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Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve. That is somewhat unfair because the basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.
The core issue for the economy is the continued cost of a housing bubble made possible only after what Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers back then trumpeted as necessary "legal certainty" was provided to derivative packages made up of suspect Alt-A and subprime mortgages. It was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Senate Republican Phil Gramm drafted and which Clinton signed into law, that made legal the trafficking in packages of dubious home mortgages. In any decent society the creation of such untenable mortgages and the securitization of risk irrationally associated with it would have been judged a criminal scam. But no such judgment was possible because thanks to Wall Street's sway under Clinton and Bush the bankers got to rewrite the laws to sanction their treachery.
It is Obama's continued deference to the sensibilities of the financiers and his relative indifference to the suffering of ordinary people that threaten his legacy, not to mention the nation's economic well-being. There have been more than 300,000 foreclosure filings every single month that Obama has been president, and as The New York Times editorialized, "Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the Obama administration's efforts to address the foreclosure problem will make an appreciable dent."
Daniel Tencer writing at RawStory Friday reported that "The US economic recovery in recent quarters is little more than a "cover-up" and the world is headed for a "Greatest Depression," complete with social unrest and class warfare, says a renowned economic forecaster. Gerald Celente, head of the Trends Research Institute, told Yahoo! News' Tech Ticker that there's no risk of a "double-dip recession" because the first "dip" never ended."
"We're saying there's no double dip, it never ended," Celente said. "We're looking at the Greatest Depression. There's no way out of this without [rebuilding] productive capacity. You can't print [money to get] out of it."
"Celente said the current unemployment rate, if it were measured as it was measured during the Great Depression, would be around 17.5 percent. And he expects that number to rise to around 22 percent in the coming years."
"One of the good businesses to get in to may be guillotines," Celente quipped. "Because there's a real off-with-their-heads fever going on. People are really fed up."
...
"We went from a country that used to be merchants, craftspeople, manufacturers, to clerks and cashiers," Celente said. "We have to bring manufacturing back to America."
Former Presidential Senior Advisor turned Fox News Political Analyst Karl Rove interviews former President George W. Bush six months from today at his Crawford Texas ranch, and finds a broken, pathetic ex-president who's reverted to his former days of booze and cocaine since leaving the brightly lit world stage he inhabited for eight years.
Rove finds the venerable ex-president who sacrificed so much and made it his life's mission to protect America from the hordes of evil terrorists world wide swimming across the oceans with knives in their teeth to kill American babies in their beds has sunk into a paranoid hallucinatory state in which he's broken all the mirrors in his house out of fear that they are "looking at me" every time he passes one, and who lives in the sad, pathetic delusion that President Obama and the Democrats fully intend to have him arrested, charged, and finally held accountable for what he terms "all my sins" - his war crimes.
It's sad. He's a very very sick man, obviously. In this delusional state I doubt very much it'll be possible for him to understand that Obama and the Democrats are on his side and will always protect him.
I'm coming home today, and I get on a bus downtown heading my way. In Vancouver a large percentage of the population is Asian.
I get on the bus, and besides me and the driver virtually everyone of the 30 or so people on the bus are Asian.
In the first double seat behind the driver, under the little window sticker that says these are priority seats for elderly and handicapped persons there is a little tiny sparrow of a Chinese lady probably about 85 years old or so sitting in the aisle seat with her grocery bags, so I sit down across the aisle from her.
The bus continues on and at the next stop a fat ugly lard assed white woman about 50 or so gets on the bus who looks, with the miserable scowl on her face, for all the world like a female version of Archie Bunker but not anywhere near as good looking.
