Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

FORBES

Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today issued America’s latest jobs report covering August.  And it’s a disappointment.  The economy created an additional 142,000 jobs last month. After 6 consecutive months over 200,000, most pundits expected the string to continue, including ADP which just yesterday said 204,000 jobs were created in August. 

One month variation does not change a trend

Even though the plus-200k monthly string was broken (unless revised upward at a future date,) unemployment did continue to decline and is now reported at only 6.1%.  Jobless claims were just over 300k; lowest since 2007.  Despite the lower than expected August jobs number, America will create about 2.5 million new jobs in 2014.

And that is great news.

Back in May, 2013 (15 months ago) the Dow was out of its recession doldrums and hitting new highs. I asked readers if Obama could, economically, be the best modern President?  Through discussion of that question, the #1 issue raised by readers was whether the stock market was a good economic barometer for judging “best.”  Many complained that the measure they were watching was jobs – and that too many people were still looking for work.

To put this week’s jobs report in economic perspective I reached out to Bob Deitrick, CEO of Polaris Financial Partners and author of “Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box” (which I profiled in October, 2012 just before the election) for some explanation.  Since then Polaris’ investor newsletters have consistently been the best predictor of economic performance. Better than all the major investment houses.

This is the best private sector jobs creation performance in American history

Bob 

Deitrick – “President Reagan has long been considered the best modern economic President.  So we compared his performance dealing with the oil-induced recession of the 1980s with that of President Obama and his performance during this ‘Great Recession.’

As this unemployment chart shows, President Obama’s job creation kept unemployment from peaking at as high a level as President Reagan, and promoted people into the workforce faster than President Reagan.

President Obama has achieved a 6.1% unemployment rate in his 6th year, fully one year faster than President Reagan did.  At this point in his presidency, President Reagan was still struggling with 7.1% unemployment, and he did not reach into the mid-low 6% range for another full year.  So, despite today’s number, the Obama administration has still done considerably better at job creating and reducing unemployment than did the Reagan administration.

We forecast unemployment will fall to around 5.4% by summer, 2015.  A rate President Reagan was unable to achieve during his two terms.”

What about the Labor Participation Rate?

Much has been made about the poor results of the labor participation rate, which has shown more stubborn recalcitrance as this rate remains higher even as jobs have grown.

 

Bob Deitrick: “The labor participation rate adds in jobless part time workers and those in marginal work situations with those seeking full time work.  This is not a “hidden” unemployment.  It is a measure tracked since 1900 and called ‘U6.’ today by the BLS.

As this chart shows, the difference between reported unemployment and all unemployment – including those on the fringe of the workforce – has remained pretty constant since 1994.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics – Databases, Tables and Calculators by Subject

Labor participation is affected much less by short-term job creation, and much more by long-term demographic trends. As this chart from the BLS shows, as the Baby Boomers entered the workforce and societal acceptance of women working changed, labor participation grew.


Now that ‘Boomers’ are retiring we are seeing the percentage of those seeking employment decline.  This has nothing to do with job availability, and everything to do with a highly predictable aging demographic.


What’s now clear is that the Obama administration policies have outperformed the Reagan administration policies for job creation and unemployment reduction.  Even though Reagan had the benefit of a growing Boomer class to ignite economic growth, while Obama has been forced to deal with a retiring workforce developing special needs. During the 8 years preceding Obama there was a net reduction in jobs in America.  We now are rapidly moving toward higher, sustainable jobs growth.”

Economic growth, including manufacturing, is driving jobs

When President Obama took office America was gripped in an offshoring boom, started years earlier, pushing jobs to the developing world.  Manufacturing was declining in America, and plants were closing across the nation.

This week the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released its manufacturing report, and it surprised nearly everyone.  The latest Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) scored 59, 2 points higher than July and about that much higher than prognosticators expected.  This represents 63 straight months of economic expansion, and 25 consecutive months of manufacturing expansion.

New orders were up 3.3 points to 66.7, with 15 consecutive months of improvement and reaching the highest level since April, 2004 – 5 years prior to Obama becoming President.  Not surprisingly, this economic growth provided for 14 consecutive months of improvement in the employment index.  Meaning that the “grass roots” economy made its turn for the better just as the DJIA was reaching those highs back in 2013 – demonstrating that index is still the leading indicator for jobs that it has famously always been.

As the last 15 months have proven, jobs and economy are improving, and investors are benefiting

The stock market has converted the long-term growth in jobs and GDP into additional gains for investors.  Recently the S&P has crested 2,000 – reaching new all time highs.  Gains made by investors earlier in the Obama administration have further grown, helping businesses  raise capital and improving the nest eggs of almost all Americans.  And laying the foundation for recent, and prolonged job growth.

 

Bob Deitrick: While most Americans think they are not involved with the stock market, truthfully they are.  Via their 401K, pension plan and employer savings accounts 2/3 of Americans have a clear vested interest in stock performance.

