by Eric Zuesse
\nStrategic-Culture.org<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a former lifelong Democrat, stating here a clear and incontestable fact: Barack Obama is a failed President.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s true not just because of the sad realities such as that\u00a0\u00abTop Ex-White House Economist Admits 94 % Of All\u00a0New Jobs Under Obama Were Part-Time\u00bb<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>\u2014 or, as the economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz wrote in the\u00a0original<\/a>\u00a0of that study: \u00ab94 percent of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements\u00bb. (\u00abAlternative work arrangements\u00bb referred there to Americans who were involuntarily working only part-time jobs \u2014 they simply couldn\u2019t find full-time, though that\u2019s what they\u00a0wanted.) In other words: Obama\u2019s failure isn\u2019t\u00a0just\u00a0because of America\u2019s increasingly sales-clerk, and burger-flipping, workforce.<\/p>\n And Obama\u2019s failure is also not just because\u00a0\u00abPoverty Rose In 96 % Of U.S. House Districts, During Obama\u2019s Presidency\u00bb<\/a>. <\/strong>(However, that reality turned out to be decisive in Hillary Clinton\u2019s loss to Donald Trump on November 8th<\/sup>, as Nate Cohn pointed out in\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0on December 23rd, headlining,\u00a0\u00abHow the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an\u00a0Opening for Trump\u00bb<\/a>. Hillary was running on Obama\u2019s poor record.)<\/p>\n Obama\u2019s failure is also because of other important reasons. <\/strong>Among them is the uncounted thousands of people who were killed in, and the uncounted millions of people who became refugees from, the places where Obama (or else his installed regimes)\u00a0bombed and caused the residents to either die or flee<\/a>. George W. Bush\u2019s destructions of Iraq and even Afghanistan were now being followed by the destructions of Libya by Obama and Sarkozy, and of Syria by Obama and Saud and Thani and Erdogan, who armed the tens of thousands of jihadists and sent them into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad \u2014 and Bush\u2019s destructions were followed also by\u00a0Obama\u2019s keeping in power<\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0barbaric junta-regime that replaced the democratically elected Honduran Presiden Manuel Zelaya on 28 June 2009 shortly after Obama entered the White House<\/a>\u00a0(and this junta-regime, in turn, caused Honduras\u2019s murder-rate to soar 50% to become the world\u2019s highest, which then caused hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to flee and become undocumented U.S. immigrants, against which Donald Trump campaigned).<\/p>\n The Obama regime has thus created\u00a0far\u00a0more misery\u00a0outside\u00a0America, than inside it.<\/strong> Failures such as those didn\u2019t cost Hillary Clinton many (if any) votes (because most voters didn\u2019t even know about these foreign-affairs matters), but those failures were actually even bigger than Obama\u2019s failures in purely domestic U.S. policy matters (which voters do know about). Trump campaigned against \u2018illegal immigrants\u2019, but he never even called attention to those people\u2019s fleeing the hells that the U.S. regime had created in not only Honduras but earlier in Guatemala and El Salvador \u2014 coups and U.S.-trained death squads.<\/p>\n In noting Obama\u2019s failures, I\u2019m not a Republican; I\u2019m no one who is condemning Obama for his allegedly being a \u2018Marxist’ \u2018Muslim\u2019, or some other imaginary distraction from the reality <\/strong>(a reality which is too Republican for Republicans to be\u00a0able\u00a0to criticize \u2014 so, they\u2019ve insteadignored\u00a0that reality, and cited fake \u2018reasons\u2019 against him, including \u2018death panels\u2019 and other fabrications, which Republicans then forgot about after their fraudulent allegations against him became clear, to all but insane people, as being\u00a0just\u00a0Republican lies).<\/p>\n Obama is a failure\u00a0not\u00a0because he wasn\u2019t sufficiently conservative or \u2018Christian’ <\/strong>(as Republicans had constantly accused him of having been), but instead because he wasn\u2019t sufficiently progressive (nowhere close to being a progressive) \u2014 and, in many ways, he was actually far more conservative than any of his duplicitous campaign-rhetoric had pretended him to be.\u00a0He\u2019s an extraordinarily gifted liar \u2014 he was phenomenally successful at\u00a0that.<\/p>\n And I am not blaming Obama for congressional Republicans\u2019 having been more obsessed with making him\u00a0be\u00a0a failed President, than they were interested in making America be a successful nation. Republicans lie at least as much as he does, just not nearly as skillfully.<\/strong> (They especially can\u2019t feign compassion as skillfully as he.) This article thus does\u00a0not\u00a0blame him for what the\u00a0overt\u00a0Republicans were doing to cripple the little good he had actually tried to achieve \u2014 such as closing Guantanamo. It\u2019s only about\u00a0Obama\u2019s\u00a0failure.<\/p>\n Obama\u2019s failure was\u00a0all his own<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 it\u2019s\u00a0not\u00a0because of the good things that Republicans had blocked him from doing; it is instead because of the horrible things (such as his failed\u00a0TPP, TTIP<\/a>\u00a0and TISA trade-treaties, and his\u00a0successful 2011 killing of Gaddafi<\/a>, and\u00a02014 coup in Ukraine<\/a>) that were central to his\u00a0actual\u00a0agenda \u2014 a conservative, even reactionary, agenda, which favored the interests of the hundreds of billionaires who control U.S.-based international corporations,\u00a0above\u00a0the interests of the 300+\u00a0million\u00a0American people, whom the U.S. President is\u00a0supposed\u00a0to be serving.