Our plan is to have an even worse economy for longer than Bush.
To top it off, we will give MORE money to the rich than Bush did, and less to everyone else.
Surely, this will lead to re-election!
(No, but it will lead to Obama making even more $$$ than Clinton did after his Presidency, and faster)
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Ian Welsh
To forestall the obvious, yes, the financial collapse happened under Bush. But most of Bush’s years had a better economy than most of Obama’s years. This is indisputable, a matter of FACT, not opinion.
Well, unless you’re a 1%er, in which case, yes, Obama HAS been created a better economy—for you.
S Brennan
S Brennan
November 5, 2014 at 2:03 pm
Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan – a chestnut from Roman times
Judging from the initiatives that passed, liberal ideas are not in decline, but Democrats, under the “leadership” of Obama, masquerading as liberals, surely are falling on their collective ass.
But why?
Was it…after having won in 2006 by promising to reverse Bush policies…Democrats did not even attempt to stop the shipwreck, but instead shoveled coal to the furnace as the ship approached the iceberg…”cleverly” planning on blaming the captain for the shipwreck of state? Sweet huh?
Was it…after having won in 2008 by promising to oppose the nearly dead TARP, FISA & NDAA Bills they immediately “pivoted” and started whipping for their passage. FYI, it’s shtick for Democrats, Clinton had his NAFTA, WTO & MFN betrayal.
Was it…after having won in 2008 by promising to reverse Bush economic policies…Democrats transferred the economic reins over to Bush administration’s hand picked protégés who “foamed the runways” with trillions of taxpayer monies, purchasing financial paper so the tiny few in financial institutions/individuals that caused the mess…would not face consequences of their actions…never mind prosecutions for fraud?
Was it…after having won in 2008, in the midst of historic job losses comparable to the Depression, [that we still haven’t recovered from*], Democrats, under the “leadership” of Obama could not find a “shovel ready job” in a nation which the Society of Civil Engineers says is in need of trillions of repairs. WTF, we have hundreds [thousands?] of bridges, water and sewage systems over one hundred years old. Nope, even when bridges fall down, [with some regularity], we can’t put a jobs program together for young adults to scrape and paint bridges.
Was it…after having won in 2008 by promising to end Bush’s disastrous war of aggression, [wars, which if you will recall, were supported wholeheartedly by Democrats…in spite of millions marching against…but I digress]…Democrats decided to extend the Iraq occupation beyond Bush’s exit dates and escalate AF-PAK from 18,000 to 135,000 troops, which led to countless deaths and the disaster we witness daily.
Was it…after having won in 2008, Democrats, [who were heavily funded by Pharma & Health Insurance], instead of solving the worst economic crisis since the great depression decided that 2009 was the “right time” pass a Health Insurance Bill that rewarded past transgressions with a new revenue stream, by coercively pooling [and jacking] the small percentage of individual purchasers, with individuals who could not get insurance due to the expense of chronic disease. All the while, ignoring millions of Americans being thrown onto the street, the little DC fairy tucked inside the Bill, huge giveaways to Big Pharma…in a country with drug prices that are often 20 times what next most expensive country citizens pay.
Was it…after having won in 2008, Democrats who claim to oppose war, went off on a tear, funding-arming-training armies of Al Qaeda terrorists and Nazis to wreak terror in Libya, Syria & Ukraine, countries at peace with the United States. Not since we committed genocide upon the native nations of north America in the Indian Wars, has the US started so many wars in such a short period of time. And the carnage was….to the applause of bloodthirsty Democratic media pundits.
Was it…after having won in 2008, Democrats could not manage a single prosecution of a major financial figure in what was clearly securities fraud by rating agencies whose clients openly and brazenly bribed to receive fraudulent ratings. Not surprisingly Eric Holder, midwifed CDO’s & CDS’s [the weapons of economic destruction, outside of FTC regulation] at his law firm in the mid-90′s.
Was it…after having ignored the plight of lower 4.25 quintiles for six years, well-to-do Democratic pundits looked around on the havoc they have wreaked…and to a man/woman, exclaimed, what wonderful foreign policy and economy we have. Apparently, nobody was fooled by this artifice.
No, this child is not an orphan, the child is of many loins and it has all the mutilated genes of the cowardly Democratic party under the “leadership” of Obama abandoning the successful principals and policies of the past [1932-1978]. Those policies account for the progress and great feats of our forbearers.