As this chart shows, over the first 67 months of their presidencies there is a clear “winner” from an investor’s viewpoint. A dollar invested when Reagan assumed the presidency would have yielded a staggering 190% return.  Such returns were unheard of prior to his leadership.

However, it is undeniable that President Obama has surpassed the previous president.  Investors have gained a remarkable 220% over the last 5.5 years!  This level of investor growth is unprecedented by any administration, and has proven quite beneficial for everyone.

In 2009, with pension funds underfunded and most private retirement accounts savaged by the financial meltdown and Wall Street losses, Boomers and Seniors were resigned to never retiring.  The nest egg appeared gone, leaving the ‘chickens’ to keep working.  But now that the coffers have been reloaded increasingly people age 55 – 70 are happily discovering they can quit their old jobs and spend time with family, relax, enjoy hobbies or start new at-home businesses from their laptops or tablets.  It is due to a skyrocketing stock market that people can now pursue these dreams and reduce the labor participation rates for ‘better pastures.”

Where myth meets reality

There is another election in just 8 weeks.  Statistics will be bandied about.  Monthly data points will be hotly contested.  There will be a lot of rhetoric by candidates on all sides.  But, understanding the prevailing trends is critical.  Recognizing that first the economy, then the stock market and now jobs are all trending upward is important – even as all 3 measures will have short-term disappointments.

There are a lot of reasons voters elect a candidate.  Jobs and the economy are just one category of factors.  But, for those who place a high priority on jobs, economic performance and the markets the data clearly demonstrates which presidential administration has performed best.  And shows a very clear trend one can expect to continue into 2015.

Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories.  Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan. 
Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.”  Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.

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History says Democrats are better at growing the economy than Republicans
Investor returns have been better during Obama administration than any other presidency
Why Wall Street forecasters have consistently missed the Obama market run-up

Myth Busted: Republicans Wrong Again as Obamacare Premiums Set to Decrease in 2015

Myth Busted: Republicans Wrong Again as Obamacare Premiums Set to Decrease in 2015

By: Trevor LaFaucimore from Trevor LaFauci

Saturday, September, 6th, 2014, 12:45 pm

Republicans were hoping that some great Obamacare news would slip out on a Friday afternoon and go completely unnoticed by the media.

They thought wrong.

This afternoon the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation released a report projecting premium increases for the 2015 year under the Affordable Care Act. After years of double-digit increases, next year’s premiums will not only drop into single digits, but there will be an average decrease of premiums by roughly 0.8 percent. Overall the trends are clear: a few small states will show rate increases but large states, and more specifically large cities, are will show fairly small changes. Since the small states tend to show higher variation, they also don’t affect the overall average very much so when all is said and done there’s a very realistic chance the overall premium levels will be close to zero.

As Mother Jones puts it, this result is “genuinely stunning.”

The result should be especially stunning for our Republican friends who have insisted for five years that Obamacare would be unable to support itself in the long run. They deemed it a “death spiral” and insisted the program would be crushed under its own weight. For five years, they’ve insisted that the program would be unsustainable in the long run, with a major reason being the fact that premiums would increase to levels that would be unaffordable for the average American. In fact, as recently as May of this year, The Hill released a report stating that double-digit premium hikes were set to emerge for 2015.

Yet, despite these Chicken Little predictions, Obamacare has once again proven to be an unqualified success.

The reason for this is that Obamacare is doing exactly what it was intended to do. Despite the repeated doomsday predictions Republicans have given us for the past five years, the law is not only not failing, but it’s achieving a remarkable string of successes that even proponents of the law did not see coming. In fact, it’s doing so well that’s it has now entered what economist Paul Krugman has called a “life spiral.” Krugman explains that good news continues to breed more and more good news because “the huge surge in enrollments late in the day meant that the risk pool this year is better than insurers expected, and they now expect 2015 to be better still. Also, importantly, big enrollments mean that more insurers are entering the market, increasing competition. And, of course, the better the deal, the more people will sign up: success feeds success.”

In other words, the exact opposite of what Republicans predicted would happen.

Perhaps Ezra Klein said it best today, when he wrote:

Imagine taking a time machine back to 2010 and telling Republicans in Congress, who were arguing that the CBO was wildly underestimating Obamacare’s cost, that the law would be cheaper than predicted and, at least in the states that accepted its Medicaid dollars, cover more people than the Congressional Budget Office thought. After the laughing and mocking and the calling of security, let’s say you offered this prediction in the form of a bet. What odds do you think Obamacare’s critics would have offered? 2:1? 5:1? 10:1?

