A few weeks back, the President started the State of the Union speech with a list of America’s accomplishments in the last couple of years including an accelerated graduation rate, the addition of 8 million jobs in the private sector, the weaning of the country off foreign oil, the addition of healthcare and the end of the unnecessary wars started by the last administration. We now have the lowest unemployment rate since the departure of Bush/Cheney, a rebounding housing market, the most oil produced at home in 20 years, our deficit cut by more than half and the fact that America has replaced China as the number one place to invest.
Obama pointed out that what Americans want is for congress to focus on their needs not the petty squabbles and graft-taking that has identified them for the last 20 years.
He stated that he was eager to cooperate with all, in helping the American people to close the inequality gap but warned that wherever he runs into intransigence in his fight to make America whole again, he will take the situation into his own hands and act without congress.
He talked about opportunity and indentified it as the ability to get a good job. He spoke to getting help in creating those jobs by reworking the tax code. He said that he would streamline the permit process so that we can get people to work on infrastructure as soon as possible. He talked about extending our trade policies to expand the goods sent over seas that are stamped “Made in the USA”. He demanded that congress undo the damage done last year to funds for basic research.
He announced that today, America is closer to clean energy that is made in America. He talked to strengthening our environment but we’re still waiting to see what he does with the XL-Pipeline. He proposed that we stop giving subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and give that money to sun, wind and other renewable industries. He stated that in the last four years we have reduced our emissions more than any other nation on earth, He fails to mention that we have further to go than most of them.
He then made a plea to fix our immigration system by stating that immigration reform will grow our economy by more than one trillion dollars in the next decade. Finally, he spoke to educating workers for the new jobs available and then matching them to the jobs going begging.
It’s when he demanded that congress restore the unemployment insurance that it had just let expire for 1.6 million people that the camera scanned Eric Cantor and his cronies looking angry and non-cooperative
After all the talk about lame duck, Obama strode into this speech and drove home the ideas that he wants to pursue in this next year. He won’t accomplish them all, that’s a given, but they all make sense, even to many who oppose them for other then practical reasons.
So where does that leave us? Well, if the achievements listed had been by any other president the country would be hailing him for them instead of wondering what his legacy would be. The fact is, that even though we elected him twice, this country still isn’t ready for a black president. That’s on us, not on him. But let’s forget that problem now and go on to what Obama wants, what we, as a country, need and the possibilities of what, given the current political and moral situation in this country, we can achieve.
There were many existing problems with this country when Obama took office and he hasn’t solved them all, not even a large percentage of them, but what he has done, is attack a few of them, make progress in a few more and create problems in some places where none existed.
He has pretty much gotten us out of the wars that the Bush/Cheney administration lied us into. On the same front he is holding the line against war mongers like John McCain and the military industrial complex that want us fighting on every front available. When we talk about honoring our service men and women, these are the hypocrites that are front and center, waving flags and beating drums even while they are sending our kids out to get killed for their profit. Don’t ask me why McCain is such a hawk. You’d think that a man who had been though what he has been through would have enough sense, or at leas compassion to not want any other human being to have to experience that.
Obama’s moves to pull us out of a depression, added to a couple by Bush just before he left office have gone a long way to help the country recover, have saved the auto industry and many millions of jobs but they still aren’t enough. Our economy is recovering but too slow and too feebly. The one thing that would have jumpstarted everything, a huge push to renew infrastructure has not happened, mainly because the Right has firmly blocked any progress on that front.
This is the biggest no brainer his writer can remember. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Replacing it creates exactly the kind of jobs most in need. Government creation of jobs in a sector that doesn’t need consumers to buy product, eliminates the need for private investment, which is certainly not forthcoming in any other area. The results are self- evident. Government creates infrastructure jobs, the newly employed workers spend money creating a demand for products, which then creates a need for additional labor to make more of those products, which makes for more new jobs.
It’s a simple cycle but it works, certainly a hell of a lot better than trickle down insanity. If the GOP will get the hell out of the way and let him go ahead with what he wants to do with infrastructure, Obama will get more people back to work faster and he’ll fix the physical country. That should be what we all want. It doesn’t seem that the Right feels that way.
Obamacare, the ACA, is still and will be forever Obama’s signature achievement. It’s a great idea, who’s time is long past and just he fact that he got it off the ground is something, of which, to be proud. For all the negative noise being made about it the country still needs universal healthcare. Even the Right understood and agreed with this when Mitt Romney put it in motion in Massachusetts. The problems have been in execution and in the failure of Americans o accept the fact that all big programs need to shake out. There are always too many parts and not enough functioning experts. If the Right had spent its time and effort helping to fix the ACA instead of wasting 41 unsuccessful tries to close it down, it might be in great shape now. Given time and some much-needed adjustments, the ACA will be successful.
The big problem in Obama’s list of achievements, lies in the environment. In that sector both the president and the country have failed miserably. You can pass all the environmental laws you want but if you don’t back them up and put teeth in them they are useless because the opposition is too strong and their motivation, cash, too alluring.
Obama can talk all he wants about helping the environment, but our country’s record during his administration is pathetic. He makes a big deal about holding off on certifying the XL-Pipeline but he lets his State Department give the job of stopping or okaying it to a company made up of a bunch of hacks with records of being butt boys for the oil industry. The same time he okays a bunch of other pipelines that will soon make the XL obsolete. These pipelines will not, contrary to the lies of the oil barons, create significant jobs. It will not benefit the citizens of this country because all the oil will be going to China and it will or already has poisoned the lands of Alberta, the Dakotas and wherever else the process of tar sands extraction exists. Transporting oil, either by pipeline or rail is dangerous and proven to be an ecological hazard to every where it goes and everything it passes. This is true for two reasons. One is that it is an inherently dangerous process and the other is that the oil companies would rather spend millions on lobbying efforts than spend that same money on safety. This is just a fact.
The rest of the country is an ecological nightmare, brought on mostly by the effort to create energy through the use of fossil fuels. Oil companies are drilling in our national forests and spilling their product in our oceans, rivers, gulfs and all over the world. We have coal disasters destroying mountains and fouling the streams and rivers of West Virginia, coal ash storage pits erupting and doing the same in North Carolina, fracting practices fouling wells in Pennsylvania and causing earthquakes in Ohio and Texas and pipeline spills destroying towns in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas and Michigan. The list goes on and on and so far the president not only has failed to stop what is going on, He has rarely even attempted to slow it down. In the area that may be the most important long-term problem in the world, the president has been AWOL.
Something that didn’t get a great deal of play in the address, was the problem of our national security agencies and their attempt at a grasp for power, veiled in the lie of national security. In this area he has not only failed to stand up for the American people and the constitution, he has actually worsened the problem with his signing of the NDAA bill into law, thereby exposing our citizens to arrest without evidence, on provocation invented by the military or any government agency, for any reason and exposing them to being held without representation, bail or communication, for any period that the arresting agency wishes to hold them for. But this was just the start.
Obama’s refusal to fire James Clapper, the Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover clone of the 21st century is beyond comprehension. By allowing the intelligence community to hound and vilify whistleblowers, the president shows little regard for the freedom and safety of the American people. There would be a lot less need for whistleblowers if our secret agencies would be a little more forthcoming in their dealings with the American people and could, at least, show some results from the huge acquisition of information that they are so set on hording, information that will only grease the reads of the kind off injustice that will certainly be the result of Obama’s signing of the NDAA law.
The President talks a very liberal game when it comes to social policy and economic advancement. He speaks the same way but acts another when it comes to the environment, but his policies that concern the freedoms enacted by the constitution are the building blocks of which fascist dictatorships are constructed.