Six years ago, Republicans were almost extinct, but careful nursing by the Democratic Party under the “leadership” of Obama, have brought the reptile back to life. I am sure those minions responsible for the “miracle cure” will be amply rewarded by their masters. I think Obama will join Clinton in hitting 8 figures, apparently, being a Judas pays better than it used to…and with no stigma, just polite applause.
http://l.facebook.com/lsr.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdata.bls.gov%2Ftimeseries%2FLNS12300000&ext=1415214209&hash=AckZ13H2OmA53HP8rNPdJB8TcgXN-GKQUJJ605LA-mMSfw
S Brennan
And here is another by Jesse at Cafe American in the same vein…albeit better than mine.
05 November 2014
Why The Democrats Got Their Clocks Cleaned
The Democrats failed to make the most of a great moment in history because there was no Democrat brave enough, independent enough, to energize their party around the mandate for reform given to them overwhelmingly by the people in 2008.
Remember when everyone thought that the Republican party was dead, completely and utterly repudiated in 2008? And how they have risen from the dead!.
Obama was a pawn of the moneyed interests before he even took office. He didn’t sell out; he was a well engineered product with a well targeted brand, selected and groomed for it.
Less a politician than a thoroughly modern manager, Obama’s primary objectives are to please his shareholders, whomever those may be. They were certainly not the people who voted for him and he is not any kind of progressive or reformer once one scratches the surface.
That became clear in his first 100 days with his appointments. And in his defense, the Democrats on the whole have been throwing their constituents under the bus for the sake of Wall Street money since 1992. So Obama was not so much a betrayer as a fake, a member of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic party….
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-democrats-got-their-clocks-cleaned.html
PJDNE
Cowardly? Steamrollering 50 state attorneys general into dropping criminal investigations of the banks, in a virtually unprecedented violation of the Constitutional separation of powers, isn’t exactly cowardly. It’s brazen, hideous, appalling…but not cowardly.
Stirling Newberry
Tweedle meet Tweedum.
Stirling Newberry
Yes, one more point – Red Zone will be dedicated to Ian, if I can get a publisher.
S Brennan
PJDNE, I stand corrected…
“Cowardly? Steamrollering 50 state attorneys general into dropping criminal investigations of the banks, in a virtually unprecedented violation of the Constitutional separation of powers, isn’t exactly cowardly. It’s brazen, hideous, appalling…but not cowardly.”
BlizzardOfOz
Can I broach the topic of immigration here? I have been wondering more and more why nonpartisan left-leaning types and old-school liberals seem implicitly to support mass immigration. Do they dispute the trade-off between a large influx of foreign workers, and a tight domestic labor market that would support high wages? If not, then what could possibly outweigh that concern?
I get why partisan Democrats support mass immigration — call it their “elect a new people” strategy, to import as many Democrat-leaning Latinos as possible. I get why SJW and Cultural Marxist types support it — white people=bad, brown people=good. Limousine liberals and Wall Street Democrats are obvious — suppress wages of IT workers and import cheap labor to be their gardeners, maids, construction workers, etc. I suppose some old-school liberals might be susceptible to some dewy-eyed notions of “a nation of immigrants”, Ellis Island, etc.
I just don’t get why people like Ian here, Lambert from Corrente, Jon Walker & co at FDL, are for it. The best guess I can come up with is some combination of the first (more Democrat voters) and last (diluting Scots-Irish stock) reasons. But really it doesn’t add up to me.
(Not sure if people here would have caught this, but Republicans seem to have gained some traction from the immigration-vs-jobs issue in yesterday’s election: https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/live-election-night-blogging-what-results-mean-immigration)
S Brennan
BlizzardOfOz,
Such Democratic notables as, Caesar Chavez and Barbra Jordan [from lower class backgrounds] argued against the Dixiecrats and Republicans desire for a wide open immigration. The DLC Democrats with “Think Tank” prodding solved the “problem”, by declaring that anybody against massive immigration was racist and that pretty much killed opposition from the left.
The chart shows, people in the USA are generally more liberal during times of low immigration.
http://www.immigrationeis.org/sites/default/files/images/charts/chart_immigration_into_us_1820_2010.gif
LorenzoStDuBois
Can we play a game?
How much $$$ does Obama end up with?
The Big Dawg is well over the $100m mark by now. Obama is young, energetic, I’m going to say a quarter billion. Check back in 35 years.
