What has Obama accomplished?

[applegrove]

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[NYC_SKP]

1. Recommended. (nt)

[Tx4obama]

2. Greater Ethnicity/Gender diversity regarding new Federal Judges - image below

[blkmusclmachine]

3. And a good chunk of GOP wish-list legislation, too.

Yay, bipartisanship!

[Pretzel_Warrior]

5. You mean like endin Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires?

Yeah, that was at the top of Republican wish list as we're extensive cuts to pentagon budget via sequester. Exactly what the GOP wanted.

[sheshe2]

12. Oh you haz a sad~

1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.

46 more at the link:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_2012/features/obamas_top_50_accomplishments035755.php?page=all#

[Cha]

4. In spite of all the teabaggers' Greedy Obfuscation and

Propaganda.. thanks applegrove~

[Jamaal510]

6. Only 6 comments so far?

Where is everybody?

[JackRiddler]

8. Unimpressed by bullshit?

Totally apathetic about another cheerleader thread?

So bored by it they left the site by now?

Any list that starts with "the Dow" going up (or down) as if this is the first indicator of anything that matters is seriously divorced from reality.

[woo me with science]

9. [phone]

Last edited Mon Feb 24, 2014, 02:05 AM - Edit history (2)

Top 1% Got 121% of Income Gains Since 2009
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/02/yes-virginia-the-rich-continue-to-get-richer-the-1-got-121-of-income-gains-since-2009.html

Since 2009, 88 Percent Of Income Growth Went To Corporate Profits, Just One Percent Went To Wages
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1874619
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/06/30/258388/corporate-profits-recovery

DOW Up 153 percent since 2009. Wages up 2 percent.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024265744

Wealth of Billionaires has Doubled Since 2009
http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/11/12/Billionaire-wealth-doubles-since-financial-crisis/5011384268135/?spt=hts&or=12

September 2013 - US income gap reaches its widest point since the 1920s
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023644406
http://www.chicoer.com/ci_24061870/us-income-gap-reaches-its-widest-point-since

[democratisphere]

29. Agree with #8. JackRiddler and #9. woo me with science

The super fake unemployment number is ridiculous and an insult to everyone's intelligence.

[applegrove]

11. Don‘t you think a list like this is directed

at people who are uninformed about Obama. By definition they are divorced from reality that he has helped them. Some of said ‘divorcees‘ are in the stock market and watch faux news. I would think they would be the main target of such a list. I found it on facebook. I hope everyone who has a facebook account gets to see stuff like this. It is perhaps the only way to get Obama‘s message out to faux news viewers.

[JackRiddler]

16. The Dow 30

These companies are not "America."

They are also not the solution to the world's problems.

Most of them are the problem.

3M Co. (MMM)
American Express Companies (AXP)
AT&T Inc. (T)
Boeing Co. (BA)
Caterpillar Inc. (CAT)
Chevron Corp. (CVX)
Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO)
Coca-Cola Company (KO)
DuPont (DD)
Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)
General Electric Company (GE)
Goldman Sachs (GS)
Home Depot, Inc. (HD)
Intel Corporation (INTC)
International Business Machines (IBM)
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ)
JPMorgan & Chase & Co. (JPM)
McDonald's Corporation (MCD)
Merck & Co., Inc. (MRK)
Microsoft Corporation (MSFT)
Nike (NKE)
Pfizer Inc. (PFE)
Procter & Gamble Company (PG)
Travelers Companies Inc. (TRV)
United Technologies Corporation (UTX)
UnitedHealth Group (UNH)
Verizon Communications (VZ)
Visa (V)
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (WMT)
Walt Disney Co. (DIS)

[applegrove]

17. So you don‘t want anybody who is in

the stock market to vote for Obama? That is a pretty severe purity test. And not how Democrats will hold on to or get power. Are there not many many types of people who make up a winning majority? Isn‘t that how successful liberal parties succeed?

