I disagree with this statement from a diary currently inhabiting the rec list:
[Obama's] "can't we all just get along" philosophy has put this country in worse financial peril than ever before.
I couldn't possibly disagree with that statement more. To pin the current economic state on Obama is flat out wrong.
Perhaps this author hasn't noticed the old men and women in their "golden years" who have been greeting people at the door of Walmart for years and years and years to make ends meet as their Social Security and fixed incomes don't cover what they need to survive...because unions and pensions have been eviscerated for decades now.
Perhaps the author missed the decades of financial deregulation that allowed banks to gamble our mortgages and our American Dreams away in toxic credit default swaps...a game that brought this world economy to its knees.
Perhaps the author missed the decades and decades of offshoring as jobs fled outside our borders by the thousands, the hundreds of thousands.
Or the assault on wages. The assault on unions. The push to shove more and more and more money ever higher to the highest income brackets under the theory that money is going to trickle down...
Somehow these aren't the defining problems.
Somehow it's Obama's philosophy that's put this country "in worse financial peril than ever before."
Things were not fine before Obama got into office. They weren't okay. They were't fine the year before he got into office, or five years, or ten years, or thirty years before he got into office.
The foundation of America's middle class has been meticulously eroded for DECADES.
And now it's crumbling around us.
And so we turn to the President to fix this mess for us. To reverse decades of erosion. While so many of us enjoyed our cheap foreign goods, sent our money to support corporate stocks that now have unlimited anonymous lobbying power in America, lent our money by way of savings accounts to the very banks we purport to hate.
Now we turn to the President of the United States to save us.
I seem to recall that the Middle Class arose from US. From regular people who got fed up. From seafarers who were got sick of having their meals taken away entirely if they asked for a second egg. From miners who died young and often. From factory workers cast out of the workforce like human meat after they sustained a work place injury.
I seem to recall that WE banded together to do the lion's share of change, often times AGAINST the presidents who happened to be in office. Often times even against deadly conflicts.
But today...today we turn to the President. It's HIS fault America is crumbling. HE is the weak one. HE is doing NOTHING. Meanwhile Walmart is the largest employer in America paying its people a barely livable minimum wage and cashing in on their deaths from buying life insurance policies on them...and people shop there. Meanwhile we continue to keep our money with the banks we hate. Meanwhile we keep our money in the stock markets hoping the businesses that support people against the change we want are successful so we can retire.
Obama is not the one we've been waiting for.
No president ever can be.
We have to do it. We have to TAKE it.