Deus X wrote: Wordslinger wrote:The following paragraph was lifted from an article entitled "Easy Chair" by Walter Kirn, Harpers' Feb 2018:
"Obama was like that. He made things seem okay even when they weren't. He presided over terrible wars, the loss of our privacy, and the consolidation of extreme economic inequality."
Walter Kirn is right. Obama did have dignity, style, and an amazing ability to make his audiences feel at ease. But a liberal he was not. Wall Street and the big banks were not harmed by Obama's presidency. And as a result of his foreign policy decisions, we're now fighting and losing in 76 countries. Obamacare was a blessing for insurers, and while it was a step in the right direction, big pharma and the insurers were the real winners.
What Presidents say and actually do, are often two different things.
Because Obama was our first black President, the republicans blocked him from achieving anything legislatively, as hard as they could. Racism is simply too entrenched in today's America for any black President to succeed -- including Oprah -- should she run and win.
Reality.
Amen to all of that.
Obama gave the banks a pass after 2008 and that was BIG mistake--income inequality exploded. He had both Houses of Congress for the first two years and did NOTHING to punish Wall Street for the sub-prime catastrophe. And now the big banks are even BIGGER.
At the time, before the banks were rescued, there was a proposal by Federal Reserve researchers to save the banks by paying off the failing mortgages instead of giving money to the banks:
Federal reserve bank researchers proposed plan to save people from foreclosure, and through them the banks and the financial system. Action not taken by government.
CAMBRIDGE, MA December 20, 2011 - The US government saved the "too big to fail" banks in 2008. The reason? People were unable to pay their mortgages causing the banks billions in losses. The US Government authorized $700 billion to save the banks. The Federal Reserve Bank also gave them short-term loans that were even larger.
According to a report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, there was another way. Why not save the people who were at risk? If the people were helped, they would be able to pay their mortgages, the banks would not have needed to be rescued and the financial crisis would have been considerably less severe. The cost? They calculated up to $50 Billion dollars overall - less than 10% of what was approved for banks.http://necsi.edu/news/2011/bailouts.html
But no-o-o-o...
All of that is incorrect. Please read the entire article referenced here to understand what really happened.
Secrets and Lies of the BailoutThe federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come"It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn't the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. "It is," says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, "the ultimate bait-and-switch."..."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
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And the story that Obama had total control of Congress for his first 2 years is also a blatant LIE.
Lies are easy to get away with if they are repeated often enough and given voice by many different people. Repeat a lie often enough and that lie often becomes conventional wisdom. Repeating a lie doesn’t change the lie into the truth, it changes the people hearing the repeated lie. They begin to accept the lie as truth. One huge example: ‘Iraq has WMD.’
Lies make it impossible for people to communicate with each other……lies make it impossible to, as the Villagers often talk about it, have a real “conversation.”
One particular lie, often stated by right-of-center advocates, is the statement….“if Barack Obama wanted to increase taxes on the rich, stop the wars, pass a budget…blah, blah…..he could have chosen to do so because he had “total control” of the House and Senate for two full years.”
Sometimes the “two full years” is omitted from the statement……but the lie is spread nevertheless, by the “total control of Congress” phrase.
Let’s clear that all up, shall we?
Starting January 2009, at the beginning of the 111th Congress, in the month that Barack Obama was inaugurated president, the House of Representatives was made up of 257 Democrats and 178 Republicans. There is no question that Democrats had total control in the House from 2009-2011.
Even with numerous “blue-dog” (allegedly fiscally conservative) Democrats often voting with Republicans…..Speaker Pelosi had little difficulty passing legislation in the House. The House does not have the pernicious filibuster rule which the Senate uses. A majority vote in the House is all that’s necessary to pass legislation, except in rare occurrences (treaty ratification, overriding a presidential veto).
Okay, that’s the House during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. For a lie to prosper, as it were, there needs to be a shred of truth woven inside the lie. It is absolutely true that from 2009-2011, Democrats and President Obama had “total control” of the House of Representatives.
But legislation does not become law without the Senate.
The Senate operates with the 60-vote-requirement filibuster rule. There are 100 Senate seats, and it takes 60 Senate votes for “closure” on a piece of legislation….to bring that piece of legislation to the floor of the Senate for amendments and a final vote….that final vote is decided by a simple majority in most cases. But it takes 60 Senate votes to even have a chance of being voted upon.
“Total control”, then, of the Senate requires 60 Democratic or Republican Senators.
On January 20th, 2009, 57 Senate seats were held by Democrats with 2 Independents (Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman) caucusing with the Democrats…which gave Democrats 59 mostly-reliable Democratic votes in the Senate, one shy of filibuster-proof “total control.” Republicans held 41 seats.
The 59 number in January, 2009 included Ted Kennedy and Al Franken. Kennedy had a seizure during an Obama inaugural luncheon and never returned to vote in the Senate…..and Al Franken was not officially seated until July 7th, 2009 (hotly contested recount demanded by Norm Coleman.)
The real Democratic Senate seat number in January, 2009 was 55 Democrats plus 2 Independents equaling 57 Senate seats.
An aside….it was during this time that Obama’s “stimulus” was passed. No Republicans in the House voted for the stimulus. However, in the Senate…..and because Democrats didn’t have “total control” of that chamber…..three Republicans…..Snowe, Collins and Specter, voted to break a filibuster guaranteeing it’s passage.
Then in April, 2009, Republican Senator Arlen Specter became a Democrat. Kennedy was still at home, dying, and Al Franken was still not seated. Score in April, 2009….Democratic votes 58.
In May, 2009, Robert Byrd got sick and did not return to the Senate until July 21, 2009. Even though Franken was finally seated July 7, 2009 and Byrd returned on July 21…..Democrats still only had 59 votes in the Senate because Kennedy never returned, dying on August 25, 2009.
Kennedy’s empty seat was temporarily filled by Paul Kirk but not until September 24, 2009.
The swearing in of Kirk finally gave Democrats 60 votes (at least potentially) in the Senate. “Total control” of Congress by Democrats lasted all of 4 months. From September 24, 2009 through February 4, 2010…at which point Scott Brown, a Republican, was sworn in to replace Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat.
The truth….then….is this: Democrats had “total control” of the House of Representatives from 2009-2011, 2 full years. Democrats, and therefore, Obama, had “total control” of the Senate from September 24, 2009 until February 4, 2010. A grand total of 4 months.
Did President Obama have “total control” of Congress? Yes, for 4 entire months. And it was during that very small time window that Obamacare was passed in the Senate with 60 all-Democratic votes.Did President Obama have “total control’ of Congress during his first two years as president? Absolutely not and any assertions to the contrary…..as you can plainly see in the above chronology….is a lie.
https://www.ohio.com/akron/pages/when-obama-had-total-control-of-congress
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STOP ATTACKING PRESIDENT OBAMA. He is NOTHING WHATSOEVER like Drumpf. His biggest failing was trusting the POS GOP...also Summers, Paulson, and Geithner. And the TARP was the exclusive property of BUSH and the GOP Congress, who also lied about the state of the economy...it was failing at least a year before anyone acknowledged it, thanks to deregulation in 1999 & 2000...again promoted by the GOP and passed by a veto-proof majority. In other words, Bill Clinton signed it, but he couldn't have stopped it.
AND NOW THEY'RE DOING IT AGAIN.
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