Barack Obama - The 21st Century's FDR, Now In Color!

In the slightly over a year that Obama has been president, most of the world has probably heard every popular opinion of why he is either the best or the worst thing to ever happen to the United States and the modern world. These opinions range from kooky racist allegations on both sides - white supremacists claiming he is inept simply due to his skin color and various minority power groups accusing anyone who criticizes him of racism by the same logic, - to slightly more commonplace but equally irrelevant criticisms of him being a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, a globalist puppet, etc. and praise for being a reformer, a visionary, a fighter for civil rights and economic justice and compassion, and so on. What sickens me about these political debates and the myriad of other related ones is that every one of them dwindles down to very skindeep ideological rhetoric on both sides that completely overlook the realities of Obama's presidency. Of course this trend isn't uncommon in western politics, particularly in the United States, but I get the impression that the abundance of irrelevant "novelties" in Obama's presidency has created an almost unprecedented ignorance of his actual policies, at least a level this country hasn't seen in several decades.

So, as always, let's examine Obama's actual policies in historic and political context, without paying heed to any actual or purported ideological affiliations.
Obama was elected by a landslide (the first landslide in almost 30 years) to replace an extremely unpopular administration held responsible for a catastrophic economic crisis that was in actuality only partially its fault. G.W. Bush's policies perpetuated the economic irresponsibility of the decades preceding his presidency, and his policies aimed at recovery, such as the bank and AIG bailouts, compounded the crisis. But these policies did not single-handedly CREATE the meltdown, and let's not forget that democratic legislators were behind them more or less every step of the way. Upon taking office, Obama embarked on a campaign of economic recovery policies that were inches different from those of his predecessor, and that continuously fail to achieve the recovery or, according to some measures at least, even contain the continuing economic collapse. Obama's economic approach may be regarded by both his ignorant supporters and equally ignorant critics as opposite of Bush Jr.'s, but this is exactly the false dichotomy trap citizens fall into. Bush took federal taxpayer money (YOUR MONEY!) and handed it in droves to megacorporations that had driven themselves broke through irresponsible business practices - among these banks, automobile manufacturers, and insurance companies. Obama continues to take THE SAME MONEY and fork it out to homebuyers, college students, renewable energy businesses, and a variety of others in the from of "tax credits" and various subsidies, in most cases as rewarding of irresponsible behavior as Bush's bailouts, only in the middle and working classes rather than the super-rich. Firstly, make no mistake that tax credits and subsidies are no different from bailouts in terms of giving someone else YOUR tax money. The people who receive these credits are entitled to the same government services that your and their taxes pay for, yet they get a chunk of that money back and you don't, meaning your money gets to make up the difference. As far as rewarding irresponsibility, this may not be the case 100% of the time, but the responsible people who benefit from economic stimulus are at best those who need it to be on equal ground with the irresponsible whom it "bails out," and would have not needed it and been better off if it hadn't been issued to anyone. To make an example, let's consider Obama's homebuying stimulus projects - his tax credit for first-time homebuyers and his variety of federal loan subsidies. The credit, as he himself has admitted, is intended to stimulate people to buy homes and stall the continuing decline of prices in the housing market. Sounds great? Except for the fact that said "continuing decline" would mean that prices would keep dropping and those who had been responsible for the 5-6 years preceding the crisis (saved their money if they had jobs with high earnings but low security, made responsible investments, chosen jobs which pay less but are more likely not to fall victim to the recession, etc.) would be able to afford to buy homes without the credit, while those who had made irresponsible choices would not. Ditto for the loan assistance programs, which are meant to make loans available to people with bad credit at an affordable interest rate, subsidized to the bank by the federal government, by Obama's own admission to keep the banking market from declining because so few people are able to afford loans. In this case, people with above-average credit can't benefit from the subsidies period, as the interest rates their credit qualifies them for are actually BETTER than those in the subsidy programs. Hence, if interest rates were left at their unsubsidized market value, fewer people would be able to borrow money and in order to stay in business, banks would have to offer even BETTER rates to those who CAN afford to borrow by the basic standard of competition. This principle applies to economic stimulus across the board, regardless of who it aims to bail out or stimulate, with very few exceptions. In essence, it prevents the purging of inefficient investments and business practices (bankruptcies of banks and large corporations, foreclosures of overpriced housing, etc.) by virtue of natural competitive attrition, ensuring that the people who made these poor investments are enabled to so again, EN MASSE, and bring about another crisis in a few years. This is sometimes referred to as "blowing another bubble." And of course, besides ensuring another recession a few years down the line, stimulus of any sector of the economy stagnates the recovery and can in some cases even perpetuate the downward spiral, by the simple principle that prices are not allowed to drop enough (or quickly enough) for investors who endured the crisis (from smart homebuyers and working/middle class families to large corporations and banks) to use their gains from the collapse to buy up new investments at the record low prices, providing a kind of stimulus the federal government cannot dream of. Recessions, crises, economic collapses - all of these are a sad reality of any economic system, - but what is not natural is for them to last up to a decade, a la the Great Depression. This stagnation of recovery is a principle introduced by state intervention.