As both Klein and Krugman point out, our Republican friends were dead wrong about the law. Notice how little we have heard about the ACA the closer and closer we get to the mid-term elections. Republicans bet the farm on opposing Obamacare and history will show that the entire party opposed a law that was the most significant piece of social legislation in a generation. As more and more good news about the law continues to emerge, Republicans will do their best to pretend like they never opposed the law in the first place. In fact, now Republican governors like Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett are expanding Medicaid, and there are a handful of other states whose Republican governors are also considering doing the same. Governors like Rick Scott and Scott Walker, who openly denied their citizens Medicaid, are now facing the fight for their political lives.

Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to use Obamacare’s successes for the upcoming midterm elections. As the good news continues to pour in, Democrats should hammer their opponents, and especially sitting members of Congress, for continually using fear and propaganda to deny their constituents health care. For Democrats to win big in November, they need to continue to advocate for the people that the Affordable Care Act has helped the most: The working class. If Democrats can successfully appeal to this group and can honestly and openly say how Republicans continue to deny their fellow citizens health care out of political spite, then they should be able to successfully get people to the polls who are fed up with being consistently lied to and manipulated by the Republican Party.

If Democrats can do that, they will have made a compelling case for a blue House and Senate this fall.

93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

  NEWS & POLITICS  

AlterNet / By Nicolas J.S. Davies

93 Countries Who Have Changed Their Minds About Obama

And 31 where he's less popular than George W. Bush—including Kenya.

April 29, 2014 

Photo Credit: Pete Souza, The Obama-Biden Transition Project (l) / Wikimedia Commons; yourecoveredinbees (r); Screenshot / YouTube.co

During the Bush years, people all over the world were horrified by America's aggression, human rights abuses and militarism. By 2008, only one in three people around the world approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders. The election of President Obama broadcast his message of hope and change far beyond U.S. shores, and Gallup's 2009 U.S.-Global Leadership Project (USGLP) recorded a sharp rise in global public approval of U.S. leadership to 49 percent.

As in the U.S., the reality of Obama's policies has gradually eroded global approval of his leadership, which dropped to 41 percent in 2012 before rebounding to 46 percent in 2013. The 2013 USGLP report includes a caveat that Europe and other areas were surveyed in early 2013, soon after Obama's reelection and beforerevelations of NSA wire-tapping, so the improved 2013 figures may reflect a fleeting revival of hope rather than a favorable response to U.S. policy.

A closer look at the U.S.-Global Leadership Project report reveals an erosion of approval for U.S. leadership in countries all over the world since 2009. The specific question Gallup asks is, "Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of the United States?" Large numbers in some countries refuse to answer or express no opinion, masking unvoiced disapproval behind fear, deference or politeness. I don't believe that 71 percent of Vietnamese really have no opinion of U.S. global leadership. But the approval figures are probably not as flawed as the disapproval ones.

In 2008, a majority of respondents approved of the job performance of U.S. leaders in only 30 out of 109 countries. After Obama's election, this jumped to 54 out of 112 or almost half the countries surveyed. But, in the 2013 report, only 37 percent, 48 out of 130, still had majorities who approved of U.S. leadership. Overall, the number of people who approve of U.S. leadership has declined in 93 countries since 2009, as the impact of Obama's policies has gradually displaced his iconic image in people's minds.* In 31 countries, Obama's leadership approval figures have sunk below Bush's.**

The most striking drops in approval of U.S. leadership have come in Africa, where U.S. leadership has always enjoyed its highest approval ratings. The continent's high hopes for Obama may partly account for lower approval in 28 out of 34 countries compared to his "honeymoon" in 2009. But that doesn't explain why people in 15 out of 27 countries, or most of the continent, now rate U.S. leadership under Obama worse than under Bush. That even includes Kenya, the home of the Obama family. The enthusiasm Obama's election generated in Kenya and the rest of Africa led Africans to pay greater attention to U.S. policy, but what they discovered has left them severely disillusioned.

Europe was the continent that most unequivocally rejected Bush's leadership. Only 18 percent of Europeans approved of U.S. leadership in 2008, with approval falling as low as 8 percent in Austria and Belgium and 6 percent in Spain. Obama's charm offensive was also more effective in Europe than anywhere else, boosting approval to 47 percent in 2009. This fell back to 34 percent by 2012, but recovered to 41 percent in early 2013. But Gallup surveyed Europe in 2013 before Edward Snowden's revelations of NSA spying, and before Assistant Secretary Nulandorganized a coup in Ukraine, turning it into the latest battlefield in the global American war that so alienated Europeans during the Bush administration. So we'll have to wait for the 2014 report for a read-out on Europe's reaction to mass wiretapping and "Fuck the E.U." regime change.

The approval rating of U.S. leadership in Asia varies a lot but has grown along with the region's economic growth, to 45 percent in 2013, also sweetening the global approval ratings. Latin America looks more like Europe, with a 34 percent rating in the Americas at the end of the Bush administration spiking to 53 percent in 2009, declining to 40 percent in 2013. Argentina rose from 11 percent in 2008 to 42 percent in 2009 but fell back to 19 percent in 2012 and 23 percent in 2013.

