Here in the spring of 2010 we have had a chance to take a look at the President we elected. Although every drawling Southern Senator is still pumping out more "trash talk" in chorus with the high paid, wholly owned fat heads on AM radio and the cable channels, there remains the prospect to size up just what has been accomplished.
A Brief MeanMesa Account of History --
Not Opinion, History
To start, try to remember where we were in November of 2008.
Unregulated Wall Street maniacs, often acting in concert with other unregulated banksters, had managed to write up around $60 TRILLION dollars worth of their special financial derivatives, phony securitized mortgage packages and other stinky little scams. The unelected autocrat was borrowing money from every country stupid enough to loan it to him to pay for war time tax cuts for the richest Americans, a Part D pharmaceutical plan written by Big Pharma lobbyists and hundreds of billions of dollars in tax payer paid subsidies to every big oil company whose CEO could pick up a phone.
Meanwhile, the little draft dodgers in the Oval office were losing a war in Afghanistan and sub-contracting huge amounts of another war in Iraq. After the Iraqi Hydrocarbon Treaty was signed by that unfortunate country, the autocrat lost interest in anything but contracted oil field service profits and the war profiteering saturating every opportunity Halliburton, the unelected Vice President's corporation, could find there.
The richest 400 Americans saw their net worth mushroom by $630 BILLION dollars during the W's eight year looting festival.
Unemployment had been exploding for seven straight months while the bankers running the Fed and the Treasury Department did nothing, spending their time instead scheming on how to finally destroy their competition. The Republicans in the House and Senate, after already scratching every dollar possible from their chicken coop, were turning to their "campaign contributing" friends to elect a war mongering old man to the Presidency.
Who, exactly, was happy in 2008?
Well, the middle class wasn't particularly happy. Their wages had remained frozen for most of two or three decades since the Reagan Administration. The cost of living had gone up. So had middle class tax rates.
On the other hand, Big Pharma was having a wonderful time. Part D was shoveling tax payer cash into their pockets like the Mississippi River in a spring flood. There was to be no negotiating. Just pay the price and shut up.
The health insurance companies were also having a great time. They found that the monopolies they had set up under cover of the Republicans in Congress could arbitrarily raise premiums as much as they pleased.
As mentioned before, the banksters and their Wall Street cronies were having a good time, too. They were creating cash out of thin air making phoney financial instruments, having their back room buddies rate them sky high then selling them to every Arab and Chinaman with any money in the bank.
The draft dodging autocrat was flooding more tax dollars into every Cold War weapon system that made it off the drawing boards -- for example, the infamously useless and expensive F-22 fighter bombers. Total cost? Initial program estimate $62 Billion. Original number of aircraft: 750, production beginning in 1994; then, 648 beginning in 1996; then 442 beginning in 2003; then, 277; then 183. Price per plane? $361,000,000.
The same ridiculous largesse was going on with new destroyers, new air borne refueling tankers, IED armor for HumVees in Iraq -- you name it. Halliburton subsidiaries were building showers which electrocuted soldiers and selling bottled water for $8 a pop to our troops in the desert, all the while "landing" one emergency no-bid contract after another, year after year.
The corrupt cronies of the autocracy were soon enjoying a $1.2 Trillion dollar tax cut. The national debt -- under control at the end of the Clinton Presidency -- was mushrooming at $500,000,000,000 per year or more. Yet another tax cut followed the first one! The unelected government borrowed the cash necessary to make good its promises to its "friends" by selling Treasury bonds so fast the ink was still wet when they arrived in Bejing. BTW, those "friends" were neither nice people nor good citizens.
The stock market tanked along with the rest of the economy. Terrified bankers stop lending to anyone -- not even other bankers. Businesses ground to a halt. Housing prices plummeted into a rancid swill of wounded home-owners and waves of foreclosures.
This systematic looting went on for eight years.
Internationally, the unelected draft dodgers lied their way into the Iraq War, then they began almost daily threats of bombing Iran with nuclear weapons. When the lies fell apart, they turned the problem over to professional liars like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The illiterate "hill billies and bigots" were swayed into supporting them almost immediately. Any one who hesitated or criticized was castigated by 100,000,000 watts of neo-con broadcast power every day.
Here, MeanMesa will avoid the ulta-shaky 9/11 reports and the unchallenged fear mongering of an unelected President who shamelessly frightened the hell out of the country with tales of being H-bombed by Iraq.
This gut-wrenching tale has a point.
It is now about fifteen months after the Obama Presidency began. The "hill billies and bigots" have been convinced that all this damage -- and more, the entirety of the known list is far too long to be included here -- should have been rectified by now. The Tea Baggers have been saturated with outright lies from the neo-con monkeys secretly pulling the strings on that tiny "puppet" outfit (i.e. Dick Armey of Freedom Works). The intensely greedy and fickle Independent voters are, allegedly, drifting back to the Republican Party en masse.
Screaming breathlessly with a wounded 401K earnings report in one hand and a foreclosure notice in the other, the citizens still refuse to learn about what actually happened to them... who actually has all their money... who are still planning to -- once and for all -- take over the entire country...
Enter Obama
Unemployment has finally decreased for the first time since the plummet began. The Dow Jones is up 3,000 points. Housing prices have begun to stabilize.
Many of the 3 billion Muslims in the world no longer think that the US is "waging a war" on Islam. Our troops are withdrawing from Iraq. 95% of tax payers have had a tax cut. Goldmann Sachs and other crooks are beginning to be investigated and sued by a restored SEC.
It's beginning to look like Afghanistan won't be another Viet Nam after all. European leaders are no longer afraid to appear in a photograph with the American President. Our national GDP is actually showing growth.
The auto giants are paying back their TARP loans -- so are the banks. Obama says that we should get back almost all the money that the W packed out the door in the last days of the autocracy.
Presidential briefings are conducted in understandable, literate English.
Is he a perfect President? No. Has he delivered all his campaign promises? No.
Has he interrupted the writing of the last chapter about the American Democracy?
Probably.
MeanMesa's compliments to the President.
As for all you visitors, join me in his defense!
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