To return to our analysis of Obama, let's leave the economy for a moment and examine foreign policy. Obama's strategy, across the board, has been to avoid confontation with states that are openly hostile to the US and its allies in favor of multilateral diplomacy that seeks to neutralize their threat through sanctions and transparency. The Islamist Theocracy of Iran, the nutball Communist Dictators of Venezuela and North Korea, and a number of organizations and alliances within the Saudi Government that, while not hegemonic within it at this point, the pro-US monarchy cannot readily control, have all openly announced on multiple occasions that their mission is to create a violent global revolution to remake the world in their image - a humanity that serves the ideals of muslim theocracy or the "liberation" of the working class from the "oppression" of imperialism. Mind you, neither Saddam Hussein in Iraq nor the Taliban when in control of Afghanistan ever made any such "charming" claims; the best accusation that could be mustered against them was supporting insurgent groups, morally and financially, that are enemies of the US. And, let's not forget that Iran and Syria were part of Bush's coalition to invade and neutralize these regimes, despite their open hostility to the US. I don't know why anyone ever thought the Bush administration would pursue military campaigns against these openly hostile states - these would offer no economic benefit to his constituency, and in the case of Saudi Arabia would be quite contrary to said interests. But, the fact that Bush's military campaigns were economically motivated, as has been suggested over and over again, and that in a foreign policy sense they've only served to destabilize the countries invaded, in no way excuses Obama's neglect of his responsibility to keep the American people safe from foreign threat. The Bush wars left two countries with little geographic and demographic capacity for rule of law and monopoly on force in the absence of iron tyranny in states of colossal disarray, and the resulting power vacuum has allowed hostile governments to use these as breeding grounds for their supporters. Saddam was a tyrant and a murderer, but he was widely disliked by the Islamist elite and kept the Islamists within Iraq on a short leash, preventing them from forming an alliance with Iran or the Islamist elements in Saudi Arabia. Now, in the aftermath of 8 years of Bush Jr., Obama continues to engage in an unwinnable bughunt for the various insurgent elements in Iraq and Afghanistan while pandering to the governments that supply them. Insurgents are not dangerous by virtue of the fact that they are radically hostile and willing to kill and die. There are thousands of extremists within the US, from Christian fundamentalists to liberal revolutionaries to just plain unstable psychiatric cases, that nevertheless don't pose any significant danger to our political system. This is because they have no real chance of usurping power from the US Government, even if they own a few firearms. The Islamist sociopaths hiding in the sands of Afghanistan and Iraq would be no different from these examples, even in the face of the shakiness of their governments' hold on power, if states like Iran and Saudi Arabia were not pumping massive amounts of their taxpayers' money into funding their campaigns. No matter how corrupt or immoral the rogue Russian or Pakistani military official with his hands on unaccounted for weapons may be, he will not sell them to a Jihadi if the Jihadi cannot afford to PAY for them.

The truly frightening part about these Obama policies is that, despite the rhetoric, there is absolutely nothing "novel" about them. The economic situation and policies, although arguably not to the same intensity, very closely resemble that of the Great Depression. The corporate-aligned Herbert Hoover was that era's George W. Bush, with his landslide-elected successor, the infamous FDR, seen as a messiah of change and reformist progressive thinking and implementing a decade of economic stimulus policies that make Obama's look tame that did not, by any statistical measure, facilitate any form of economic recovery until the re-gearing of the industrial machine for WWII in the 1940s. Speaking of war and foreign policies, let's not forget that Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany saw their infancy in the early years of FDR, and that both of these countries announced open hostility toward the west and a mission of global domination, with Imperial Japan having done the same a decade prior and by 1933 having began conquering military campaigns in East Asia. (The USSR originated in the 1920s, of course, but did not truly emerge as a totalitarian regime with the capacity for a global domination bid until Stalin's rise to power in the late 1920s and his draconian agricultural and industrial reforms that transformed it into a starving but powerful war machine.) What was the policy of FDR and his allies for dealing with these sociopathic dictators who openly announced the desire to take over the world? The support of weak, unstable governments in a variety of countries in a struggle against insurgencies supported by one or both! (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, to name a few.) When every single one of these countries fell into the control of a regime sympathetic and similar to the USSR and Nazi Germany, even if not allied with it (a la Franco's Spain), they had accumulated the power to begin their own global domination campaigns, and arguably failed largely because they eventually ended up at war with each other.

Even Obama's apparent novelty is comparable to that of FDR. FDR was a severely physically disabled man, having spent the majority of his life paralyzed from the neck down and even during his presidency requiring a lot of physical assistance with his basic self-care. Disabled people are to this day arguably a very underpriviledged minority, but 80 years ago the idea of a man so severely crippled being elected president was seen as revolutionarily progressive, and a variety of the opposition's rhetoric focused on his disability just as Obama's opposition focuses on his race. Similarly, supporters cheered FDR fervently as somehow being one of them because of this minority status, forgetting conveniently for him that just like Obama, he descended from a long ancestral line of very rich entrepreneurs and politicians. I don't mean to paint a doomsday scenario of 7 more years of economic failure followed by the inevitability of WWIII with this comparison, as the world is very different now from 80 years ago, and changes quickly enough that these similarities to the 1930s may very well not last long enough to have the same disastrous outcome. However, the purpose is to point out that Obama is nothing more than just another mainstream politician, with neither some hidden subversive agenda for a New World Order nor some revelation of innovative political thought, and that the clouding of his actual policies by these assumptions by both critics and supporters is dangerous as it leaves the real plausible effects of his administration out of the spotlight.

To those who say "give Obama a chance," I fervently respond "I will be glad to do so, when I see him doing something that hasn't already been tried by the US government for the last 100 years."