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign promises of hope and change have faded from the headlines around the world as they have in America. His foreign and military policy has conspicuously failed to make a clean break with the Bush policies that alienated so much of the human race. He has failed to close Guantanamo or to hold senior U.S. officials accountable for war crimes. He escalated the war in Afghanistan, where he has conducted 22,000 air strikes, along with hundreds of illegal drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He has expanded special forces operations to an incredible 134 countriesand launched bloody proxy wars in Libya andSyria, reducing them to chaos and warlordism to rival Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama has overseen an evolution in U.S. war policy from mass military occupations to a greater reliance on covert operations, proxy wars and a naval buildup in the Pacific. But this evolution was dictated by the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of China rather than by any new vision Obama brought to U.S. policy. A President McCain would have followed roughly the same policy and likely committed many of the same crimes.

Obama's global charm offensive was always more about style than substance, and the substance behind the mask of "change" was "continuity.” Neither the American nor the global public would have submitted quietly to another George W. Bush. So the challenge for the power brokers of America's capitalist political system in 2008 was to find and promote a face and a voice that a jaded public would welcome but who would ensure continuity for Wall Street's control of the economy and America's relentless but ever more elusive quest for global military dominance. The pretense of change was essential to sidetrack and silence growing demands for actual changes in U.S. policy.

This was the challenge that defined Obama's inherently deceptive role as the new CEO of America Incorporated. How to change public perceptions without changing the underlying policies that they were based on? The U.S.-Global Leadership Project explicitly defines itself as a tool in such efforts. Its introduction reads, "The (USGLP) gives public- and private-sector leaders a better understanding of what is driving global views of U.S. leadership, creates a context for collaboration on how to improve those views, and enhances U.S. public and private global engagement efforts."

But the report does not suggest fundamental changes in U.S. policy. The authors implicitly accept that the views of the people they are polling have no voice in such matters. But U.S. leaders must "engage" with them to manufacture consent and minimize resistance to U.S. policy. This was precisely what American power brokers hired Barack Obama to do, and the USGLP is a useful report card on his performance.

The parameters of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy were first defined in 1992, to provide a stable and predictable framework for "public- and private-sector leaders" to exploit the power dividend gained by the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were spelled out in a "Defense Planning Guidance" document drafted by Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his assistant Scooter Libby, which was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. The document was substantially revised to obscure its globally offensive implications before it was officially released a month later. But the policy framework outlined by Wolfowitz in 1992 was later codified in the Clinton administration's 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2002National Security Strategy, which Senator Edward Kennedy described as "a call for 21st-century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept."

The policy Wolfowitz outlined in 1992 was to establish a world order in which the U.S. military would be so dominant and so ready to use overwhelming force that "potential competitors" would be discouraged "from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Even NATO allies would be discouraged from acting independently of the U.S. or forming European security arrangements outside NATO. Once this policy was established, the U.S. would "sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order."

The 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" implicitly violated the U.N. Charter's prohibition on the threat or use of force by threatening unilateral U.S. military force against "potential competitors." As the New York Times noted at the time, "the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II when the five victorious powers sought to form a United Nations that could mediate disputes and police outbreaks of violence."

During the Bush administration, the "neoconservative" political philosophy of Wolfowitz, Libby and their cabal came out of the shadows and became a target of widespread public criticism. The roots of U.S. aggression against Iraq were traced to the neoconservative "Project for the New American Century," founded in 1997 by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-funded Weekly Standard. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Libby were all PNAC members.

But the role of Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, as the leader of the State Department/CIA team that organized the U.S. coup in Ukraine has drawn new attention to the fact that the neocons still hold positions of power and influence in Washington under Obama. The neocons today are not just influencing policy as an outside pressure group as they did with their "Team B" in the 1970s and PNAC in the 1990s. They remain comfortably ensconced in Obama's State Department, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and corporate-funded Washington think-tanks.

Victoria Nuland was Deputy National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Hilary Clinton installed her as State Department spokesperson, and then John Kerry appointed her as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Her husband, PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan, works at the Brookings Institution, and he and Kristol have now co-founded the Foreign Policy Initiative, widely seen as the successor to PNAC and lampooned as, "The Project for the Rehabilitation of Neoconservatism."

But Robert Kagan doesn't seem to need rehabilitating. President Obama prepared for his State of the Union speech in January 2012 by studying Kagan's essay, "The Myth of American Decline" and discussing it paragraph by paragraph with network news anchors at a White House meeting. In contrast to the USGLP report, Kagan's essay completely fails to consider the point of view of anybody outside America, but of course that's not necessary in a propaganda piece for an American audience. Obama drew heavily on the essay in his speech, climaxing with a cheap applause line based on Kagan's wishful thinking, "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline, or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about."

