Could Obama Have Fixed the Economy?

Could Obama have fixed the economy?

Not any more than he can find his anus with two hands, a flashlight and illustrated instructions.

That is not his job. Obama’s job is to deceive. Obama is very good at his job. You can hardly tell he is at work, unless you see his lips moving.

Great kudos to the Republicans. They stated their only purpose was to destroy the Obama administration. They gained control of the House and turned obdurate. Then they convinced the voters to give themselves complete control of Congress to complete that purpose. They were assisted by the gormless Democrats who proved that party could not govern. This all goes to show that you get what you are willing to support. Democracy was not on that list.

We had the choice between:
1) Taking a lot of pain in a short time and then have a sound recovery
2) Taking less pain by diluting it for 20 years

We only have 14 more years to go.

Excellent post! I do inspire to one day, having a job again. If that happens I will contribute.

Best Regards,

Bruce

My breaking moment occurred in summer 2008 when Obama broke his word and voted to retroactively immunize the telecoms for spying. I knew then he was a repulsive sellout. But even so I figured however bad he might turn out, he had to be better than Bush.* I abhorred Bush and still do. But I never imagined Obama would make look Bush look like the good old days!

This might be a painful comparison for those who cheer for Team D, but nevertheless:

1) Bush when confronted with financial crisis and fraud prosecuted the execs and sent them to prison! (MCI, Enron)

2) Bush when facing a severe recession after 9/11 sent checks to every household in the country!

3) Bush when facing a financial crisis in 2008 cut payroll taxes for every worker!

4) Under Bush pre-2006 the Democrats actually fought him over things and pretended to care about civil liberties and governance (Katrina).

5) Bush didn’t give a shit about the deficit (his VP said so flat out) and certainly didn’t alter a whit of his domestic policy over it

6) Sure it ended badly but at least under Bush there was an economic recovery in which the middle class participated (and not only via home equity loans). As opposed to a recovery only for the rich, in which 99% of Americans grew poorer than before. Unforgivable.

7) Obama cut food stamps for hungry families. Unforgivable. SNAP rolls boomed under Bush but he didn’t care. Times were tough but hey people had food.

8) And because it needs to be said for the Team Ds, yes Bush was a terrible disaster of a president. But Obama doubled down. And now he owns it too.

* Of course, I voted third party both times.

It isn’t just Obama, but the whole d–n Democratic Party. This drubbing at the polls has been building up every since the 2006 midterms, when voters voted to punish Bush and his cronies for the Iraq War, only to have Pelosi immediately take impeachment off the table.

In election after election the Dems turned their backs on their base in favor of their wealthy donors and they have finally reaped the whirlwind for the actions–and yet they right now overwhelmingly favor an even MORE conservative candidate (Hillary) to be their standard bearer in 2016. Well, good luck with that, I’ll be staying home–again.

“Can one man change the world?” Not very often. That is why – meaning we progressive, liberals, or whatever we call ourselves – need desperately to study and read history. Because every once in a while the opportunity arises to change the world. Whether it is one person who stands on a rocky crag and looks out over a battlefield, and sees instantly the doom of an army, a war, and a nation, unless he acts IMMEDIATELY and without orders from on high – as Warren did at Little Round Top, Gettysburg – or someone who spends months and years pondering what happens as matter approaches the speed of light – as Einstein did – the simple fact is, yes, one person CAN change history. And part of our role as sentient human beings, our purpose, is to be familiar with the history of those moments when the scale can be balanced, when the efforts of one individual made all the difference, so that if we are deemed worthy of being given such an opportunity, we will recognize the moment for what it is, and understand what it is we must do.

There is a book that I believe absolutely and eloquently captures the historic opportunity Barack Obama was given in the first year of his Presidency, and how he failed to recognize the moment, and failed to do what needed to be done, with the talents he had, and all the immense power he had been entrusted with, to make the world a better place. That book is Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.

I left this comment a few weeks ago on DailyKos, and it has a small excerpt from Suskind’s book.

