Obama Gives A "Speech" On His "Jobs Plan"

Obama the cynical

By Tom Eley 

 

Obama’s Tuesday speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., which was touted as a major address on job creation, outlined an agenda that will only exacerbate the nation’s unemployment crisis.

Obama made no suggestion that the government would allocate significant funds to directly promote job creation, much less undertake any major public works program such as those that typified Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression.

Instead, Obama repeated the free market mantras that “there is only so much government can do” and that “job creation will ultimately depend on the real job creators: businesses across America.”

These callous remarks come from a president who has handed over trillions to the finance industry, under conditions in which nearly 30 million people in the US are either unemployed or underemployed.

Obama used the speech to emphasize “restoring fiscal responsibility,” and reaffirmed his commitment “to halving the deficit we inherited by the end of my first term.”

Given his extraordinary outlays for Wall Street and to the war in Afghanistan—which will cost at least $1 trillion over the next decade—this can only entail a relentless drive to cut all forms of social spending.

Obama acknowledged popular anger toward the Wall Street bailout, while attempting to obscure the nature and dimensions of what has been, in fact, the largest plundering of public wealth in the history of the nation.

“There has rarely been a less loved or more necessary emergency program than TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program],” Obama said. “[But] as galling as the assistance to banks may have been...[it] is on track to actually reap billions in profit for the taxpaying public.”

This is a lie. In fact the $700 billion TARP was just one small part of a federal bailout of the finance industry that relied far more heavily on the Federal Reserve Board of Ben Bernanke.

According to Neil Barofsky, the inspector general appointed to make an accounting of the Wall Street bailout, the federal government is potentially on the line for nearly $24 trillion in the form of loans, direct cash infusions, and guarantees on debt.

The resulting deficits will be paid for not by the financial elite who have benefited from these policies, but by the working class.

This Obama alluded to cryptically by discussing the need to “solve tough problems,” and confront “hard choices.”

“We have begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run,” Obama said.

In the days leading up to the speech, a handful of Congressional Democrats had suggested that money from from TARP might be diverted to pay for jobs programs or for specific forms of social relief.

TARP is over-funded by an estimated $200 billion, largely the result of a number of major banks repaying their loans to avoid relatively toothless government restrictions on executive pay.

Such a jobs program the Obama White House has ruled out categorically, according to an article Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.

The White House and Congressional leaders have determined that their “ability to use Wall Street bailout funds for a new job-creation initiative will be strictly limited by budget rules and the terms of the original bailout legislation.”

That is, the rules and terms they themselves drafted in collaboration with the Bush administration. Instead, “bailout funds are likely to be restricted mainly to a new small-business lending effort.”

This proved to be the central theme of Obama’s speech, the president declaring that he would order Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “to continue mobilizing the remaining TARP funds to facilitate lending to small business.”

Here it is noteworthy Obama said the money will be used to facilitate lending, rather than lent to small businesses directly. This is because Obama’s “help” for small businesses is in fact a means of turning the money repaid by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Bank of America back to the finance industry.

The Small Business Administration, which Obama indicated would disburse the remaining TARP funds, does not loan to small businesses. It instead guarantees such loans to participating banks, who in turn try to sell packaged loans to larger financial institutions.

The administration “hopes that by supporting the secondary market [i.e., the big banks], lenders will gain their confidence back and make new loans,” as a Business Week analysis put it in describing this element of TARP in March.

Whatever remains from TARP not allocated to the SBA will be used to pay down the federal deficit, Obama indicated.

Other elements of Obama’s speech ostensibly aimed at small business included a proposal for “the complete elimination of capital gains taxes” on small businesses, and tax credits for businesses that hire workers.

Only after discussing policies that will benefit Wall Street and private industry did Obama call for a “boost in investment in the nation’s infrastructure,” in addition to what was appropriated through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He offered no figure, and did not say how this would be paid for, besides excluding TARP as a source.

The amount of money set aside in the Recovery Act for infrastructure—between $70 billion and $111 billion depending on the estimate—is not only a small fraction of the Wall Street bailout.

It is a drop in the bucket set against both the needs of the country’s physical well-being (crumbling roads, transportation system, water supply, schools, hospitals) and the vast unemployment crisis.

Even according to the Obama administration’s own imaginative (and dubious) accounting methods, the Recovery Act has so far “created or saved” between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs. However, the economy has shed well over 3 million jobs since Obama’s inauguration, and has purged more than 7 million since the economic crisis began in late 2007 during the presidency George W. Bush.

As for the infrastructure, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ “2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” infrastructure needs require $2.2 trillion in investment over the next five years to stop the advanced decay of roads, bridges, water, and sewerage, or at least 20 times the outlay of the Recovery Act. (See: “America’s crumbling infrastructure”.)