Everythings Jake
This election result seems necessary to give Obama the cover to pass the Grand Bargain. Instead of the Gingrich and Clinton forced to work together trope, we’ll get Obama and McConnell. G&C really escalated the impoverishment of the middle class, O&M will seal the tomb.
ProNewerDeal
^Everythings Jake,
I am very worried about a Grand Ripoff, now that far-right-wing extremists are in control of both branches of Congress & the Exec branch (Obama Reagan Jr.).
Do you/others know on if the Senate fillibuster is potentially relevant in stopping a Grand Ripoff bill? If so would a self-proclaimed Progressive Senator like B Sanders or E Warren actually exhibit some courage & fillibuster a Grand Ripoff bill, even though this contradicts the policy preference of the The Anti-FDR Traitor Obama? Even then, would it matter, since there may be 6 right-wing Democratic Senators that would team up with 54 ReThug Senators to meet a 60-vote fillibuster-proof treshhold?
1 concept I wonder that I never see mentioned outside of say internet writers/podcasters like Ian, is that the US safety net already is the worst or among the worst of the OECD. Civilized nations have Medicare For All, ReThugz like Obama/McConnell/Boner hate USians so excessively that Medicare at age 65 is too generous & want to privatize it or make it eligible at age 70 or whatever. Really is it even accurate for the US to consider itself an OECD/ “1st World Nation” given its barbaric minimal safety net?
Mallam
Say what you will about Harry Reid, but he opposes cuts to Social Security. We’ll see what happens in the coming months. I expect a few government shutdowns. My agency wasn’t affected last time — we can go about four weeks on fees we’ve collected — but everything will be in the open this time. His team seriously contemplated minting the coin, indicating that there was never a threat of default and he was using it to push a GB through.
I suspect the House Republicans will be even harder to herd this time, being as they’re more RW. Further, the Senate is substantially harder for McConnell to control. Cruz, Paul, and DeMint were bad enough. He’s got his hands full, now.
BlizzardOfOz
@S Brennan
I wonder how long they are going to keep flogging that dead horse? Probably until enough people become aware that the PC-to-English translation of “racist” is just “white”.
On thinking about the issue of immigration some more, I realized that I was reading too much into some of Ian’s statements on the subject. As far as I know he hasn’t advocated strongly one way or the other on immigration policy — when he has mentioned immigration, it has been more in the context of deportations, and even then, not taking a position so much as noting that Obama has failed to keep promises to a core constituency, even when he could have done so acting alone.
At most, I could probably have maintained that the nonpartisan left de-emphasizes immigration as an issue relative to the dissident right (where it is very central to their concerns). Maybe it is that, since liberals want more government intervention in the economy, they view immigration as neutral-to-positive (bigger labor force=more *potential* economic growth). Conservatives see immigration as a negative from elementary supply-and-demand in the labor market. From the perspective of the culture wars, again, the left tends to see immigration as a net positive (“diversity”), whereas the right sees a net negative in fracturing the culture along racial lines (“diversity+proximity=war”).
Anyway, I recall that Jon Walker at FDL gets a lot of push-back from his commenters when he posts about immigration. So it is also, to an extent, another one of those issues where the divide is more elitist-populist than left-right.
Spinoza
For what its worth, most working-class whites I know in my Southern town don’t really care about immigrants or Hispanics. For the most part, we all work in the same jobs together!
Spinoza
Also, I know this was mentioned in an earlier post, Mr. Welsh, but short-order cooks, of which I am, used to make decent money?! That’s unthinkable. I can hardly believe that was the case once upon a time.
Jerome Armstrong
BlizzardOfOz, I would probably fall in that same camp. I wouldn’t necessarily dispute what you propose as the wage trade-off, but nationalism isn’t really a priority for me either. Probably globalist in a Marxist-Libertarian way on the issue. More social flow and less stratification.
I sincerely doubt it, but would love the chaos if Obama executive ordered conditional amnesty on a mass scale here now coming up. I think the odds are about 8 percent.
Lisa FOS
I don’t think the Democrats and Obama are cowardly at all. I think they have achieved everything they have wanted to do, except attack Syria.
Talk Left/Do Right is what they do now (with increasingly little ‘Talk Left’ as time goes on) . As does (and did) the Labour Party in the UK, Labor Party in Australia and so on.