[JDPriestly]

20. See my post #18. The booming stock market does not say much about whether the American

economy in which most of us live and work is working well. It does say that the very rich have lots of money to throw around. The discrepancy between the very high stock market and the jobless numbers which are better than they were but not what they should be in a strong economy is what tells the story and it's a lot better than when Obama came into office but not where it should be. The high stock market numbers in this international economy don't tell the story for Americans.

So this is not about a purity test. Obama cannot restructure the tax code by himself. We need to really get behind his push to raise the minimum wage. The disparity in wealth is the biggest problem facing America.

On edit: There are various ways of figuring the unemployment rate. The rate in the OP is rather optimistic and does not seem accurate to me because of the huge numbers of underemployed and part-time employed people that are included as employed in that number.

I quote from CNBC (critics of the President but they make a good point):

A number of economists look past the "main" unemployment rate to a different figure the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls "U-6," which it defines as "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers."

In other words, the unemployed, the underemployed and the discouraged — a rate that still remains high.



The U-6 rate fell sharply in January to 12.7 percent. While it is down 170 basis points from January of last year, the trend has been more volatile than in the main unemployment rate, which steadily declined.

[applegrove]

23. I agree the country is doing poorly for

many. But I don‘t think this list was directed at Democrats. I think it is directed at people in the stock market. Surely in this data driven age we can make messages geared towards one group or another. Because a president has to lead more than one group. And the GOP has not disrupted the economy for the upper middle class, unlike what they have purposely done to destroy workers wages. So why not promote Obama‘s success there, for those people stuck on faux? Facebook. To try to wake them up. So they like Obama. So they pay attention to democrats. So they then are able to hear how bad Republicans are for the country as a whole. So they vote democratic. So Repubs lose power. So the democrats in power can actually do something to fix unemployment. Because they are in power. Because some faux news viewers saw that Obama was not all bad. So they stopped thinking like children in black and white with Obama demonized. So they stopped thinking Obama was all darkness and evil while thinking their republican asses are all good and pure. So they stopped thinking pure capitalism was all good and pure. So they actually began to think that government did have a role to mitigate the worst of capitalism. So they actually saw a role for regulations, unions and such. Because they didn‘t see those things as all evil. All because they read a list of 5 things Obama had accomplished and that, for once, they saw he was not all bad.

[JackRiddler]

31. So you want to kill kittens?

Please learn to read what I wrote, before misrepresenting it with a non-sequitur question like that.

I said something about what the Dow is, both inherently and as an indicator of something positive (which you seem to think it is). It indicates nothing other than the current market value of 30 mega-death corporations chosen by NewsCorp as indicative of something important. These are big parts of the much bigger machine that is melting the icecaps and driving what is probably the biggest extinction event in the history of life. To focus on the triviality of their current market price is the problem, not the solution.

Golly gee, do a lot of voters nevertheless care about that crap more than they do about their own lives, and those of their children and grandchildren? On some level, yes. Or they are willfully ignorant. Either way they do.

Your response - that I was actually expressing an opinion about how people who own stock should vote, and somehow magically without actually saying so - is bizarre, and speaks to obsessions of yours so strongly held that you can't even read what anyone wrote except in terms of party strategy, apparently divorced from any principle or the most important issues facing us.

The Democrats are not a successful liberal party. That's what they were up until the 1970s (domestically, anyway, notwithstanding their support for the international murder machine that killed millions in Vietnam and elsewhere).

At the moment, they are a successful, for now, neoliberal party. Very big difference, and highly unfortunate. They would be serving us better in the wilderness, if they were actually going to be a liberal party when elected.

[JDPriestly]

18. You have a point. Although there are still some good points on the list.

The Dow is rising because the very rich 1%ers have more money to gamble with. The Dow would really mean something if the jobless rate had fallen lower than it has and if the GDP were rising faster than it is. But the stock market boom is irrelevant to the US economy if an absurdly great portion of the investments are made only by the richest few in the country and those investments are not creating jobs in America but rather creating them in China, Mexico and outside the US.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

22. Spoken like someone who knows nothing about economic drivers

Earnings and growth potential drive stock prices in the long term. Yes, job growth has been a very lagging indicator...but part of the reason this has been so is a refusal to drive new bubbles that would generate transitory growth that is unsustainable.