<\/p>\n I voted for Barack Obama both times,<\/strong> because both of his opponents (\u00abBomb bomb bomb Iran\u00bb<\/a>\u00a0McCain in 2008, and\u00a0\u00ab#1 geopolitical foe\u00bb<\/a>\u00a0Romney in 2012) were clearly determined to focus America\u2019s enormous military expenditures\u00a0away from\u00a0exterminating the jihadists and their Saudi funders, toward instead conquering Iran (McCain) and Russia (Romney), and also because Republicans \u2014 throughout\u00a0at least the period extending from 1910 to 2010<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 consistently had, in fact, produced a record of far less success with the U.S. economy, than did Democrats, and\u00a0especially\u00a0because neither McCain nor Romney had repudiated the very\u00a0worst\u00a0President in U.S. history (at least prior to Obama) and his atrocious record of lies and needless bloodshed and invasions: George W. Bush \u2014 Bush\u2019s Party instead\u00a0reaffirmed that monstrous President.<\/p>\n And, consequently, I never expected Barack Obama to turn out to have been, quite possibly, even a worse President than Bush<\/strong>. Nobody expected that \u2014 except Republicans, for whom Bush wasn\u2019t bad\u00a0enough\u00a0to satisfy them (and certainly not bad enough for them\u00a0to apologize for\u00a0\u2014 so, they did\u00a0not\u00a0apologize for him).<\/p>\n Here, then, is Obama\u2019s astounding record of failure<\/strong>:<\/p>\n \u00abFrom a Democracy to a Plutocracy\u00bb<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n \u00abUnderstanding President Obama\u2019s Strategy to Force Cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid\u00bb<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n \u00abObama Finally Lays His Cards on the Table\u00bb<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n \u00abBarack Obama Is Now Completing His Long-Held Plan to Subvert the Democratic Party\u00bb<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n \u00abObama: \u2018I Don\u2019t Care About the Public\u2019s Welfare\u2019\u00bb<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n As that last one documented, the Obama \u2018Justice\u2019 Department scored an all-time low number both of financial institution fraud prosecutions, and of white-collar-crime prosecutions. Obama came into power immediately after an economic crash that was loaded especially with financial-institution frauds. He protected the banksters. So, financial-executive-fraud prosecutions didn\u2019t soar, like they\u00a0should\u00a0have; instead they\u00a0plunged. Like Obama told the Wall Street bigs, near the start of his regime, on 27 March 2009, in private, inside the White House:\u00a0\u00abMy administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. \u2026 I\u2019m not out there to go after you. I\u2019m protecting you\u2026 I\u2019m going to shield you\u00bb<\/strong><\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0And that\u2019s what he did. And, on 20 September 2016, Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America\u2019s Future, headlined\u00a0\u00abBanks Used Low Wages, Job Insecurity To Force\u00a0Employees To Commit Fraud\u00bb<\/a>, so there was no way that the employees could keep their jobs except to do the crimes that they were being virtually forced by their bosses to do.<\/p>\n The criminality was actually at the very top \u2014 where Obama had promised \u00abI\u2019m protecting you\u00bb.<\/strong> So, the TARP\u2019s Inspector General urged, on 26 October 2016 (since the President was refusing to prosecute those people), \u00abthat Congress remove\u00a0the insulation around Wall Street CEOs\u00a0and other high-level officials by requiring\u00a0the CEO, CFO and certain other senior\u00a0executives to sign an annual certification\u00a0that they have conducted due diligence\u00a0within their organization and can certify\u00a0that that there is no criminal conduct or\u00a0civil fraud in their organization\u00bb. The Special Inspector General of TARP, Christy Goldsmith Romero, was proposing this, as being the way to make prosecutions, of these top-level fraud-executives, so easy that the Obama Administration\u2019s claims \u2014 that there was no top-level fraud that\u00a0could\u00a0be prosecuted \u2014 would be an even\u00a0more\u00a0blatant, absurdly false, lie, than it had\u00a0been.<\/p>\n If this country were Ukraine, or even Russia, then Americans (trained by decades of a CIA-controlled \u2018free press\u2019) would say \u00abOh, of course those countries are corrupt, but America isn\u2019t like that\u00bb. <\/strong>But, at least under Barack Obama, \u2018we\u2019 were that. This\u00a0was\u00a0America \u2014 and \u2018our\u2019 President was protecting the elite fraudsters,\u00a0instead of\u00a0prosecuting them.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, anyone who would say that the American people are not better off now than they were at the end of Bush\u2019s disastrous Presidency would be either misinformed or lying, because there\u2019s\u00a0lots of data showing that, finally, eight years after Bush, Americans are better off than they were at the end of Bush\u2019s miserable eight years<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(even though not yet better off than Americans were prior to Bush\u2019s 2007-2008 crash). And the Administration published on December 15th<\/sup> its record of \u2018successes\u2019\u00a0\u00abThe 2017 Economic Report of the President\u00bb<\/a>\u00a0which was real but not adjusted for the fact that Obama came into office at the pit of the economic crash, which means that such \u2018successes\u2019 are almost inevitable, hardly a credit to Obama. <\/strong><\/u>But yet, the reality stands, that the Obama economic recovery was the weakest in the entire post-World-War-II period. Plus, the federal debt doubled on his watch, even while, as that Economic Report mentioned only in passing: \u00abThe United States has seen a faster increase in inequality in recent decades than any of the major advanced economies, and despite the historic progress made over the last eight years, the level of U.S. inequality remains high\u00bb. Normally, after an economic crash, economic inequality\u00a0reduces; but under Obama it remained at or near its pre-crash high.<\/p>\n It was an economic record (and an invasion and coup record) of which any Republican President could justifiably have been proud (since conservatives favor inequality, a\u00a0caste system<\/a>) \u2014 but\u00a0no\u00a0Democrat could (except fake ones \u2014 such as Obama and the Clintons).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n