I woke up this morning to a recommended diary touting the empathy of a president who has combined the economic policies of Herbert Hoover with the foreign policies of Lyndon Johnson, thus enabling the United States to simultaneously and needlessly impoverish its citizens and slaughter other other countries' citizens.
No great surprise. This site is still filled with people who would thank Obama for giving them a gift of excellent plant fertilizer if he walked into their house, dropped trou, and took a dump on their living-room rug.
But praising our ass clown of a president for the auto-industry bailout and stimulus is like praising a doctor who watched another doctor save a woman's life and then failed to perform the necessary procedures to bring her out of her coma because he was too busy taking a victory lap around the emergency room.
First of all, the auto industry bailout was begun under President Bush. So even the title of the diary to which I'm responding is incorrect. President Obama obviously isn't the first fucking person in 10 years to give a shit. The diarist admitted his diary was a rant; he should have added it wasn't based on facts, either.
Also, since the bailout was started during the regime of the most conservative president ever, that should indicate that expanding it, as Obama did, wasn't a great act of political courage, unless you want to argue that since Republicans oppose everything Obama does, for him to do anything is a great act of political courage.
As for the diary's premise that we're in our current economic situation for the long haul, that's true, but only because the policies being implemented by Obama and the rest of the world's political elite virtually guarantee it.
In the case of the stimulus, economists calculated that while the Obama administration's proposal was enough to keep the economy from going off the cliff, it wasn't enough to steer it away from the precipice.
Obama didn't follow their advice, and not because he or the advisers he relies on had evidence showing otherwise. Instead, they appear simply to believe the conservative bullshit that is now conventional wisdom in the economic-policy field.
That shows in their emphasis on reducing the deficit by cutting spending at a time when sane (read: not-conservative) economists say that we need to increase government spending to stimulate the economy so we can get back to the kind of growth that can help us reduce the deficit in the long term.
If Obama and his fellow members of the political elite had proof to back up their theories, I would object less to the misery their policies are going to inflict on millions — and probably billions — of people if those policies are adopted worldwide.
But, as Paul Krugman repeatedly points out, they don't. Instead, they seem to be wedded to their economic views precisely because, when put into policy, those views are likely to inflict misery on large numbers of people, as if the economy were a person who needed to suffer through a hangover so he'd learn not to drink excessively.
And even that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that they not only are refusing to investigate whether the people who caused the economic mess we're in broke any laws — as the evidence of fraud in all aspects of the mortgage bubble unearthed by Matt Taibbi, Michael Lewis and others shows they did, they're leaving them in charge of — and continuing to prop up — the giant financial institutions that acted so improperly and immorally. In fact, as Taibbi detailed in his Rolling Stone piece on the financial reform legislation, the restructuring of the financial sector that enabled this disaster hasn't been altered, all but guaranteeing that it's just a matter of time to the next bubble.
The unemployed and disenfranchised in this country and throughout the world are suffering because the world's financial elite created a fraudulent lending and securitization machine that enabled them to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. And rather than prosecute them and nationalize their institutions, forcing whoever bought stock in and lent money to those institutions to eat their losses, Obama and the other members of the world's political elite let them stay in place and propped up their institutions, guaranteeing that the suffering will continue. And it's going to continue until those institutions are forced to value the dubious loans on their books at the loans' real value, which doesn't appear likely to happen any time soon.
That this isn't apparent to someone close to the U.S. auto industry doesn't surprise me. When the industry was booming by cranking out big, gas-guzzling, polluting trucks for the millions of American men who feel the size of the vehicles they drive directly represents the size of their Johnsons, both its managers and its workers blithely ignored the warnings — see number seven in the link — who told them its high times would be short lived.
If unemployment remains around 10 percent, or goes higher, as is distinctly possible if the austerity policies implemented in Ireland and gaining bipartisan support here are replicated globally, the U.S. auto industry's revival will be short-lived too.
If that's the case, Muskegon's future will look even worse than it does now. And many of the people now praising Obama for giving a shit will realize that he didn't. Unless, of course, they're waxing nostalgic about how much better life was under him than it is under President Palin.