Anther neocon with influence in the Obama administration is Kagan's brother Frederick.Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberlyis president of the Institute for the Study of War. They were among the principal advocates of escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 and their close relationships with Secretary Gates and Generals Petraeus and McChrystal gave them critical influence in Obama's decision to escalate and prolong the war.

Former PNAC director Bruce Jackson is the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, dedicated to integrating Eastern Europe into the EU and NATO. Reuell Marc Gerecht, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a former CIA officer in Iran, is one of the most strident voices in Washington urging U.S. aggression against Syria and Iran and working to torpedo diplomatic solutions to either crisis.

Carl Gershman and Vin Weber are president and chairman respectively of the National Endowment for Democracy, which laid the groundwork for the coup in Ukraine, spending more than $3.4 billion of our tax dollars on 85 projects there. Ron Paul has called NED, "an organization that uses U.S. tax money to actually subvert democracy, by showering funding on favored political parties or movements overseas."

But the influence of neoconservatism extends well beyond the cabal of neocons who rode in with the Bush administration. Despite failing every test in their application to the real world for 22 years, the policy framework and goals developed by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 have become set in stone throughout Democratic and Republican administrations alike. The goal of U.S. military supremacy has become such an article of faith that rational alternatives are viewed as sacrilege or treason.

As Gabriel Kolko noted in "Century of War" in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not only plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles." There are no limits to the crimes that American exceptionalism can justify, and genuine compliance with the rule of law is viewed as an unthinkable existential threat to the new premises of American power.

The only way a government can maintain such an illegitimate position is by the most elaborate use of propaganda, deception and secrecy, both against its own people and the rest of the world. The Obama model has evolved beyond traditional propaganda with techniques of branding and image-making developed in the corporate public relations sector, not least to build a deep sense of trust into the iconic image of a hip, sophisticated president with strong roots in African-American and modern urban culture. The contrast between image and reality, which is such an essential element in Obama's role, represents a new achievement in "managed democracy," enabling him to continue and expand policies that are the polar opposite of the change his supporters thought they were voting for.

But this regime of secrecy, deception and propaganda is an essential feature of the neoconservative political philosophy that now drives the leadership of both major political parties. Leo Strauss, the intellectual godfather of the neocons, was a refugee from 1930s Germany who believed that any genuine effort to achieve "government of the people, by the people, for the people" was doomed to end as the Weimar Republic did in Germany with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Strauss had a very dark Hobbesian view of human nature, which he justified with "secret" meanings he claimed were hidden in the works of Plato, Nietzsche and all philosophers. Strauss did not believe that the general public could handle the truth as he saw it, so that any system in which the public held real power would surely end in barbarism.

The Straussian solution to this imaginary problem is a system of "managed democracy," in which a privileged high priesthood or oligarchy monopolizes real power as it oversees a superficial structure of democracy and promotes patriotic and religious myths to ensure the loyalty of the public and the cohesion of society. Political scientist Sheldon Wolin has dubbed this "inverted totalitarianism." Because it is less openly offensive than "classical totalitarianism,” the inverted form may be more sustainable and therefore more successful in achieving a total concentration of wealth and power, paradoxically making it more insidious and dangerous than the classical totalitarianism the Straussians claim to be saving us from.

In her 1997 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, Shadia Drury wrote, 

Strauss believes that every culture and its morality are human fabrications designed by philosophers and other creative geniuses for the preservation of the herd. Because the truth is dark and sordid, Strauss maintains that the philosophic love of truth must remain the hidden preserve of the very few. But in their public posture, philosophers must pay lip service to the myths and illusions they have fabricated for the many. They must champion the immutability of truth, the universality of justice, and the selfless nature of goodness, while secretly teaching their acolytes that all truth is fabrication, that justice is doing good to friends and evil to enemies, and that the only good is one's own pleasure. The truth must be deliciously savored by the few, but it is surely dangerous for the consumption of the many.

If this sounds uncannily like the cynical attitude of the people who run America today, it is because we are now living under a neoconservative, Straussian political system, and President Obama, far from representing some sort of alternative, is a neoconservative, Straussian president. In fact, by drawing on the sensibility and tools of Hollywood and the advertising industry to carefully balance traditional appeals to patriotism and religiosity with urban identity politics and inclusive and populist rhetoric, Obama and the Clintons are more sophisticated and masterful practitioners of Straussian politics than Bush or Cheney ever were.

The 2013 U.S.-Global Leadership Project report is the latest evidence that you can fool all the people some of the time and some people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. And yet fooling all the people all the time is precisely the Straussian model for American politics and government. Behind a smokescreen of democracy and American values, a capitalist political system recycles wealth into political power and vice versa. Behind a consumerist American Dream, a corporate command economy drives a concentration of wealth and power such as 20th-century totalitarians never imagined, supported by a corresponding explosion of poverty, debt and mass criminalization. And behind an endlessly waving flag, a militarized foreign policy wrecks country after country in the name of democracy.