I doubt anyone can fully understand the enormity
of Obama’s failure unless they understand the the root of our economic problems is cultural. And by this, I do NOT mean to imply the type of “culture wars” over social issues that the Republicans promote. In May 2010, I quoted extensively from Thorstein Veblen and Sheldon Wolin to explain The Obama administration as “managed democracy”:
According to Wolin,

Corporate culture might be defined as the norms and practices operative at various levels of the corporate hierarchy that shape or influence the beliefs and behavior of those who work in a particular institutional context. Today corporate culture is not confined to the corporation. Managed democracy depends upon managers, and managers are the product and creators of corporate culture. The question is this: what are the characteristics of the culture that corporate managers bring to government? How are the corporatists likely to approach power and governance, and how does that approach differ from political conceptions?

Wolin’s approach here is basically that of Veblen’s institutional analysis. Wolin compares corporate culture to the civic culture he discussed above.

In contrast, the ethos of the twenty-first-century corporation is an antipolitical culture of competition rather than cooperation, of aggrandizement, of besting rivals, and of leaving behind disrupted careers and damaged communities. It is a culture for increase that cannot rest (= “stagnation”) but must continuously innovate and expand. It accepts as axiomatic that top executives have to be, first and foremost, competition-oriented and profit-driven: the profitability of the corporate entity is more important than any commonality with the larger society. “The competitor is our friend,” according to an Archer Daniels Midland internal memo,” and the customer is our enemy.” Enron had “visions and values” cubes on display; its chief financial officer’s cube read, “When Enron says it will rip your face off, it will rip your face off.”

Veblen is particularly powerful on the issue here, when he analyzes how the anti-industrial culture of business managers becomes increasingly barbarian, because 1) the skills of business managers increasingly are concerned with accumulating, aggregating managing wealth, not creating wealth (i.e., being productive); and 2) the accumulation of wealth, in an industrial economy that has come under the sway of management philosophy increasingly depends on the barbarian traits of deception, deceit, and violence.
Do you think an America dominated by a business culture of “we’ll rip your face off” would have been able to rebuild its war adversaries, Germany and Japan, and turn them into steadfast allies? In this sense, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, with a combined population of 45 million in 2000, did not present the enormity and complexities of the occupations of Germany and Japan, with a combined population of 151 million in 1950. I would suggest that the U.S. can no longer achieve what it did in the 1940s through 1950s simply because the dominant culture is so awful.
One of the few observers of the Obama administration who understands this cultural problem is Ron Suskind. In his important book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President he discusses the week that Obama met with the heads of the 13 largest banks, and explicitly told them that he would stand “between them and the pitchforks”, then a few days latter forced out Rick Wagoner as head of General Motors. The bankers went into that meeting “terrified” at the weight of public indignation against them, and the enormous power of the American Presidency to direct and channel that indignation; they were ready to literally grovel at Obama’s feet and beg for mercy. Instead of putting them in their place, Obama publicly proclaimed the bankers to be “savvy business men.” On the other hand, the troubles of General Motors were directly a result of the collapse in vehicle sales caused by the economic disaster, caused, in turn, by the bankers and their financial crash. Suskind writes:

….Presidents are among the few mortals who are sometimes graced with chances to change a culture. Throughout a windswept March [2009], the country had been working to dislodge some of the era’s prevailing certainties about markets being efficient, about people—economically, at least—getting what they deserve, along with the concomitant belief that financial barons are brilliant and indispensable, and manufacturing executives are dinosaurs.
With the eyes of the country on him, Barack Obama ended the month by shielding Wall Street  executives against these winds of cultural change, while he fired a man who had effectively managed four hundred thousand workers in their making of seven million cars a year—without ever bothering to meet him

That week was a historic turning point – or should have been.

Thank you, Ian, for a hard-hitting reprise. If I may toot my own horn yet again, I also wrote about the same things, as the same time. In fact, I think it was one of your postings in on The Agonist that inspired me to title one of my pieces “Let Wall Street Burn.”

