The Sorry State of the Union

[SHRED]

Mr Scheer, as usual, is hardhitting and to the point.

This President started with the bar raised high. A bar he raised.
But from the Wall St. bailouts, the big pharma and big insurance capitulated "health reform", to now this "freeze"(cutting) nonsense for social/civic services, I have to say that it is no wonder that everyday Americans who are suffering under this mess (handed down from the previous administrations) are pissed.

Seems to me like a continuation of supply-side, "trickle-down" government.

When will the populist Obama show up?
Was there ever one to show up?

The Sorry State of the Union
Posted on Jan 26, 2010
By Robert Scheer

~excerpts~

Obama distracted progressives with a grand crusade for health care reform that reasserted the fundamental fallacy of the previous health reform effort of the Clinton years: Give the insurance companies a captive universal market under the absurd illusion that we can control costs without undermining their greed with a competitive government-run option.

The same is the case with the collapse of the economy, as Obama shamefully continued the Bush administration’s mugging of U.S. taxpayers by throwing trillions of dollars at the Wall Street bandits who caused the financial meltdown. Meanwhile, 7 million Americans have lost their jobs and 15 million families owe more on their homes than they are worth.

Someday our president, whom I still regard as a decent and well-intentioned politician, will have to confront the demons of that fatal opportunism that led him to turn over the economy to the likes of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, who can most charitably be described as hugely successful Wall Street pimps. Obama knows of Summers’ devilish role, during his time in the Clinton administration, in pushing the radical deregulation of the markets that the president blamed last week for our economic debacle. And he is aware that the TARP inspector general is hot on Geithner’s heels for his role, as head of the New York Fed, in the funneling of $62 billion dollars through AIG to Goldman Sachs and the other bonus payout alchemists.

~snip~

Shame on Obama for now telling us after wasting many trillions on Wall Street and the Pentagon, that he will now seek to balance the biggest indebtedness in U.S. history not by cutting from that greasy pork but rather into the bone of our civic life, found in funding for schools and other desperately needed social services. That is the opposite of a New Deal for ordinary folks in need of their government’s assistance more than at any other time since the days of that last great Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Will we ever have another?

SOURCE:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_sorry_state_of_the_union_20100126/

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[izquierdista]

1. Spare change you can believe in

Wall street gets the money, ordinary Americans are left to go spanging for help.

[daa]

2. Private profits, public losses nt