Jobless Recovery- Oil Protests & Obama Magic
In Canada this week there is a G20 meeting of the finance ministers representing the 20 most prosperous nations. The Obama administration is encouraging the world to increase spending to support the economic recovery that they say is taking place. Tim Geithner is preaching increased spending and avoidance of prudent government budgets as the path to economic recovery.
Several nations have proposed reducing deficits as a path to recovery. Obama using Geithner as a spokesman has opposed such an outrageous idea. Restricting spending to what a nation can actually afford is incomprehensible to Obama and his financial team.
Obama keeps talking about the recovery that is taking place. He must have started to believe in fairy dust or magic incantations because his stimulus program certainly shows no evidence of important success. Last month the new jobs were mostly census jobs and most of them were a one day hire with little additional census taking required,
The recovery is an example a expecting a magic potion to work. It must be faulty magic because the reality of private sector jobs has not yet appeared. Obama is weaving a Fantasia like tale. He is a reincarnation of Mickey mouse as the Sorcerers Apprentice with few skills in the use of an economic magic wand. Like Mickey, every move he make causes the flood of America’s economic problems to rise.
The housing situation remains stagnant. Mortgage money is almost free and there still is no appreciable recovery beyond those home sales that included government tax credits. With mortgage interest in the mid 4% range it would appear reasonable to expect home sales to be booming. New home construction is not booming and a matter of fact is barely breathing as a provider of jobs. With unemployment close to 10% and underemployed raising the troubled workforce figure to 15 or 16 % a housing boom is in a misty distant future.
It is becoming even clear to many one time supporters of Obama that a generous description of his administration skills is that he really doesn’t know what he is doing. A less gentle, but perhaps more accurate description of Obama, is that he knows exactly what he is doing and is following a plan that is alien to the America tradition, as a land of private enterprise, with individual opportunity at it’s core.
He seems to be driving successfully towards a goal of changing America to a land governed by this alien philosophy in which he strongly believes. His known background is grounded in Socialism and belief in government control of our lives and liberty
I am becoming convinced that the oil spill is looked upon as an opportunity by Obama and his cohorts to pass additional legislation that will place another industry under his control. The regulations that will be imposed on the ol industry will go far beyond issues of safe drilling practices. The crippling of the oil industry will be used to promote his plans for alternative non-fossil power sources to become a major part of our lives.in the near future. The fact that there are no non-fossil energy sources available at this time to replace the fossil fuels seems to be of little importance to Obama.
He is ideologically driven and the private sector, people, the Constitution and opposing views are not any part of his governing strategy.
The criminalization of the oil industry has started. I have wondered where all the war protesters that were present during the Bush administration had gone. They have not picketed Obamas’ failure to end the war or close Gitmo Their unexplained absence has ended.
The pickets have joined hands across Gulf beaches protesting the oil spill and the oil companies. No one seems to be protesting government ineptness. They are focusing on the oil companies. Like the vapid actions of war protesters there seems to be no idea or interest in finding a way to protect the beaches or stop the oil as part of the hand holding protesters program. The protest is against oil and is promoting non fossil answers for energy.
The media is covering the hand holding beach protesters with a sense of relief since they now have visual replacements of the war protesting. The protesters need a bit of coaching in their effort . The hand holding protest is facing inland in every TV shot I have seen. They are not facing the problem out on the water or by taking action to help protect the beaches in any meaningful activity.
Inane protest is enough for the hand holders
The next 5 months seem like an long long time to wait for the start of real changes that we need. I hope there is meaningful opposition organized by then.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Eternity,
Your comments are always of interest even when they are longer than the Post that has stimulated your reply.
You may be correct about Obama and Facism. I am not sure that your model is correct in extolling the efforts of Lulu and Hugo as an example of enlightened leaders.
Obama having a kill switch on the Internet as part of the Senate Bill is scary whether he is a Socialist or a Fascist.
How do we classify the legislators who would give him such power?
Where do we find a politician of Kevin Rudd’s quality in any of our current crop, whatever their governing philosophy?
Hugo Chavez and Lulu DeSilva as well as Evo Morales of Bolivia, are notable because first and foremost they have broken the centuries long rule of white, European colonist. These men are of indigenous stock and this is the first time since the genocidal European invasion some 5 centuries ago, that the people of the land, rule the land…their OWN land.