On January 2, 2008, I argued that The Credit Crises are THE Story of 2007

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/02/429158/-The-Credit-Crises-are-THE-Story-of-2007

Bear Stearns collapsed four months later, and Lehman Brothers nine months later. I think it is interesting how little attention my story received. It is up to you judge whether that is because my writing fails to capture attention, or I am simply too far ahead of the crowd. Of course, I hope that you will see a way to use my prescience to help inform and direct your audience.

Five days later, I assessed the different Presidential candidates with the goal of determining Who will tell Wall Street to shove it?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/07/432425/-Who-will-tell-Wall-Street-to-shove-it

I wrote: “The big problem with Obama is the same problem Hillary has: his economic advisers are Democratic versions of “neo-liberal” radical free marketeers, so it is going to be the major intellectual breakthrough of their lives to have to admit that most of what they know and believe about economics is wrong.”

On April 22, 2008, I argued that it was necessary to
Euthanize Wall Street to save the economy
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/04/22/501153/-Euthanize-Wall-Street-to-save-the-economy

I cited the Federal Reserve Board’s Report on the Condition of the U.S. Banking Industry for the second quarter of 2006, which showed that derivatives holdings of the 50 largest bank holding companies totaled $117.6 trillion, and that those derivatives had no relationship to their ostensible purpose: to make it easier, or less risky, to provide loans. I cited a February 2007 Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report, Credit Derivatives and Bank Credit Supply, which reached the same conclusion, though the banking jargon used tried to obfuscate the point. I cited a February 2005 report by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Consolidation in the U.S. Banking Industry: Is the Long, Strange Trip About to End?, which concluded that mergers of banks were driven more by “empire building and increased managerial compensation” than economic efficiencies. And I ended by outlining the need for a financial transactions tax.

After Lehman Brothers imploded in September, I reposted most of that article in Let Wall Street Burn http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/09/17/602022/-Let-Wall-Street-Burn

Pissing away $700 billion http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/30/11112/750
posted 10/30/2008 – On how inadequate the “stimulus” was

Debunking the Great Myth of the Financial Markets http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/24/105511/478 posted 05/24/2009 – Presents the evidence that the financial system no longer serves the function of credit mediation for an industrial economy, but in fact is looting the industrial economy

Roosevelt created 4 million jobs in one month http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/8/101352/1485 posted 01/08/2010 – intended to show what could be done if there was will to do it.

A little harsh, Sterling? Scathing would be more like it, and 100% deservedly so. Elegantly put from start to finish.

@ SRK

Think I would go a bit further than that. Any place that puts Karl Marx in the position of being a mild mannered centrist is where we need to be. That alone would generate several generations worth of terrorism (the tactic, not the act). And yes, if a little status quo is good, massive status quo is even better (and stay well away from cliffs and edges).

“Part of the argument is that Obama couldn’t do almost anything because Obama only controlled the House, the Presidency and didn’t quite have 60 votes in the Senate in his first two years. Because this is the case…”

But it’s most definitely not the case!

The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 carved out an exemption from the filibuster precisely for budgetary matters, called reconciliation.

By invoking reconciliation, the quite progressive 111th Congress could have passed budgetary stimulus with only 50 votes in the Senate.

Something like Christina Romer’s $1.8 trillion plan, heavily weighted towards spending instead of tax cuts, could rather easily have gathered 50 votes in the Senate. (Even that would’ve been a bit too small, but it still would have made a genuinely significant difference in the real economy over the Olympia Snowe / Joe Lieberman / Ben Nelson approved stimulus passed under ‘regular order’ in the Senate, with the 60 vote threshold.)

And why did the stimulus not go on the 50 vote path in the Senate? The WH, of course. In their first week in office, the administration sent a letter to Congress, (under the name of Peter Orszag), pledging not to use reconciliation and the 50 vote path in the Senate for stimulus.

