There are some good points on one blogger’s site but I’ll quote it to make my own points. Arguing by text seems to be the way that brings out the best articulation in me, so thank you for that… Snippets from her blog and my replies follow below:
http://helenofmarlowe.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/483/
I’ve
been disappointed with President Obama. He has moved much further to the right than I expected, and he seems to have been very late in discovering that what he called negotiating we called betraying his supporters. He has referred to liberals as “sanctimonious”. And like everyone else in American politics he has become beholden to big money. Some of his largest contributions come from Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Time Warner, IBM. But in this era of he-with-the-most-money gets the most “free” speech, I don’t know what he can do about that.
First, I hate the way Conformist Media has us tricked into thinking of all “political” and now even social and personal issues as “left” and “right”. It’s a false dichotomy, a false spectrum. China has introduced a lot of capitalist ideas into its ruling philosophy as applied, and now even Cuba, a couple of years after Fidel Castro confided to a New York Times reporter that the Cuban model doesn’t even work for Cuba anymore, Raul Castro has introduced some measures that allow a limited real estate market. Raul Castro had already told the islanders they could do limited retail selling. But after three such “thaws” since the regime took over, for awhile they’ve had a hard time convincing them they are serious.
But this left-right thing can be deceiving. The most important spectrum is freedom. How much liberty does the regime permit? There is national socialism, and there is international socialism, and the only difference is that ethnicity is added to ideological brand for where you are in the rulers’ hierarchy. A dictatorship is a dictatorship. Like the slogan says, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
I told some fellow techs in a coffee-break general topic forum in 2008 that Obama would be George W Bush Extended Version.
He does get money, indirectly and/or directly, from all those big-bucks money changers in the list above, and so do all the major Republican Party contenders –notably EXCEPT ONE of them. Keep in mind, that lonely voice of reason predicted all the major bubbles and busts we have had, years before they matured into the disasters we’ve seen happen.
I said that then and now see my predictions fulfilled:
1. He not only continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of bringing them home like he promised, but expanded the reach of American militarism to Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya. In Libya, Americans supported the gangs that wiped out an entire town of black folks and have promised to totally destroy what remains of it. America’s media reported that there were “African mercenaries”, code word for blacks.
2. BOTH the DEFICIT and more importantly the DEBT expanded exponentially from Bush’s preposterous years.
3. The Federal Reserve continues unchecked, even though Ron Paul‘s persistent demands and Americans’ growing awareness pushed through the legislation to have them tell us where they put all that secret bailout money. Free dollars “lent” out (paid back but with more loan money) to European central banks and private banks and domestic banks and corporations.
And money supply inflation continues, devaluing the dollar and robbing the poor and the “middle class” by stealth.
But he does deserve some credit, so here goes: my late-night effort to look for reasons to support President Obama.
1. President Obama has proposed a Jobs Bill that will reduce unemployment, and will not increase the deficit. Republicans have blocked it, but he has done what he can do get around the blockade.
A jobs bill that takes money from the private sector to pay for government sector jobs (which is much if not most of what that “jobs bill” does, just moves money around but with a cut for the tax collectors. He proposed it knowing it would not pass so he could get something new to blame on Republicans, because his support for TARP and for “stimulus” and for the Fed’s freely giving out dollars to friends and buddies everywhere did nothing to help the jobs scene.
His proposals also detract from job-killing over-regulation that he was going to put in place this year. But his advisers have been smart enough to tell him to postpone them till 2013 because they know that those measures will just be an extra private sector cost that could otherwise go to jobs.
Jobs can be had by pulling back his administration’s blocks on oil drilling in the continental United States. Measures that Ron Paul has suggested that the executive can do simply by writing CONSTITUTIONAL orders to bring home American troops right away instead of “someday”, would bring all that military spending to us rather than overseas, for example. And letting people use whatever they like for a medium of exchange as a transition to a more prosperous economy based on sound money.
2. He has created a Consumer Protection Agency, which you will benefit from. The Republicans have tried to gut it of all it’s authority and have refused to accept as its leader the woman who has done the most work on it, but at least it now exists.
The Consumer Protection Agency is just another agency with more regulations to come. Recent mandates on banks have already backfired, because banks find other ways to make profits as they are required to do by law as an obligation to their stockholders (remember Enron?).
That is just another example of how central planning by political powers never works, or works backwards from the intended good cause. Poor people are better served by better financial education, to help level the playing field, so they can force the bigger banks to actually compete with each other, rather than these measures that only favor the biggest banks. Because the biggest banks are the ones that have the staff to study these things.
3. He has appointed two moderates to the Supreme Court, moderates who actually have legal credentials and high scores from the bar.
“Moderates”? Kagan had no more credentials than George W’s friend he tried to foist on us and which was derisively hooted down by both halves of the ruling political duopoly cartel. What the Supreme Court needs is more judges who respect the actual Constitution as written, not the ones who might do as Obama said once they should do, “redistribute the wealth”. There is no constitutional mandate to rob Peter to pay Paul, no matter how good the cause. It backfires anyway. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, except there are a lot fewer new bosses, as power is concentrated.
4. He has cut taxes for the middle class and for small business, and has tried valiantly to reduce the loopholes that allow the rich to take more and more from the poor. (Yes, hard-earned money from the working poor IS being re-distributed to the rich. And no corporations actually pay the tax rate that Republicans are fond of quoting.)
“Cut taxes”? I’d like to see a link on that. If you mean the payroll tax, it’s a bogus attempt to help the poor because it only accelerates the rush to the negative region for the social security and Medicare programs. Ron Paul wants to keep those benefits for the elderly who have paid into it all their lives but set the young people free to opt out. It will not be there for them anyway.