If Leo Strauss was right, the American people will passively accept a diet of endless propaganda and deception fed to us by a wealthy, powerful high priesthood as they gorge themselves on the fruits of our labor. If he was wrong, we will reject Straussian politics, organize effectively to elect a very different political class, and ensure that they democratically represent us to build the better world we all know is possible. But the problems facing the world today will not wait very long for us to make up our minds whether Leo Strauss was right or wrong in his dark, disdainful view of who we are.

___________________

* Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Palestine, Panama, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Somaliland, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

** Afghanistan, Armenia, Chad, Colombia, Congo Brazzaville, Djibouti, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.  

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." Davies also wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, "Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader."

BP Gets an Anniversary Gift From the Obama Administration

Published on Saturday, April 19, 2014 by Common Dreams

BP Gets an Anniversary Gift From the Obama Administration

 

by Richard Schiffman

 

 

This Sunday April 20th is the fourth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 workers and dumped over 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a three month period in 2010.





You wouldn't think that the London-based company that spilled the oil would get an anniversary gift from the federal government. But the Environmental Protection Agency has just given BP a big one. The EPA ruled that the corporation could start bidding on lucrative new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico after having been suspended from doing any new business with the government ever since the accident.

That suspension was lifted on March 13th less than a week before the yearly government auction for drilling rights. The company whose negligence was responsible for the worst marine oil-spill in history won 43 new leases in the Gulf that is still fouled by million of gallons of unrecovered crude.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was not the first time that BP was found culpable in a major accident. In 2005 the company was deemed criminally liable for a refinery explosion in Texas City which killed 15 people. Yet again in 2006, a Justice Department investigation found that BP had willfully ignored evidence of serious corrosion in its pipeline, which led in Alaska to the largest oil spill ever in the Arctic.

BP's critics say this was not just a run of bad luck, but the result of an ingrained corporate culture which routinely put profits above safety. In an interview, Tyson Slocum of the public interest group Public Citizen said: "If ordinary people are found guilty in three felony cases, they will be imprisoned-- suspension from contracts is a kind of corporate imprisonment."

However, under intense pressure from BP, which filed a lawsuit challenging the contract ban, and the British government, which filed a brief in the case criticizing the US for its action, the company was just granted a get-out-of-jail-free card by the Obama administration.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the head of the EPA suspension and debarment office which ordered the original ban against the oil giant, "retired" just days after the administration caved to BP's demand to end their 5-year criminal probation period early.

After the Gulf oil spill, there were calls in the environmental community and in Congress to reform the outdated regulatory system. "The last time that regulations for offshore drilling were written," says Slocum “was 1978. Deepwater wells, like the Deepwater Horizon were introduced in 1994. So what you've got is regulations for the typewriter age applying to IPhones."

In the aftermath of the disaster, Congress passed a bill in the summer of 2010 which called for a comprehensive reorganization of the Offshore Oil Agency, and for tougher new environmental standards. But, under pressure from the American Petroleum Institute that bill died in the Senate.

The Obama administration then took matters into its own hands calling for a temporary moratorium on drilling. By executive decree, the President reintroduced many of the same rules that had been included in the ill-fated bill. These rules, however, do not have the force of law and can be reversed by future administrations.

Moreover, the central problem, according to Slocum, remains: "Remember, we all watched in horror over a period of two and a half months how one of the largest and most profitable multinationals on the planet with some of the smartest engineers in the world had absolutely no idea how to cap that well... We still do not have clear certification that any driller-- whether they be BP or Exxon or Shell-- has the right equipment and the proven technology to stop a deepwater blowout."

Slocum says drillers need to be required by law to have equipment on hand to drill a relief well in case of a future blowout. And we also need to require companies to thoroughly test in advance critical equipment-- like the faulty blowout protector which malfunctioned to cause the Deepwater Horizon accident.

However, we're unlikely to get these critical regulations anytime soon. The American Petroleum Institute has said that they will oppose any efforts to impose new regulations on offshore drilling. One of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbies in Washington, the API generally gets what it asks for.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

 

Richard Schiffman is the author of two books and a former journalist whose work has appeared in, amongst other outlets, the New York Times and on a variety of National Public Radio shows including Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

The Refusal of Democrats to Recognize that They've 'Been Had'

OpEdNews Op Eds 3/29/2014 at 11:55:58 The Refusal of Democrats to Recognize that They've 'Been Had'   By Eric Zuesse (about the author)     Permalink       Related Topic(s): Barack Obama; Democrats Progressive; Ideology Progressive; Obama Cabinet; Obama Effect; Obama Hope; Obamacare; President Barack Obama Headlined to H2 3/29/14

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Barack Obama
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I am a Democrat, but I hold "Democratic" politicians to the same standards as I do ones who are self-professedly Republicans.

Sadly, only few Democrats do: they refuse to recognize that they voted for a Republican-at-heart in "progressive" sheep's clothing, a conservative who had pretended to be a progressive in order to win the Democratic Presidential nomination. 