So a much larger stimulus was available in the toolkit for the progressive 111th Congress in 2009. Multiple reports are that Democratic Congressional leadership was in favor of a much larger stimulus, knowing they’d be on the ballot in 2010. And Obama rejected the plan in a desire for ‘bi-partisan optics’.

This may seem like a ‘deep in the weeds’ quibble, but it’s the single most important failure in the entire Obama administration’s management of the economy.

I find all the right-wingers commenting on this hilarious. This is not an attack on Obama from the right, it’s a salvo from the Left.

Now that Congress is firmly in the hands of the triumphant Republicans, the final years of this administration promise to be epic, not in what will be accomplished, but what will be destroyed. Lame duck no longer serves its normal function under such conditions as the final input of an outgoing administration. Another term is needed to take its place, therefore maybe: The Quacky Lackey may do in its stead.

The Republicans next year are going to pass a budget reconciliation bill loaded up like a
Christmas tree. They will do at least every two years while they hold both houses. The Democrats never even considered it when they had both houses. You can’t filibuster a budget reconciliation bill. That’s how Bush got all those tax cuts for rich people year after year. It was political malpractice for the Democrats to ignore the budget reconciliation process. At the the time I thought it was because they were abject cowards. I’m beginning to think that they didn’t though that they didn’t want to accomplish anything. They treated having a majority like a hot potato they couldn’t shed fast enough. That way they can just point he finger and make excuses.

An important post, and particularly good stuff from Tony Wikrent, too.

There is political realignment going on now, with splits in both Parties. I think the country was ready for realignment in 2006-8, but it is happening now, as a result of Obama’s decision to extend the Age of Reagan past its natural moment of collapse.

I think realignment will not go well, in part because so many people have no idea about how the political economy works as a system. That widespread ignorance and learned helplessness — which pervades lives due to rapid change and digital upheaval, which buries visible or felt mechanics — reaches from bottom to top. It is the lesson of Trump, who seems to actually understand quite a lot, but is opposed by ineffectual morons who think russiagate is a clever gambit.

The lesser of evils.

Gee, if only Obama were still president and criticisms of his failures then were able to influence what he would do now…

Someone else occupies the Oval Office now I’m told, someone whose ideas about economic issues seem to be even more favorable to banks and banksters and other gangsters and con men than Obama’s were, and even less favorable to ordinary schmucks who have to try to live in this world. It might be more useful to deal with current errors of judgment that have effects now than to continue to fret over what Obama (or Clinton or whomever) didn’t do when time was.

“Obama is a Right Wing President”

President Obama describes himself as a “blue dog” ie a conservative: http://www.theneweditor.com/index.php?/archives/12170-President-Obama-Im-a-Blue-Dog-Democrat.html

Obama’s an Eisenhower Republican and proud of it. He also tried to fence off anyone to the left of himself. So in USA USA, you can range anywhere from center-right austerity advocates to far right authoritarians.

Willy. The answer to your last question is yes.

I agree with Ian. It is amazing how quickly we forget and how quickly self-serving revisionist histories become received wisdom. Ideologically, Obama was in line with or slightly to the right of Ronald Reagan. His chief economic advisors were architects of neoliberalism and the policies which produced the 2008 financial meltdown, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s first and second Treasury Secretaries, respectively. So even before the start of his Presidency, Obama made it clear that his was very much not going to be a transformative Presidency and would be a more of the same one. Still it was funny. Rubin was too toxic to be the outward face of Obama financial policy so that role was given over to Larry Summers. Summers in turn was too toxic either for Fed chair (the position he coveted) or Treasury Secretary (which he had been) so Bernanke whose continuation of Greenspan’s easy money, no regulation policies did so much to create the environment for the collapse was kept in place and Timothy “foam the runway” Geithner, a Summers protégé, was put in at Treasury. Geithner had been head of the New York Fed and as such had the primary responsibility for limiting the activities which led to the meltdown but instead of reining them in he championed them and was one of their biggest cheerleaders. Character is destiny and personnel is policy. So it was clear from the getgo that Obama was never going to take down the banksters, break up the banks, or stand with the American people against them.