Please look beyond CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, ABC and other government-sanctioned, corporate propaganda outlets masquerading as unbiased sources of news. Once you do, you will get closer to the truth; that like Castro of Cuba, Chavez, DiSilva and Morales are not the enemy of the US, the US is the enemy of itself, which unfortunately can also be said of Israel–a “mini-me” version of the United States–a country in which 18 families own 60% of the nation’s collective corporate wealth: http://maxeternity.blogspot.com/2010/07/18-families-control-60-of-equity-value.html
Buck, just ask yourself this: why do we have $1,000,000,000,000+ to spend on colonizing Afghanistan and Iraq, but we don’t have money to keep colleges healthy, offer better pay to police, firemen and women and pay high school teachers a salary that can actually live on.
Why can we afford to continue building nuclear power plants, but we can’t afford to build solar power plants or a national high-speed rail system?
Why can we afford to bail out private banks, but not afford to keep hard-working citizens in their homes?
And why on God’s green earth are we spending half of our national budget on defense related programs?
It’s sociopathic–it is psychotic. And until Americans wise up and realize that human needs are more important than corporate needs, we will continue down this path of self-destruction.
The government is not the problem, it’s the rogue corporate cannibals which control the government, the media and the courts. That’s the problem.
Hence, for all their fury, Teabaggers are fucking clueless. They’ve got it all wrong.
Just look at the BP oil volcano in the Gulf. Who’s in control there, the corporation or the government?
You see, that sums it all up: public resources controlled by a private company, which treats the government like it’s lap dog, just like the banks, the insurance companies, the arms manufacturers, et all.
Our government is nothing more than a tampon for mafia-style collective of corporations that are constantly on the rag.
The oil industry is a criminal industry, just like the banking industry and other aspects of last century’s foul plutocracy that refuses to go to its grave where it belongs.
Furthermore, it is an absolute falsehood that there is no fully-developed solutions to non-fossil fuel energy, which can and will sustain this nation, once the OILagarchy loses its death grip. As, for instance, it is public knowledge that many decades ago a long-range electric car was created by GM–being highly successful–but was pulled from the market. It is also public knowledge that several nations around the world are already getting significant portions of their daily energy consumption from renewable energy; to say nothing of the fact that Genpax of Japan already has a car available for the market which runs on water: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jivb7lupDNU
In Germany for instance, included in industrial farming subsidies is a program for solar energy “farms.”
On the subject of President Obama being a Socialist…don’t I wish !!! Obama is every bit as extreme and hard-right as Bush ever was, in some ways even more.
For instance, Bush only had the occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whereas Obama has an additional 3 proxy wars going on: Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
Obama has increased the Pentagon’s budget, and he’s now working on getting an “Internet Kill Switch” within his executive power. This is Fascism, no Socialism.
Hello? History 101.
If Obama were a socialist he would be more like Lulu Di Silva of Brazil or Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, which would be to provide equal footing toward uplifting the poor and working class to a more just standard of living, putting thieving corporations in check, no longer allowing welfare queen, elitist white men to rape and loot shared resources, in the name of “democracy.” Hello, Dick Haliburton Cheney are you listening??? Hello Henry “Welfare Queen” Paulson, are you listening???
If Obama were a Socialist he’d be nominating someone like Glenn Greenwald to the Supreme Court, not a stealth, right-winger like Elena Kagen.
If Obama were truly a Socialist, he would have done what Austrailia’s Prime Minister did in less than 3 years time. From Truthout.org:
“Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s in only two and half years in the office. Significant achievements he revolutionized that kept Australia out of global economic recession, got rid of work choices and restore decency to the work place, started to built nations infrastructure i.e. national broad band network which he fundamentally believed would transfer the economy which is yet to conceive, begin education revolution, trade training centres in nation’s secondary schools, new libraries in schools, nationwide early child hood education, introducing national curriculum in every states and territories, created fifty thousand more universities places, invested more in universities researches, deep reform in health system, national health and hospital net work, biggest investment in cancer services the nation have ever seen, building 20 regional cancer centres, first time setting up national organ transplant authority, restore decency in pensioners by signif
icance increase in the age pension , long time due paid parental leave, reduced to half the homelessness in the country, added 20 thousand additional units of social housing, , ratify the kyoto protocol, boosted renewable energy target to 20 %, the emission trading scheme was three times tried to get through the parliament, first time setting up Murray Darling basin river system authority, bringing Australia on the table of G-20, closing the gap between indigenous and non indigenous Australian, commitment to create 50 thousand new jobs for indigenous Australian, apology to the stolen generation.”
Read the entire article here: http://www.truth-out.org/first-female-prime-minister-elected-australia-makes-history60862