Obama and the Great Depression

[unhappycamper]

Obama and the Great Depression
der Standard, Austria
By Hans Rauscher
Translated By Ron Argentati
14 August 2010
Edited by Sam Carter

The most important, major project President Obama should address is not health care reform; it’s the U.S. economy.

Barack Obama’s most important domestic achievement so far has been health care reform; new regulations on finance have already been judged “too weak” by the non-banking sector. As important as health insurance was for millions of uninsured Americans, it’s apparent that Obama went after this major project at the wrong time.

The real problem is certainly the structural condition of the American economy. The Fed just announced that despite large injections of government money and low interest rates, the economy isn’t expected to improve appreciably nor is the unemployment rate expected to fall any time soon. Conventional wisdom would call for further massive injections of stimulus capital and further purchase of near worthless debt by the Federal Reserve, which is something that amounts to financing by printing more money. This solution has been suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, whose warnings about a really serious depression along the lines of the Great Depression of the 1930s appear more and more likely by the day.

~snip~

No matter how one cares to characterize the status of a superpower whose liquidity is dependent upon China’s willingness to assiduously buy up its debt, there’s no denying that the United States has been undergoing a process of de-industrialization for years. Even relatively simple manufacturing has migrated toward Asia, and nothing has taken its place despite America’s technological prowess. Incomes are stagnating, the middle class is in decline and unemployment is firmly entrenched.

That’s the problem Obama needs to address. The United States is losing its industrial base, and the attempt to recoup the lost income in the financial sector led to the economic crash of 2007 and 2008. The solution most likely lies in a new investment push: On the one hand, in the crumbling American infrastructure and, on the other, in environmental technology.

[Bandit]

1. People that do not understand that Health Care Reform is directly related to the economy

Are not much on the ball if you ask me..

[Better Believe It]

4. When do you think we will get a reform of the private health insurance system?

[Bandit]

5. We just got some reform

Kids can now stay on their parents policies until 26 years old, no refusing insurance for pre-existing conditions, Shop across state lines, Actually there are just too many to list..I understand we did not get single payer as we should have, for the most bang for the buck, but we did get quite a bit..

[OHdem10]

2. The Problem ---His closest advisors and those upon whom he

most depends are Free Marketers--same as Conservative Republicans
except kinder and gentler.

[femrap]

3. Hans seems to see the problems

better than the U.S. minions. Or maybe that's the plan of TPTB....turn the U.S. into a Third World Nation with no middle class and no industrial base.

Just in the past couple of years even the manufacturing of toothpicks and straws has moved from the US to China.

WASF

Health Reform was nothing....Corporations are still 'responsible' for contributing to their employees insurance. The Public Option would have stopped that...but that wasn't on that fucking Table.