John Poynton, the chronology is like this. On Sunday September 7, 2008, Henry Paulson, former CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs and Bush’s then Secretary of the Treasury, took over the huge mortgage GSE’s Fannie and Freddie. The following weekend of the 13th and 14th, Paulson and Bernanke put together a plan to bailout the insurance giant AIG which was to be announced Tuesday the 16th. The bailout of AIG was also a bailout of Goldman, Paulson’s former company and AIG’s biggest trading partner. The 4 remaining investment banks (the smaller Bear Stearns had gone belly up in March) were the other theme of that weekend. With the AIG deal, it looked like Goldman was taken care of. Morgan Stanley looked OK, too. Merrill Lynch was more or less ordered to sell itself to Bank of America. And then there was Lehman, a competitor and rival of Goldman that Paulson had always had a thing against. So lo and behold on this weekend when he and Bernanke are slinging tens of billions of dollars around and just the weekend after dealing with the multi-trillion dollar GSEs, suddenly, so the story goes, they were “too tired” to deal with Lehman, the fourth of the remaining investment banks. So the next day, Monday September 15, 2008, Lehman went bust and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy setting off the great financial meltdown. It was a cascade of events that went like this. When Lehman went splat, money markets who were the big lenders for short term paper suddenly lost money, i.e. “broke the buck.” They stopped lending and this froze credit markets. This led to further losses triggering credit default swaps (CDS). Since CDS represented multiples of nominal losses (essentially being lots of bets on the same credit event), they increased losses exponentially, and put at risk huge pools of different derivative types. All this fed on itself and took out the financial system. It also threatened to take out the last two free standing investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Except that, mirabile dictu, the Fed came through on Sunday September 21, declaring that it would open regular credit lines to them. So the question that has never been answered, indeed never really asked in official circles, is that if the Fed could do this on the 21st for Goldman and Morgan Stanley, why could it not do this for Lehman on the 14th? Why could the Fed and Treasury bail out Goldman, the most predatory of the IBs, not once but twice in a single week, and yet fail to throw a life line once to Lehman? Even though they had been dealing with systemic threats to the financial system (the GSEs, AIG, the other IBs) nonstop since the 7th.

“If there were any particular interest in fostering more positive economic policies for the majority of Americans, not simply serving the pecuniary interests of the already rich, what Obama did or didn’t do would be of much less interest than what is going on under the current regime and what should be done instead.”

Utter nonsense, but I knew that some comment like this was coming.

It is nonsense because it is not enough to say Trump is bad— you have to have an alternative that will actually make people’s lives better and to do this you have to confront the failures of the Democrats and understand where they went wrong and what their motives were and are. This is so obviously true you have to be missing the point deliberately. I knew some comment like yours was coming because one sees it so often. It is the tyranny of the false dichotomy. We can’t possibly think of more than one thing at a time. I have been around religious fundamentalists and people who are dogmatic in their politics and the political types are easily as rigid as the fundies.

In the lame duck period of Bush’s presidency, Obama stepped up and supported the stimulus/rescue package proposed by the “team” then in charge–Paulson and Bernanke. And Obama then carried on with what’s his name who was heading up the NY Fed and then became Obama’s Treasury secretary, Geithner.

Given that Obama made a decision not to take the opportunity presented by the crisis, the question is why.

I think the answer is that Obama decided that health care reform was more important. Why? 20 million people gained access to health insurance.

Oddly, one never sees a demographic breakdown of who these beneficiaries are or were.

It would be interesting to know how those who gained access to health insurance under “Obamacare” voted in the last election.

What is it about “Obamacare” that the Republicans hate so much, after all?

@Donald

And given the continuing obsession with Obama’s failures, Clinton’s failures, and Democrats’ failures to the exclusion — yes, exclusion — of consideration of what is going on now I knew a comment like yours was coming.