I learned about this closed-mindedness of liberals, by means of the reader-comments to my recent article at Huffington Post,  "Obama: 'I Don't Care About the Public's Welfare'." 

Respondents to it didn't challenge the facts that it summarized, which were damning in the view of any progressive -- and some even in the view of any non-fascist. Instead, these readers listed the good things that Obama has done as President, such as, "Rescuing the Auto Industry." Every President has done some good things. Such readers were simply refusing to believe that Obama is a liar and is at least as conservative as he is liberal. Instead, they diverted onto irrelevancies: onto the good things he has done, which have nothing to do with those bad things.

A real progressive doesn't avoid the truth, but instead faces and tries to understand the truth.

For example, the progressive magazine Mother Jones headlined on 25 August 2005,  "Bush's Biggest Achievements,"  and listed four: "Humanitarian Aid in Africa," "Tsunami Relief," "Marine Protections," and "Executive Branch Diversity." Even that man who might have been America's worst-ever President, did some excellent things.

Oddly (and admirably), The American Conservative bannered on 5 February 2009,  "Bush's Good Deed,"  and praised a different action by him, which also happened to be actually a progressive action that he had taken: "Bush's last -- it might seem his only -- good deed:  rejection of an Israeli request for overflight permission and perhaps military assistance in bombing Iran's nuclear reactor. There's been very little about this in the mainstream press -- though it's the kind of major incident that history often turns on." That's correct.

Should we assume, therefore, that Bush was a good President? Of course, that would be silly.

My article didn't merely list a few middling-bad things that President Obama has intentionally done: it described many very-bad things he's done (not things done very badly -- very bad things), and then ended the litany with: "Anyone who doubts that Obama is a liar (except when addressing banksters in private), whose actual values are often the exact opposite of his sanctimonious public statements, should read not only the IG's report, but, regarding other issues, things such as," and I then linked to six more -- each of which, likewise, entailed Obama's intentionally doing things that were exactly contrary to his publicly expressed (and always more-liberal) stated objectives.

As to the question of why Obama would have entered politics in 1996 as a "Democrat," instead of a "Republican," perhaps the reason for this is he recognized that, after Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," starting in the 1970s, the likelihood for any person with a dark skin-color to win the Republican Presidential nomination was clearly nil; whereas in the Democratic Party, there would be lots of voters who would actually like the idea of voting the first Black into the White House. Being a "Democrat" was thus the only path by which a young black person in 1996 could realistically hope to become the U.S. President. To an ambitious black person entering politics in 1996, being a "Democrat" instead of a "Republican" was a no-brainer choice. And Obama is clearly not a no-brainer person: he could figure this out.

But Obama is no progressive. He isn't even much of a liberal. He is an enormously gifted politician. Unfortunately, part of that gift-set is a phenomenal ability to deceive.

This isn't to say that he's purely a conservative, either. Some of his remarks, such as the famous one about which the Romney campaign headlined against him "You Didn't Build That," were obviously stated by him with an actual progressive intent.

Obama told donors on 24 November 2013,  "I'm not a particularly ideological person,"  and that statement by him was unfortunately true: he has never even thought seriously about his values, his ideology; he just accepts unquestioningly the ones that he has absorbed from the people around him, especially from the aristocrats who enabled him to receive a first-rate education. Not everything that he says is a lie.

Perhaps that will satisfy Obama-bots that he's okay, after all. Far from it.

At best, Obama is a bad President. And I say this as a progressive historian who respects, above all Presidents, the progressive Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose Party transformed into something very different and vastly more conservative practically as soon as he was murdered by an extreme conservative; and as one who respects almost as highly the progressive Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose impact on our entire world was more beneficial than that of any other leader in all of human history (if you consider what would the world be like if Hitler had won?), but who additionally has the unquestionable black mark on his record, of having rounded up and imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent for no good reason.

An authentic progressive applies the same standards, scientific standards, empirical facts, to everything, including human relations. But it seems that many people who consider themselves to be liberal or even progressive, are actually too filled with some kind of tribal loyalty (to "Democrats," in this instance), which prevents them from being that. To the extent they do, they're being conservative.

Perhaps that's not as bad as being a Republican, but it can turn out to be worse than being a Republican if what it means is that one will vote for a conservative like Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential nominee, which will mean that the nation will "choose" a conservative President no matter what.

Our main obligation as progressives is to do everything we can to assure that one of the two Parties' Presidential nominees will be a progressive; because, if we fail to do that, then we will have failed the country.