The neo-liberals got their teeth into social democratic parties a long time ago. Here in Australia in the ’80s it was the Labor party that wiped out out textile companies, car companies and much of our manufacturing and introduced all the neo-liberal ‘reforms’.
Labor in New Zealand was even worse.
Personally I think people should just vote for Conservative parties now, at least they are honest. I’d rather see someone come at me with a knife, than being stabbed in the back. And after awhile Social democratic parties might reform themselves and actually be worth voting for again in the future.
Jerome Armstrong
I was curious, so looked. Clinton lost 12 Senate and 58 House seats; Obama lost 14 Senate and 71 House seats. I have read that Democrats control less at the state legislative level at any time since 1860 (not confirmed), so it’s even a deeper hole than at first glance.
Clinton:
Senate
1992: 57 – 43
1998: 45 – 55
House
1992: 270 – 165
1998: 212 – 223
Obama:
Senate
2008: 60 – 40
2014: 46 – 54
House
2008: 258 – 177
2014: 187 – 248
sancho panza
re: the comment above about immigration
Net Emigration to US is at historic lows.
Obama has deported a record number of immigrants. He makes Pat Buchanan blush with envy.
Immigration is not a serious issue. It is a bogus one set up to scapegoat, through old fashioned and time tested race baiting, a greater hatred of the poor, of all stripes, as the sole cause of our economic woes and a potential cause of undermining our NATIONAL SECURITY. Stoking fear and riling up good, hardworking, white folk to demand “closed borders” and more military spending to protect us from the MASS INVASION–BUILD THAT WALL!. It is not a real issue. It is effective in making people forget the true parasites at the top looting everyone here and abroad for their own pleasure.
Bill H
For those making comments about “immigration reform,” that is not the contentious issue. The difficult issue is illegal immigration and what form of amnesty to grant, or whether it should be granted at all. The assumption the the illegal immigration issue must be rolled into immigration reform, but they are actually separate issues and rolling them together is a ploy to make it seem that the illeagls problem has simply gone away, and/or that by dealing with the future we will have neatly and painlessly dealt with the past. It is the usual search for the holy grail of the easier softer way.
Phil Perspective
Jerome Armstrong:
Yes, the Democrats are in deep poo at the state level. Most state level Democratic parties are in a world of hurt, largely of their own doing. I have to believe Clinton took a big hit this week. Her campaigning for Grimes, among others, really worked out well.
reslez
I forget who said defeat isn’t an orphan, it’s a bastard. And everyone blames everyone else for the responsibility.
Illegal immigration is a wedge issue intended for idiots to get angry about, because it’s preferred for us to hate poor brown people rather than the people profit from them. (Please keep generalizing everybody as R vs D too, because it helps identify which opinions to ignore. Both parties worship the same god. And “SJW”? If you oppose SJ what pray tell do you stand for? Besides idiocy.) The reality is business wants illegals, it thirsts for cheap labor, and cheap labor it shall have. But please unleash your hatred! Stay angry at the immigrants and tug your forelock before your betters. If you actually wanted to address the issue I’d suggest starting with the business owners who hire them. You might also want to refrain from destroying any more 3rd world countries.
In the meantime here is my 3 point plan for legacy party domination:
HATE (the poor and people with a different background from yours)
IGNORANCE (you don’t need to know what we don’t want you to know)
FEAR (whatever we tell you fear)
Here is my 3 point plan for breaking free:
LOVE (your neighbor)
KNOWLEDGE (required for all true citizens)
PERSEVERE (it is not necessary to hope but to stand fast)
Roman Berry
Ya know, the Democrats real issue boils down to this: They stand for exactly the opposite of most of what the people who vote for them believe they stand for on issues related to everyday life for the vast majority, i.e. jobs, wages and the economy. They are not the party of the people. The New Deal, in an age where the Democratic Party is essentially a reflection of the DLC (which disbanded not because it lost, but because it had utterly won), is dead. And only so many fools can continue to support the delusion that the Democrats are other than what they are. And that ain’t enough fools to get elected.
I defy anyone to tell me in plain language exactly what the Democratic message to the masses is these days. Can’t be done. The only overarching vision is that of empire (“exceptional!” “strongest military on earth!”) and worship of the myth of “free trade”, i.e. your job and your life matters not so long as there is short term profit to be made.
Harry Truman is the one who said “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.” And there you have it.
The Republicans many be insane, but at least they have a story.