And hard-earned money is being redistributed to the rich, but the worst way it is being done is with deficit financing and “quantitative easing”, a euphemism for PRINTING MONEY. This is theft out of the pocket pure and simple. It is the “false balance” spoken of in the book of Proverbs in the Bible, referring to merchants that deceive their buyers with a false weight and measure for what they’re buying, and it’s an abomination.
People have a right to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The man whose self-immolation sparked the Arab “Spring” last year told his brother shortly before that “The poor also have a right to buy and sell”.
Corporations are not people, but people who know how to create wealth should not be robbed of it, they should be encouraged to do more of it.
My wife is from Honduras, and today in the poorest barrios you will find thousands of not just cell phones but iPhones and Android devices and the like. Things like cell phones, smart phones, the Model T, steam engine, light bulb, and the proliferation of other such conveniences and necessities were driven by entrepreneurs in the free market and the profit motive.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, where no profit was allowed, even their trucks were made based on the engineering specifications stolen from the West (according to Cuban refugees here in Miami who used them in Cuba).
5. He captured Osama bin Laden
And the now retired CIA officer who headed up the search for Osama bin Laden has endorsed Ron Paul for president. As to military prowess and who do active military personnel trust most for our nation’s defense, Ron Paul receives by far the most support both in numbers of donations and in total amount from active military personnel, than ALL of the other candidates COMBINED.
6. He has made some effort to address the very real and serious environmental problems.
The most serious environmental problem today is petty bureaucracies who use discredited science as props for political micro-control over the economy, to get us used to government controls, socialistic controls “for the collective good”. Long before climategate, real bona fide genuine climatologists were already exposing the sloppy methods and demanding release of data and debunking the versions sold to us by the politically powerful.
Michael Crichton totally annihilated the idea of spending trillions on this thing, and slams the false science.
Al Gore has his own beach house, I’ve heard. He’s not scared of rising sea levels. He blows the cover off the AGW “scientists” themselves, who have admitted they cannot make precise accurate reliable long-term climate projections.
Go look for Crichton’s essays, especially the one titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming”.
And if you think there’s a disaster on the way, do what Christians have done to help those who hurt throughout the ages, and do your part, But to do takings and legal forcings to support your idea is tantamount to theft. It’s as if I were to use taxes to subsidize tobacco or oil drilling, which I also oppose just as strongly.
7. He has put a stop to the policy of allowing politicians to re-write scientific reports.
That “re-writing” and the politicization of “scientific reports” will never ever never stop until we kick government out of the business of picking and choosing which projects to subsidize. The ones that have promise get grants that fund the research, and then the researches go out and start companies with the new technologies. The CDC and NIH and FDA are among the biggest obstacles to health research today.
Science must be freed totally from government dominance.
For example, how much hot fusion research is being funded? It’s in the billions and billions in 2012 dollars.
For example, the way the science research industry has warped the field so bad is hot fusion research, which gets billions and billions. The ITER reactor is “an international boondoggle”.
The real energy revolution endorsed even by the late Arthur C. Clarke is what has promise. Scientists and environmentalists who are serious about clean energy should be supporting this promising field instead of wasting resources on demanding more government intervention into everything:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/
http://pesn.com/2011/07/03/9501862_Cheap_Cold_Fusion_to_Save_World_Billions/
http://world.std.com/~mica/cft.html
The president knows about this technology, you bet, because Clarke joined in the noise at the authorities to support it, and it is maybe a similar threat to big money interests like Tesla, the inventor of alternating-current technology and others.
If you endorse government taking care of all of our “collective” problems then you have to concede the point that “government knows best” to the biggest polluting nation of all time, the Soviet Union.
Eugene Mallove is the unsung hero. After MIT lied about the success it was having with repeats of the Fleischmann-Pons results, he quit in anger and started the “Infinite Energy Foundation” to finance research into this new technology.
8. He has instituted a more humane policy on Cuba, allowing Cuban families to travel to visit their parents and children.
Credit where due, I support allowing free and open trade with anyone, which is a way to spread the Gospel and the message of freedom. In the interest of truth be told, though, the US embargo should not be an impediment on Cuba’s development, because it is the ONLY nation that disallows trade and would be more poverty-stricken than it is if not for Cuban relatives subsidizing them from Miami,
9. He has removed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.
Not even George W Bush placed “restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research”, he only took federal money out of NEW embryo lines, a kind of cop-out for him, since those are the lines that they reproduce ad infinitum.
But growing pieces of babies in a lab is not only unethical to those who realize that the baby in the womb is still a baby, it is macabre.
Besides that, it has proven totally ridiculous waste of resources. While there are 72 actual present uses for ADULT stem cells helping people today, there are none for embryonic stem cells except for those that adult stem cells are already accomplishing.
That’s why PRIVATE money is already funding adult stem cell research, with spectacular results. And that’s why the “new mad scientists” were so demanding of the public treasury for this.
10.He can put a sentence together, even a compound or complex sentence, complete with subject and verb. This may not be important to you, but it is important to our standing in the larger world.
George W did not know how to say “nuclear”, but both he and Obama have continued the failed federal policies of intervention in local education. Obama reads teleprompters pretty good but of course has been caught pants-down without it, and for interviews demands a veto over interview questions before the fact. He’s been caught getting irritable if something is not by script, same as lots of them from both faces of the two-faced political cartel,.
Would anyone care to add to my list? Or challenge my list?
There’s my answer. I prefer not to use the word “challenge”, because it is not important “who” is right, what matters is “what” is right.
–trutherator
