Legacy of the First African-American President

I wonder how many people who comment on what President Obama said in any particular speech actually heard him speak. It’s far easier to read the media and form an opinion, but often there’s very little difference between an article that’s supposed to be journalism and the op-ed pages that are openly personal opinion. 

Not long ago he said he made two promises at his inauguration: that he wasn’t a perfect man and wouldn’t be a perfect president; and that he would work unflinchingly towards giving the middle class better opportunities to be rewarded for their work. He smiled as he said he didn’t break either of those promises. And he hasn’t. As to the first, nobody’s perfect. But it’s a rare American President who will stand up and acknowledge that, and then do what he needs to do to fix whatever problem has resulted from his imperfection.

Obama has done that with Obamacare. He has acknowledged that HealthCare.gov is flawed, and he hasn’t blamed the IT specialists who set it up. He’s clearly said “that’s on me”. He promised people they could keep their old medical insurance policies and it turned out they couldn’t. Again, he shouldered responsibility for that and did something about it. 

You would think, from the way the media interprets what he says and how he says it that he’s on the back foot. But he isn’t. If you listen to him speak you can see that.

He was never going to have it easy. It’s one thing for a country to want change; it’s another for everybody to actually be willing do what’s necessary for that change to happen. For Obama to have been optimally effective, voters needed to take responsibility for properly informing themselves about the Republican agenda, and not give them so much power to thwart Obama at every step. 

And as for him being African American, the racist river of blood that has tainted America since forever never dried up, it just flowed underground. It will be generations before every white conservative American can look at an African American president and see a man or a woman before they see the color of their skin. If it ever happens. What's more likely is that the conservative base will die out. They're vocal, often vicious, and counter-productive. But they aren't smart. They don't even wait for somebody to give them rope. They just grab it and go about hanging themselves.

There’s been a lot of noise about how the ACA is Obama’s legacy, and Republicans celebrated wildly whilst they thought they could take it down, then when HealthCare.gov floundered at first. They believed part of their main objective – to destroy Obama – was achieved. 

Firstly, they didn’t succeed, and HealthCare.gov is already functioning a whole lot better. Secondly, Obama’s legacy is that as the first African American president in a country still dessicated by racism he hasn’t buckled and given in to Republican efforts to derail him and his mission – to improve the lives of the majority of Americans; to strengthen the middle class and to change a status quo that’s brought the US to its knees. Part of that has been to provide all Americans with affordable quality healthcare and destroy the power insurance companies have had which they abused by selling low quality insurance. 

Obama has also withdrawn America from war-mongering and brought the deficit down from 9.2% of GDP in 2009 to less than half of that, at 4.1%, currently. It’s the fastest sustained decline in a deficit since World War II. No wonder House Republicans, whose main opposition to Obama in 2012 was the deficit, who don’t want the status quo to change, don’t want reform, don’t want to lose the power they’ve abused for way too long, stir up dust storms wherever they can to distract Americans from the truth. 

That Obama is successful. He was always going to be, no matter how hard it was for him.

Ultra Right Congress Declares War - On its own Electorate

Congress, controlled by the ultra right, is at war. Their foe? Their own electorate. It's debatable whether they've noticed or not.

The NewYork Times reported today that Republicans in Congress have said they’d agree to raise the debt ceiling if Democrats agreed to, amongst other things:

Delay the health law for a year; Overhaul the tax code; Keystone XL oil pipeline construction; Offshore oil and gas production; Increase permission for energy exploration on federal lands; Roll back regulations on coal ash; Block new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on greenhouse gas production; Eliminate a $23 billion fund to ensure the orderly dissolution of failed major banks; Eliminate mandatory contributions to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Limit medical malpractice lawsuits; Increase means testing for Medicare.

President Obama’s response was to say “No Congress before this one has ever, ever, in history been irresponsible enough to threaten default, to threaten an economic shutdown, to suggest America not pay its bills, just to try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with a budget.”

But he isn’t the only one who looks on this madness with disgust.

When the US Government shut down in 1995 after a budget battle similar to the one that’s currently happening, 51% of Americans blamed Republicans in Congress, and 28% blamed Bill Clinton. 

In a recent CBS poll 44% of respondents said if the same thing happened again they would blame Congress Republicans and 35% Obama. Obama has less support than Clinton did but how much of that is attributable to agendas that have nothing to do with budget or even of government is an unknown. Whatever the reason, despite that resistance to Obama, Congress Republicans are still in the firing line and their unpopularity is increasing virtually by the minute.

When asked ‘Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation's economy – Republicans in Congress or Barack Obama?’ 45% of respondents chose Obama, and 33% chose Republicans in Congress.

But when the poll questions focused solely on Republicans in Congress – i.e. the distraction of the Obama-agendas is removed from the picture - then the reality of how much support Congress has even amongst Republican voters is quite shocking. 80% in total (and 75% of Republican respondents) disapproved of the overall job Congress is doing. 80% of respondents said they believed that threatening a government shutdown is not an acceptable way to negotiate.  

In this latest blackmail fiasco the ultra-right Cabal, which appears to control Congress, represents about 25% of the Republican electorate. Yet it continues with the behavior that is destructive to the US as if it has the right to ignore those it represents. Is that even constitutional? It sure doesn't look like democracy.

The Power of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et al

When a megalomanic dynasty falls apart I celebrate. What about Google, Apple, Facebook et al? The megalomaniac seems pretty appropriate. We think of them as being just massively creative, but when creativity is used to accumulate power and control it gets another name: greed. The greed that drives the eWorld isn't a beautiful thing or a strength, it's an inner monster that strips people of their humanity. 

What does a company need to monopolize the world for? Because companies are about people, right? How much money can an individual spend in a day on things that they can actually use?

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon et al run roughshod over whoever is in their way. Remorseless, relentless. But we idolize them - because they make billions by producing bright toys and using brilliant PR to convince us we need them? Because they work incessantly to evade responsibility and to increase their control over us?

Accumulating, accumulating. Meanwhile, the middle class in the US fights for survival; around the world children are sold into forced labor; women are sold as sex slaves. There's a lot that these companies could do if they really applied themselves but they don't. 

Celebrity-corporate individuals call themselves philanthropists and get mega strokes for donating a million here, a million there. But it's chump change to them.

It’s hard to imagine now what the world would be like if Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple fell off the face of the earth. But I guess a few years before Gaddaffi was tossed out it was hard for Libyans to imagine what life would be like living free of him. 

Too much power corrupts. Not because power in itself is a bad thing, but because anybody who wants that much power is inherently weak, not strong.