Donald, the Democratic failures, bad judgment, and service to the self-proclaimed masters of the universe have already been thoroughly examined and discussed in exhaustive detail — for years and years and years. Ian’s article was written in 2014, and many, many similar articles preceded it. Hugh has been making essentially the same points since before Obama was elected the first time. Some of us were well aware then what was coming. We know — or at least we ought to know — how bad the Dems are and how many failures to take the right path there were under Obama.

We need to pay more attention to what’s going on now and to develop alternatives that go well beyond ineffective party politics and electoral charades.

In effect, we are being ruled by a junta put in place by the current occupant of the Oval Office, acting in service to a faction of the Overclass. This is like the failures of the previous regime on steroids.

Is that OK with you?

Che Pasa. Democrats love to be out of power. That way they can just whine and point fingers and not be responsible for anything. It’s actually wielding power that Democrats can’t stand, because they’re so bad at it. And conflicted. The Awesomely Awesome One mastered the art of creating the illusion of acting in the public interest when he really was just serving the rich and powerful whose acceptance and praise he was desperate for. But most Democrats run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

BTW. I think Obama is much more motivated by a craving for status than a craving for money. Money is nice, but Obama really wants to be counted among the global elite. He’s fantastically successful in this but it’s never enough.

The reason for hashing and rehashing and re-rehashing the evil and immoral successes of Clinton and Obama against the American people is to reach the tens of millions of worshipful cultists who worship one or the other of these two figures. The forlorn hope is that some of these Clinton or Obama cult worshippers may be reached and somehow assisted to begin thinking again.

Why would that even matter? Because the Democrats plan to run another Obama-type figure next election. They have a deep bench full of such people . . . Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, etc.
People who don’t know or understand what Obama’s true policies were and why they were bad . . . will not be equipped to understand what the Democrats’ next Obama 2.0’s policies will be, or why they will be bad. The Democrats’ Obama 2.0 figure will run as “not as bad as Trump” and “maybe even better than Trump”. The more people understand exactly how Obama made America a worse and poorer country for most Americans . . . the less chance that the next Obama figure will get itself elected. If enough Clintobama-type Democrats can be defeated, purged, burned and destroyed; then perhaps the Democratic Party will finally run out of such people to offer up for nomination.

Until the DemParty can be stopped from running Clintobama-type figures, the Republicans will win over and over again with Trump after Trump after Trump.

@ Che Pasa

“What’s your vision for the future, beyond petty politics? Do you have one?”

That’s an excellent question, Che.

Care to answer it?

And, how will you get from here to there?

\”Those “millions and millions” don’t read this blog and they’re not going to. If you actually want to do something positive about the future, then continuing to bash the Clintons, Dems, and Obama is a waste of time. \”

This doesn\’t make very much sense on its own terms. If what we say here makes no difference, why are you upset about anything that is said here? You should be going to every blog that isn\’t explicitly organizing an anti-Trump demonstration and telling them that, and not just the political blogs.

The issue concerning what to talk about at a political blog is fairly simple. You talk about the sorts of things Ian writes about and if someone (whether Ian or a commenter) has any bright ideas about practical organizing then throw that in there as well, but it is not one vs. the other. We need to understand how the Democrats need to improve if we want them both to toss out the Republicans and actually help build a better society once they are in power.

If you want to talk about practical things to do right now against Trump, nobody is stopping you from doing that in the comments. You could also start your own blog or if you have one, link to it (assuming Ian is okay with that.)

As for Trump\’s idiocy, I assume virtually everyone here sees endless accounts of that everywhere and that is as it should be. Trump has a core group of supporters who will back him no matter what–the majority of Americans and certainly the overwhelming majority of people from center to far left know the guy is an idiot. There is some disagreement about how dangerous he is. That has a practical side. Would we actually be worse off if Trump were removed from office and Pence put in power, if Pence was more likely to get things done? Or is Trump so dangerous we should take that risk? I would be open to that kind of discussion at this or any blog My own opinion changes from day to day. But it shouldn\’t rule out criticism of the Democrats. I think this mentality that we should not criticize the Democrats and only think about one thing at a time is part of the problem.

