Recovery Interruptus – Why Obama Just Tanked the Economy

When the markets closed after news of the debt deal signing, the Dow Jones had dropped 265.87 points, or 2.19 percent, the biggest sell off in two years.  This followed Boehner’s boasting that he got 98% of what he wanted in the negotiations.  I don’t doubt it at all.

The market today accurately predicts the state of the economy six months from now. Why? Is the stock market prescient? No, it’s just that reality rules, and the market doesn’t believe campaign slogans or talking points. It deals with what works or doesn’t work.

Over 300,000 jobs in the short term will be lost as part of this Obama/McCo­nnell monstrosit­y. Millions more jobs are predicted to be lost.  The market knows that cuts in government spending mean that there is no one purchasing anything, not the government­, not private citizens. Business doesn’t exactly boom when no one is opening their wallets to purchase goods or services.

Obama and the Democrats are pivoting and saying *now* we will focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. Why hasn’t that been the focus the last three years?

Besides, focusing on jobs now is like someone burning down all of our houses, and then telling us that they are now going to focus on the homelessness problem.

David Bromowich had a very insightful piece in the Huffington Post about Obama’s true nature, the man who has been stripped of all the hype:

We had thought the country was in disastrous condition in 2008, and that Obama was the man to pull us out of it. We were misinformed. Instead of turning from the Bush-Cheney policies and the Paulson-Geithner policies and treating them as an aberration, he ratified the former by opening a chapter of new wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and rewarded the latter by turning the infection-carriers into certified physicians. Who was Barack Obama after all? A young politician who excelled at giving sonorous utterance to prepared words (every mass address of the 2008 campaign was done with a teleprompter) and who could defend with ad-lib competence a law or program developed by a suitable conglomerate of others. But Obama lacks the ability to explain a policy or a predicament. He cannot argue. He cannot occupy a position and fight to hold it. He cannot mimic or humor or deflate, or detect those hidden points of leverage that may reshape a public discussion by the force of wit and invention. Not will not, but cannot. It is a kind of ability impossible to hide.

He does not use the authority he has; what hope from entrusting him with more authority? The coming social catastrophe, whose seeds are borne by the terms of a new austerity directed against the poor, the weak and the unlucky, was facilitated by a Democratic president and a Democratic senate with public opinion on their side. And yet, by the end of the discussions Obama had worked himself down to a position where only surrender was possible. We have had two and a half years of his presidency now, and if the strength was there, we would have seen it. That is why so many Democrats contemplate a vote for Obama in 2012 with a sense of appalled inevitability.

President Obama is a charming listener and a pleasing talker. All the evidence from Harvard, from Chicago, from his brief and uneventful career in the Senate tells the same story. The gift required of a leader in a time of crisis — that is, to explain the reason of public matters honestly and answerably — was what we looked for in 2008. Six presidents among the original founders had that gift; but they were the race of giants before the flood. Lincoln, too, had the gift in words he wrote himself; FDR had it in words written by others; Kennedy, at the end of his life, was beginning to show it. Obama likes to compare himself to Lincoln but the president he most nearly resembles is Clinton — but it is Clinton without the knowledge of politics, without the passion for politics, without the sheer tenacity of devotion to the game of politics. Clinton beat his Tea Party and humbled their leader within a year of their midterm victory, and their only revenge was an impeachment which they also lost. Obama has awarded his opponents a hostage, the economy, which they won’t release in a year, or two years, or ten.

We mistook Obama for a man of strong convictions. Why? Because he has an aesthetic admiration for people with strong convictions, people with names like Gandhi and King. Yet the emotion of conviction — a feeling that will not let you go — is foreign to him now and probably always was. The broad programs to which he thought he adhered, and talked as if he believed in, he has sold down the river. In his recent press briefings, he has seemed shaken and depressed. He has wondered aloud why he should go on being president. This may be the first time a sitting president who sought re-election has made such a confession in public. So the Democratic Party is leaderless. And the enthusiasts of the Tea Party, who did not deserve the debt-ceiling victory Obama handed them, do deserve the explanation that he has denied them. An explanation and an argument addressed to something more than people who cling to their guns and religion, people who are bought off by big money, people who swallow the ridiculous ads they see on TV. Who now will dare to tell them why anyone thinks differently?

David Bromwich: Why Has Obama Never Recognized the Tea Party?.

That was absolutely, perfectly stated.  I have come to the same conclusions.  Obama has no unshakable beliefs about anything.  He has no passionate idea that he is willing to fight for.  He dresses up this lack of ability to lead, this inability to enunciate the issues, and make sense of them by explaining these personality deficits as being examples of his “spirit of compromise” and bipartisanship.

This bipartisan spirit is just a smoke-screen for the fact that this intelligent man doesn’t know what to do.  He lacks a sense of purpose and commitment.  He doesn’t believe in right and wrong. He doesn’t care about the suffering of others.   I don’t know why he ran for President.  He should listen to candidate Obama’s speeches sometime, and then consult his speech-writing team for political advice.

His speechwriters knew what he should say and promise.  But having surrounded himself with nothing but Wall Street CEO’s and Megabank advisers, he has listened to their advice without filtering any of it based on what the country needs, or even what the Democratic Party stands for.  There are reasons that the Democratic Party has stood for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  To dismantle them means that the elderly cannot afford both medication and food.  They can no longer stay in their homes.  The loss of Medicare and Medicaid will cost lives and worsen the quality of life for young and old alike.

Obama will do whatever anyone close to him tells him to do, whether it’s Geithner, Summers, Boehner, or McConnell.  His selection of advisers has proven the downfall of his Presidency and the middle class, the lower class, the elderly and the poor of this country.  We are headed for increased unemployment and a double-dip recession, which will decrease federal revenues and worsen the deficit.

But don’t worry, Obama’s focus now is on “jobs, jobs, and more jobs”.  Too bad he is three years too late. But we can all take comfort in the fact that Obama will be satisfied with whatever the Republicans give him.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald says that Obama is not just flawed, he is evil.  Obama has turned his back on the average American because he expects to gain a political advantage from being willing to hurt the poor, the weak, and the elderly:

As I wrote back in April when progressive pundits in D.C. were so deeply baffled by Obama’s supposed “tactical mistake” in not insisting on a clean debt ceiling increase, Obama’s so-called “bad negotiating” or “weakness” is actually “shrewd negotiation” because he’s getting what he actually wants (which, shockingly, is not always the same as what he publicly says he wants). In this case, what he wants — and has long wanted, as he’s said repeatedly in public — are drastic spending cuts. In other words, he’s willing — eager — to impose the “pain” Cohn describes on those who can least afford to bear it so that he can run for re-election as a compromise-brokering, trans-partisan deficit cutter willing to “take considerable heat from his own party.”

The myth of Obama’s \blunders\ and \weakness\ – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

The whole article is well worth the read.  I think it’s sad, but Glenn Greenwald is telling the truth.  In that case, I don’t even expect Obama to nominate a liberal for the Supreme Court once he’s been re-elected.  What we have in the White House is a conservative Republican, an extension of the George W. Bush administration.

The howl of the extreme right-wingers echoes throughout Washington over Obama’s election and his policies.  Republicans everywhere, who understand what is going on, cannot keep from smiling every time Obama’s name is mentioned.  Still, when the Republicans are in front of the cameras, they will bash Obama openly.  It’s all part of the Kabuki theater that is our Federal government, completely co-opted by corporations and the wealthy.  They pretend to be angry at Obama, and Obama pretends to want to do what’s right.  Political theater is all we have, and no matter who wins in 2012, we will have a Republican President.