PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING

5/20/10

President Barack Obama can’t win for losing. He is never given any slack. In the New York Post’s Late, Late Final, front page article, “BAM’S IPAD SLAM, Launches War On High Tech,” Monday, May 5, 2010, columnist Leonard Greene asserts the President attacked Apple’s iPods and iPads, Twitter to Flickr and the high tech industry in general, saying, “high-tech gizmos and apps are straining American democracy.” Quoting the President, “With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than a means of emancipation.” The President continued, “We can’t stop these changes…but we can adapt to them. And education is what can allow us to do so. It can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time.”

What war on technology?! Mr. Obama is absolutely correct. Mr. Greene’s claim could not be further from the truth. By his own disclosures, he doesn’t know how to listen and process information. As exciting and, in most cases, an instrumental necessity of life as computers and their smaller version cousins are, they are destroying the human ability for critical thinking. And now, with web access allowing EVERYONE to express their personal point-of-view, where once accredited news and opinion were read, it is awash with personal reflection, regardless of factual content. Add in the reality of our horrendously deteriorating educational system, (we are world ranked twenty-fifth in math and twenty-first in science,) it is easy to not only understand the President’s alarm and applaud him for stating his case.

What the front-page banner of the New York Post should have read was, “BAM’S CRY FOR US TO EDUCATE OURSELVES AS A PRIMORDIAL NECESSITY TO SURVIVE AS A SPICIES. Education is the answer to solving all our problems!”

No, President Barack Obama is never given any slack.

Not that I don’t have my own issues with the President. I realize the political landscape is about compromise. He has an agenda which needs support from all dispirit sides. There is, obviously, the need for give and take. But if you’re going to be playing the game of Chess, you don’t forfeit the queen first! He has given away so much to a body politic who repeatedly doesn’t give anything back in return. Yes, he miraculously managed to get a health care reform bill through Congress, but how effective is it truly, and does it really address all that is wrong with the system. No! There are still too many middlemen, bureaucracy and waste. If you want to fix health care, maybe first or at least simultaneously go after the food industry, which is making us sick in the first place.

Many of us are extremely angered by the bank bailout. Personally, I don’t think we had any other choice but to bail out these bastards who caused this debacle. However, where’s the regulation to prevent this from all happening again? Why did the President bring on Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as advisors, when along with Allan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Arthur Levitt, all had gotten it wrong. Brooksley Born had it right from the beginning, predicting the dangers because of how derivatives were being handled and the inevitability of financial collapse as early as 1996, eleven years before it happened. Why wasn’t she brought in as an advisor?

Wolves are being slaughtered. After a twenty-four year moratorium, the U.S. is now whale haunting again. Yes, that’s right. With all the data on global warming and the scientific reality that the planet’s temperature has gone up an alarming one degree, Mr. Obama has not enacted a strong green policy for our nation which would establish a whole new green industry which means needed new jobs.

The president is obviously highly intelligent and well read. He sites Lincoln, who surrounded himself with cabinet members who disagreed with him so that he would know all sides of the equation, and Roosevelt, who during the Depression, established acts of legislation, including the Works Progress Administration, better known as the WPA, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, a.k.a. CCC, to create desperately needed jobs, improve the infrastructure and promote better environmental husbandry. He also established Social Security for working citizens, who had contributed to the fund, so that they could retire when they reached the age of sixty-five. Those against Roosevelt deemed his legislation would create too large government and socialism, let alone bankrupt us. The economy was already in shambles. One in four was unemployed. Yet, this new legislation truly saved the day during the Great Depression and defined us as a nation who looked out for its citizen’s general welfare, as promoted within the Preamble of our Constitution. Roosevelt also legislated the GI Bill for veterans of World War II to be able to get loans for higher education. It only made us stronger.

Our government, of the last forty or so years, has clearly failed us. Special interests rule the day. Over spending, under taxing, not addressing programs that need to be restructured so to allow their healthy perpetuation, or to be rightfully terminated, has been ignored. Not that special interests were always trying to sway the political landscape, but there was always some recognition of responsibility to the well being of the nation as a whole. Now, with total disregard, Congress overtly demonstrates its own specific personal interest no matter the consequence for the nation. As a result, we are stagnantly intransigent and dysfunctional.

It seems to me Barack Obama, as a highly evolved, intelligent political creature, has to see the writing on the wall. The anger of the nation is palpable. His re-election is seriously doubtful at this moment. Why not then go full court press and leave diplomacy behind, denouncing all the wrongs for what they are. Why not propose legislation ending money in politics. Even as absurdly impossible as it would be to pass this presently into law, we the People would see who discredited themselves by voting against it.

Why not push, through by Executive mandate, under Eminent Domain, a single payer none-for-profit health care system. The profiteering within this industry is so egregious that as a none-for-profit, we could upload fifty million uninsured and not raise a penny of taxes. This present health care bill may slow down our self-destructive increasingly expensive system, but rising costs will still have to be addressed. Its present course is not affordable and will inevitably force not only the eradication of Medicare, but destroy our economy.

Education should be free, if not tax deductible. Health care premiums should be deductible as well.

The anger about “too large government” and “government being in our lives,” is very well true when it doesn’t deliver the services it had promised to deliver. Without governance, however, there is anarchy. If the citizens of our nation want smaller government, then we will have to take up the slack. We will be responsible on a local level to make sure things work. If we are not prepared to do this, then we better make sure that the people we elect do legislate what we need to have done. We can’t have it both ways.

Take all money out of the political election process.

No more political advertising. FCC licenses are given to the air ways. As a result, they must give free time for candidates and debates during election years.

No more PAC money. Period!

Revoke the Federal Reserve Act. The Central Bank can no longer be privately owned.

Create serious regulations for the practice of Fractional Reserve Banking.

Mandate, as if a national emergency during war, concentrated new green technology and its implementation.

No, President Barack Obama is never given any slack.

Excuse my informality, but Barack, join the club. We, the People, haven’t been given any slack for decades because of political corruption, special interest and ineptitude.

Yes, it’s time for change!