@ Donald

Mostly, I agree with your comment above, but every time I see someone assert Trump’s supposed stupidity, I am reminded of this:

“Captain Renault: We musn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.”

When one man triumphs so thoroughly over the entire Establishment and all its supporters, other possibilities than stupidity should be considered by the intelligent. IMHO

On Trump’s intelligence

Trump has a certain kind of intelligence. He thinks with his gut and his dick. They, plus his inherited wealth, have made him quite successful.

Billikin,
I don’t think it’s possible to do the POTUS job without having a certain degree of callous narcissism. The stress could break somebody with normal integrity and empathy. Trump has an overabundance of callous narcissism. In my previous corporate life (and as a born skeptic), I noticed that these ubermensch were far better at manipulating than they were at knowing the everything which they were always selling. In fact, mano a mano, I found them to usually be technical idiots. With Trump we get to see this in full public view.

@ Billikin

That’s just silly. And lazy.

Hope it made you feel good, though.

He is on top of the world, and you are commenting on small blog. Ruminate on that awhile.

RC—

I think Trump happened to be the man of the hour, unfortunately. I underestimated his likely success like most people. Initially I was amused and delighted at how he chewed through the ranks of the Republican candidates, making them look like idiots. I sort of laughed all the way to election night.

I don’t think he is especially smart. A large number of people wanted to give a giant middle finger to the Establishment and he was perfect for that.

Our electoral system is a bad joke, a farce and it managed to elect a clown, an abuser, a con man, and a bully all rolled into one. It’s done so repeatedly. Trump is by no means the first. A majority of the voters didn’t elect him but that doesn’t matter because the system ensures that the voters’ choice can be and too often is dismissed, overruled, voided, so as to emplace… someone else on the the throne. It’s set up that way, but as long as your tribal preference is the one it chooses, it’s all good. When in 2000 it looked like there might be yet another problem with the farcical electoral system, the Supreme Court lawlessly intervened and a majority of the Court picked its partisan preference.

The fact that there was no uprising then shows you how easy it is for the voters’ interests to be subverted in our ridiculous system.

So if you’re thinking that our electoral system will produce the outcome you desire you’re badly mistaken — unless your desire happens to coincide with that of those who can — and will — jigger the results to suit their desire.

Thus, there will be no postal banking, no tuition free higher education, no Medicare-for-All (to use NC’s triad of issues) via the electoral system. You can’t vote for them in any case.

You vote, if you can vote — and for many, it is becoming more and more difficult or impossible — for and against personalities and propaganda. What happens after an election is something else entirely.

Whether or not Obama could have fixed the economy is essentially irrelevant. The fact is that he didn’t do so on behalf of the many, but he sure did a wonderful job of fixing the economy on behalf of the few. Wow. Herbert Hoover on steroids. I called him Barack “Hoover” Obama even before he ascended the throne. In some ways Hoover was more inclined to aid the many in the face of financial collapse than Obama was.

But he’s not the President now, and his failure to do what a whole lot of people wanted while doing some things a few people wanted, is not the present issue we face as a nation. My own sense is that the nation as we’ve known it is not likely to endure much longer.

The experiment set up a couple of centuries ago is reaching its conclusion.

So what do we do?



@ Willy

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

It does not matter one bit whether the horse knows he is a gift. Not one bit.

It is unlikely that we will ever see a guy at the top who cares about any of us as individuals. That is the world. Better learn to live with that reality.

The internet likes to proclaim the imminent collapse of The (US) Empire. I’ve argued for years that that’s not what’s happening. The Empire, per se, is doing just fine.

The collapse that’s been happening is rather that of The Republic, starting with institutional collapse in the Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan era. The experiment is coming to an conclusion, and the transformation that’s s been under way is from a self-governing constitutional republic to an authoritarian and in many ways autocratic imperial government.