Anyone who relies upon a third-party candidate to deliver the nation a progressive as a serious contender for President, is entertaining a fantasy, not a strategy, because the two political parties are ideologically polarized so that the Democrat will inevitably be less fascist than the Republican, and no third-party candidate will stand a chance to win unless he's a billionaire who can fund his own campaign, which won't happen. (Nader's efforts, especially to get onto the states' ballots, were funded largely by big-money Republican donors, and it gave them a Bush "win" in 2000, so that's what happens when progressives bury their heads in the sand: bad news that turns into catastrophic history.)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of   CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

Obama plans to outspend Reagan on Nukes

Obama plans to outspend Reagan on Nukes

Monday, March 17, 2014

 

Steve Breyman,, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency

Barack Obama has outlined a nuclear weapon expansion plan that beats Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' debacle in both dollars and dangers.

The anti-nuclear movement spent much of the eighties resisting Ronald Reagan’s new Cold War, and his new nuclear weapons of all shapes and sizes. We pushed back against his giant ‘defense’ budgets and countered his harrowing rhetoric. We knew Star Wars was a scam, and the MX missile a danger. We grimaced at his appointments to key policy making positions, and scoffed at his insincere arms control efforts.

In the end, the tireless work of professional activists, plowshares heroes, and a handful of stalwart others who stayed in the anti-nuclear weapons movement trenches deserve some credit for preventing planetary incineration that seemed frighteningly close at the time (Gorbachev deserves some too). Although nukes were not abolished with the end of the Cold War, most of the rest of us nonetheless moved on to fight other evils, and to work on one or more better world construction projects.

Two recent events should serve to re-awaken this movement and return to this struggle. First is the situation in the Ukraine, where old Cold War Hawks have been re-animated to again advise nuclear armed leaders, East and West, to show 'strength' and beat their chests at one another.

The second call to action has received much less attention. President Obama released his FY 2015 budget on Tuesday, March 4. It asks for considerably more money (in constant dollars) for nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production than Reagan spent in 1985, the historical peak of spending on nukes: $8.608 billion dollars, not counting administrative costs (see graph below). The Los Alamos Study Group crunched the numbers for us.

Next year’s request tops this year’s by 7%. Should the President’s new Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) be approved, yet $504 million more would be available for warhead spending. The OGSI is $56 billion over and above the spending agreed to in the December 2013 two-year budget (unlikely to pass given that it’s an election year, would be paid for by increased taxes on the retirement funds of the rich, and reduced spending in politically dicey areas like crop insurance).

The US currently deploys some 4650 nuclear weapons. That these are mere dangerous remnants of the Cold War, and of no use to counter contemporary security threats, was confirmed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment which said not a word about Russian nuclear weapons but instead focused on cyber threats, mass atrocities, and the extreme weather events attendant to climate change. (Yeah, Clapper is the guy who lied with impunity to Congress about NSA bulk data gathering on Americans; he’s probably not lying this time).

The Congressional Budget Office reports that current nuclear complex spending plans total $335 billion through FY2023. Then, believe it or not, the Pentagon and Department of Energy plan to begin replacing current weapons systems by new ones. There’s $100 billion to design and construct twelve new missile submarines, $81 billion for new strategic bombers, tens of billions for a new long-range cruise missile, a new ICBM, and revamped command and control infrastructure. Add to this the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plans for at least $60 billion to “extend the life” of current weapons, and more than $11 billion for the Uranium Processing Facility. None of these CBO figures factored in the usual cost overruns.

For the Administration to find record funds to invest in nuclear weapons in budget under so much political and fiscal pressure reveals how far Obama’s rhetoric has drifted from his actions.

Obama's Nuclear Contradiction

Increased lucre for the nuclear weapons complex maintains Obama’s inconsistency on the Bomb. He wrote his senior thesis at Columbia on the arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Two months after his first inauguration, he uttered these words in Prague: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review promised to avoid “new military missions or... new military capabilities” for nuclear weapons (don’t laugh, you’d be surprised how imaginative those guys can be). 2011 was even better: Obama signed the New START Treaty. It limits the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1550, a 30% decrease from the previous START Treaty, signed in 2002. New START also lowered limits on the number of launch platforms — ICBMs, ballistic missile launching subs, and nuke-equipped bombers.

At the same time, his State Department refuses—under first Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry—to present the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for ratification out of timidity over expected resistance (never mind that the U.S. has essentially figured out ways to circumvent the Treaty’s spirit if not letter; the CTB was once the ‘holy grail’ for arms control and disarmament advocates).
That same State Department refrains—under both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry—from getting tough with Pakistan over its years-long obstruction of United Nations-sponsored negotiations over a global ban on the stuff needed to make bombs. (Pakistan is the country building them faster than any other; how about: ‘we’ll ground the killer drones in exchange for a fissile material cut-off?’). And Obama now wants to outspend Reagan on nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production.

Winding down nuclear weapons spending, and eventually abolishing the things (for which no negotiations are underway) has been the right thing to do since the first bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert in 1945. State Department support for the coup in Ukraine and the resultant saber rattling make it as urgent as ever.


~ Steve Breyman serves as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Ecology Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.

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