<\/span><\/a>, so there was no way that the employees could keep their jobs except to do the crimes that they were being virtually forced by their bosses to do. The criminality was actually at the very top \u2014 where Obama had promised \u201cI\u2019m protecting you.\u201d So, the TARP\u2019s Inspector General urged, on 26 October 2016 (since the President was refusing to prosecute those people), “that Congress remove\u00a0the insulation around Wall Street CEOs\u00a0and other high-level officials by requiring\u00a0the CEO, CFO and certain other senior\u00a0executives to sign an annual certification\u00a0that they have conducted due diligence\u00a0within their organization and can certify\u00a0that that there is no criminal conduct or\u00a0civil fraud in their organization.\u201d The Special Inspector General of TARP, Christy Goldsmith Romero, was proposing this, as being the way to make prosecutions, of these top-level fraud-executives, so easy that the Obama Administration\u2019s claims \u2014 that there was no top-level fraud that could<\/i> be prosecuted \u2014 would be an even more<\/i> blatant, absurdly false, lie, than it had been<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

If this country were Ukraine, or even Russia, then Americans (trained by decades of a CIA-controlled \u2018free press\u2019) would say \u201cOh, of course those countries are corrupt, but America isn\u2019t like that.\u201d But, at least under Barack Obama, \u2018we\u2019 were<\/i> that. This was<\/i> America \u2014 and \u2018our\u2019 President was protecting the elite fraudsters, instead of<\/i> prosecuting them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, anyone who would say that the American people are not better off now than they were at the end of Bush\u2019s disastrous Presidency would be either misinformed or lying, because there\u2019s lots of data showing that, finally, eight years after Bush, Americans are better off than they were at the end of Bush\u2019s miserable eight years<\/span><\/a> (even though not yet better off than Americans were prior to Bush\u2019s 2007-2008 crash). And the Administration published on December 15th its record of \u2018successes\u2019 \u201cThe 2017 Economic Report of the President”<\/span><\/a> which was real but not adjusted for the fact that Obama came into office at the pit of the economic crash, which means that such \u2018successes\u2019 are almost inevitable, hardly a credit to Obama. But yet, the reality stands, that the Obama economic recovery was the weakest in the entire post-World-War-II period. Plus, the federal debt doubled on his watch, even while, as that Economic Report mentioned only in passing: \u201cThe United States has seen a faster increase in inequality in recent decades than any of the major advanced economies, and despite the historic progress made over the last eight years, the level of U.S. inequality remains high.\u201d Normally, after an economic crash, economic inequality reduces<\/i>; but under Obama it remained at or near its pre-crash high. <\/span><\/p>\n

It was an economic record (and an invasion and coup record) of which any Republican President could justifiably have been proud (since conservatives favor inequality, a caste system<\/span><\/a>, and also favor conquest, empire) \u2014 but no<\/i> Democrat could (except fake<\/i> ones \u2014 such as Obama and the Clintons).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org I\u2019m a former lifelong Democrat, stating here a clear and incontestable fact: Barack Obama is a failed President. It\u2019s true not just because of the sad realities such as that \u201cTop Ex-White House Economist Admits 94% Of All\u00a0New Jobs Under Obama Were Part-Time\u201d \u2014 or, as the economists Alan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":287680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-290088","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}