It really doesn’t matter whether we, the Rabble, disagree with whomever sits on the throne of the Empire. Our excoriations don’t matter, but if we should get too uppity about it, we’ll be punished or exterminated no less efficiently than the residents of dozens of cities have already been punished/exterminated overseas. The pattern is set. We’ve seen the results over and over and over again. Cities obliterated, populations annihilated. Or have we not noticed?

That’s the thing. Once it’s all normalized, we don’t notice any more. We may be too busy fighting over the past to notice the present or envision a future.

If we use Rome as a model, the final end of The Republic may not turn out so bad at all. Leastways the Romans apparently didn’t think the advent of Octavian/Augustus’s role and “restoration” of the Republic was such a bad thing — at least not for a very long time afterwards.

The US may go through a brief civil war before consolidation of Imperial rule, and if there is one, the upshot is likely to be regional autonomy. There will not be a revolution along the lines of 1917 or 1789 or 1776 or what have you. That’s just silly.

Regional autonomy within the borders of the United States means that essentially the “united” and the “states” cease to exist. Rather, a tributary relationship between the regions and the center is established, with considerable liberty for the regions to develop independently of one another. Over time, a very different US emerges.

I’m too old to live through much of what is to come, but the outlines are clear enough to recognize the future path (of course barring the unforseen…;-)



@ Willy

You may choose to stay “stuck” there, but then you will continue to miss the big picture that is much more important than personalities.

Stuckness and growth are mutually exclusive.

@RC

It has proven to be a waste of energy to try to communicate rationally with the snowflakes who’s altered state slips further and further from reality. They will continue to flail about striking out at anyone who won’t join them in their slide to permanent loser party.

I see the third party plea as another lost cause unlikely to emerge but if it did it would only make the Clintonites weaker because it could only emerge from their ranks. Trump probably wouldn’t care because the only people blocking his agendas are the republican elites who are feeling the heat of populism and nationalism on the move.

@ Peter

I think that 75 years of TV has everyone convinced that there will be a happy ending, so why should they trouble themselves to think hard or clear about the evidence of what is going on.

I have no such optimism, so, yes, there is a built-in communication problem.

Reality-checking will compel me to stop trying soon. I’m tired.

@ Billikin

How many guys can you take on simultaneously?

Trump is taking on every Establishment-oriented power player there is. And they are all willing to fight dirty to take him down.

You know, even extremely intelligent people have weaknesses in some areas. As Trump certainly does.

But it’s just silly to think he could have accomplished everything he has accomplished without a high level of intelligence.

And it’s just silly to ignore that we desperately need some pushback against many of the trends of the last few decades. The level of stupid about many things that shape our belief systems has clearly been pushed way beyond any reasonable limits.

Who besides Trump is going to deliver that pushback, in your opinion?

@ Che

Belief systems, Che, belief systems.

You do know what those are, don’t you?

Peter, nobody gives a flying fuck about what you say.

Lots of the others here have a theme, or a schtick, or a set of core beliefs that don’t usually change (Hint: mine involves spotting, discussing, and fighting systemic corruption).

But your opinions just flop around in the breeze. One day you bitch about sanctuary cities. The next day you brag about hiring latinos because anglos are just too damn lazy. Then you bitch that a couple latinos tried to break into your bathroom window with knives in their teeth. Maybe you’re pissed that all the good latino help is in the sanctuary cities, but I think you’re just plain goofy. Plus you may need to be paying your help better.

Stereotypical namecalling is a sad sign that one has nothing else to say.

Poor Willy, he has a pretty good memory but his ability to comprehend what he remembers is retarded. This is probably due to the effects of corrupting snowflake conditioning or poor blood flow to the brain.

Because you have this handicap I’ll just state the fact that sanctuary cities/states are harboring criminal illegal aliens. They are releasing them onto the streets and protecting them from deportation by ICE which is insane snowflake behavior driven by their Trump Derangement Syndrome.

“criminal illegal aliens”

Gotta love it. Maybe Trump can help you sort that one out.