[pragmatic_dem]

24. Are you quoting 1980s Reagan and/or Regan?

Because shooting money from canons aimed at rich people has not created jobs It has fueled a speculative stock market and new bubble while making a very small percentage of people ultra rich. At least you didn't claim that austerity is necessary for growth. I'll give you credit for that. Over 150 million people don't have a dime invested in the stock market.

If you want to prevent speculative bubbles like the one building now, you need regulations on what banks can do with the money you give them. I don't see Democratic leadership biting the wall street hand that feeds them any more than Republican leadership.

Democratic leadership certainly has more sympathetic rhetoric to the US worker who has not seen a median wage change since 1970s.

But, you'll have to do better than trickle down economics 101 to make a case for sustained growth given the weakness in jobs numbers. And beyond the raw numbers there are still several primary concerns

1. Wages remain depressed, benefits remain reduced

2. Workers are under employed in deadend jobs

3. Young workers are near all time low.

4. New grads, especially minorities having terrible time finding any work.

5. Companies are sending massive amount of work and training to Asia

6. Companies are demanding massive number of H1Bs from Asia.

We have a fraud driven financial crisis which requires billions/trillions of bailouts every 6 to 8 years, so another one is around the corner. Democratic Party has been too afraid of losing campaign money to challenge wall street with real regulation necessary to stop the pump and dump economy.

[uponit7771]

32. Wingers have similar response to Obama accomplishments .... sigh

[JackRiddler]

33. So sorry for your limited world-view.

Most wingers are thoroughly impressed by the Dow.

So your generalization is bullshit. Basically, you're saying: if anyone criticizes Obama (which I don't in particular: I criticize the capitalist and the U.S. system of civilizational self-destruction), even if for the opposite reasons as the "wingers," this person is a winger! And you get to insult them and dismiss them as such. Very lazy. But you're a team player, I'm sure.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

7. Very good list, and only scratches the surface

Saving GM and Chrysler and millions of related jobs.

[JNelson6563]

19. Yes, this was much bigger than many know.

But it's positive news so they don't want to know.

Julie

[pragmatic_dem]

10. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a huge amount of inequity in who has been able to participate

The Pew data show that just 15 percent of people with a family income of less than $30,000 per year are invested in the stock market. As families earn more, their participation in the stock market increases. Fifty-five percent of those who earn between $30,000 and $75,000 per year are invested in the market, while 80 percent of those who earn $75,000 or more are.

What this means is that the rise in stock prices since the financial crisis has widened the distance between those at the top of the income scale and those at the bottom. This is reflected in various observations, such as the fact that CEO pay has ballooned in the past few years — largely thanks to increases in the value of stock awards — while median worker pay has remained flat.

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/how-many-americans-even-own-stocks.html/?a=viewall

Unfortunately, many wealthy Democrats hold the conviction, as did Reagan and Regan, that wealth trickles down.

[sheshe2]

13. K&R!

[Spitfire of ATJ]

14. Remember where we WERE under Republicans?

Nuff said....

[rury]

15. K&R!!!!!

I posted this to my Facebook page a few weeks ago!!!!
Proud of President Barack Obama!!!!

[ErikJ]

21. Dow plunged to 6500! and GDP to -9% and ...........

we were losing 800,000 jobs a month when Obama took over. He turned it around with his stimulus and He has since ADDED 8 million jobs in the last 2 years!

I love to taunt Republican idiots with this every time they say he is the worst pres in US history.

[davidpdx]

25. OMG

RAH RAH Cool-aid

[MADem]

27. Yeah, thanks a lot, Obama!!!!!!

[liberal N proud]

28. Now that is almost worthy of a Mission Accomplished banner

Not quite completed, but damn impressive.

[flamin lib]

30. Reminds me of the guy in a bar slamming back shots

The bartender says, "What's up fella?"

'See this bar? I built this bar, does any body call me Bill the Carpenter?'. I carved the church doors outta' solid oak and hung 'em myself, does anybody call me Bill the Carpenter?'

But ya' fuck just one goat . . .