The third point in Obama’s “jobs” speech was a plan to encourage homeowners to “retrofit their homes.”

This so-called “cash for caulkers” program would offer government rebates to lessen the cost of making homes energy efficient. In this portion of his speech, Obama also mentioned encouraging the production of “wind turbines and solar panels.”

Even those enthusiastic about Obama’s “green economy” proposals concede that there is little chance they will fundamentally alter unemployment levels.

The fourth point on Obama’s agenda was relief. He dedicated only one sentence to the subject, stating that he favors the extension of “emergency assistance to seniors, unemployment insurance benefits, COBRA, and relief to states and localities to prevent layoffs.”

In fact, COBRA benefits—through which the federal government makes contributions to the health care premiums of laid off workers—last week began expiring for hundreds of thousands of households, with neither the Obama administration nor Congressional Democrats taking any action to extend the benefits.

As for state and municipal governments, they are buckling under record budget deficits that have been translated into unprecedented cuts to social programs and public education.

Just before Obama delivered his speech, the U.S. Conference of Mayors published a report showing a 26 percent increase in demand for food assistance in one year.

It follows recent reports by the US Department of Agriculture, the New York Times and Feeding America, a major food charity, in revealing a dramatic increase in hunger in the US over the past two years.

With the scourges of joblessness, hunger, and homelessness at levels not seen since the Great Depression, Obama’s closing words can only be deemed provocative.

“The storms of the past are receding,” the president said. “The skies are brightening. And the horizon is beckoning once more.”

Is Obama aware of how cynical he sounds? 

Let Them Watch Garbage - 21st Century Media.

Next Up, Who's Gay?

By Chris Hedges

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity.

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.)

And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview?

Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity.

We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains.

We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency.

There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive.

The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them.

We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and “The Purpose Driven Life” won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility.

We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life.

Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn’t engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home.

The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole.

Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities.

And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it.

Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes.

The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.

Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as “The Hills,” “Gossip Girl,” “Sex and the City,” “My Super Sweet 16” and “The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue).”

The American oligarchy—1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined—are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions.

They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts.

They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon.

This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television’s gated community.

They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power.

Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything.

We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected.

The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts.

Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.

The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy.

Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems... as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power.

Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us.

Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique.

All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success.

This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything

. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible.

Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real.

The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation.

It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear.

The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions.

Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age.

Orthodoxy & Ecumenism

We have a responsibility to spread the Faith to others.

The involvement of the Orthodox Church in the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical bodies has become a matter of bitter debate among Orthodox Christians. The discussion can often take a harsh, polemical quality. Sometimes it is unclear what “ecumenism” even is.

By Peter Bouteneff

The purpose of this web page is to post some of the texts which provide the foundation for Orthodox involvement in the ecumenical movement, as well as essays which introduce into the discussion the perspectives of Orthodox who are actually involved in it.
The essays come from a variety of sources. Their authors cannot readily be categorized as “liberal” or “conservative”, “traditionalist” or “modernist” (as useful as these terms may or may not be). But there are three perceptions which emerge from all of them without exception:
Ecumenism is not a heresy — or at least the “ecumenism” that is derided as “heresy” in some people’s estimation, and the “ecumenism” that is actually practiced by the Orthodox who participate in ecumenical organizations are two different things. If one looks at the anathemas which some have written about ecumenism, it is clear that what is being anathematized is the so-called “Branch Theory”, something which is not held by Orthodox “ecumenists”.
Orthodox involvement in ecumenism is a missionary responsibility. As in any missionary situation, a person’s actual conversion to Orthodoxy is left up to God, but the responsibility lies with Orthodox to be present and witness to their apostolic faith, to teach, and also to learn from the encounter.
Orthodox involvement in today’s ecumenical institutions merits serious examination. Orthodox Christians need to remain critical of problematic tendencies within institutionalized ecumenism. They also need to reflect seriously among themselves about the nature and purpose of their involvement with it.
It is hoped that the texts and essays on this site can help to balance the discussion on ecumenism and the Orthodox Church’s participation.

Humor For The Day: Preffering toothpaste over church.

I only use Crest

Winter 2009 issue of In Communion / IC 52

Protestants in the United States have less “brand loyalty” to their denominations than they have to their toothpaste, a survey made public in January revealed.
The survey, which categorized churches as “brands,” found there is a trend of “church shopping” in a diverse marketplace of religious offerings in the US.
The survey found that only 16 percent of US Protestants surveyed said they will not consider changing their denominational affiliation. By contrast, 22 percent expressed brand loyalty to a preferred toothpaste.

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