sorry. I couldn't edit the post above. The President can order the imprisonment of any American without charge or trial or any limit. And, as we now know, he is free to turn over a Canadian citizen to a military court that accepts torture in evidence.

Democracy is not n trouble. It's over.

mulling over a response....  I was one of Obama's cheerleaders, if aware of the pitfalls.  I still think he's better than Bush.  But I have thoughts milling around about his miscalculations of the world's perspectives on the US Empire and what would repair it.  Pretty words and playing the kindly King won't work if the only change coming is superficial.

You have a handle on the specifics and the spin, that I don't.  I am working off of the various events happening and the emotions in the stories around it.  For example, Pakistan certainly isn't hiding the chasm between it and the US at the moment.  And that smacks of disrespect of the US.  They aren't afraid of them.  And the world's news buzz doesn't seem surprised at it either.  So they've decided Obama is all talk, and the US is declining.   Even Harper doesn't pay the US any heed these days.  He's got free reign to be himself, instead of just Shrub, aka "little Bush".

...as I said, I'm mulling...

Obama lacks experience and it shows  He's created a void in world leadership and other countries are stepping in to fill that void.

My god where is analysis?  What we have is rhetoric.  Yes we expected more but much has changed - what void?

What has changed? Explain any of Obama's moves in the context of change. Show me how any is different from what Bush would have done.

And it's extremely dangerous. The US has enormous killing power. As it declines him human spirit, it was to rely increasingly on drones, electroically guided (ofetn erroneously) assassination teams, mercernaries, and extensive survelilance and use to extreme powers of investigation, imprisonment and assassination,even within the US.

Obama is worse than Bush. We are very, very close to the sort of mass murder we have not seen since Mao.

http://politics.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2010/06/18/mort-z...

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-JanFeb/full-Kagan-JF-20...

Then there is this in the same worldaffairs

Ed Pilkington

graeme said "Obama is worse than Bush"....  And thanks to you, the name of the next American president will be Sarah Palin. God help us all.

I read that too,figured you would see it.

But I still think just by watching him and listening to him, he really wasn't ready for the presidency. And I was one that had high hopes for him also.

Then again, there will be no one voted into that position that will be above criticism.

Or maybe Hillary Clinton?

Those commentaries are pretty shallow stuff - a nythical view of american traditions and policies.

The US doesn't give a damn about democracy. It has more often killed than established democracies. It has been aggressive ever since the revolution - the whole interior and west cioast of the US, Mexico, Canada, Hawaii, The Phillipines, Central American in general. The entry to the second world war nothing to so with Pearl Harbour or Hitler. It was to cut off Japanese conquest in an area the US wanted to conquer. Then there was the deliberate destruction of British business and Empire (Failed at Hong Kong, but worked at Suez, and in denying Britain Marshall Plan help.)

'Open trade" is a virtue only as long as US business can use to to overwhelm business development in other countries. Both Canada and the US were heavily protectionist when they were builidng up. Both abandoned it when their businesses had so much advantabe they could crush foreign opposition. If that changes tomorrow, Canada and the US will both go back to protectionism.

Hilary would be bad news. I'm just not sure it matters any more.

All of them had to do with the office of the president. It was the office of the president that ordered the British fleet not to liberate Hong Kong. (Roosevelt planned to give it to a Chinese puppet, Chiang Kai-Shek). The British defied Roosevelt. A Canadian should know that because the first surface ship to enter the harbour and accept the surrender was a Candian ship. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?

It was also a presidential decision that the UK could not receive aid uner the Marshall Plan. Do you know what the Marshall Plan was?

It was the president who ordered the Free French ships in the Pacific not to liberate Hanoi. (American business had its eye on Vietnam even then.) When the French ships defied the president and sent in a destroyer, it was bombed and machine gunned by American aircraft. A large number of French sailors were killed. (You may have missed that in the news.

The American people don't matter. Both parties and all candidates are bought and paid for. As we're seeing with Obama, it really doesn't matter who wins.

The US is close to very dangerous social unrest. And we will feel it.

the opinion of the American people has not mattered since 1945. We now have a  highly sophisticated and manipulative press, most of it owned by the same people who own the political parties.

the last president whose opinion mattered may have been Eisenhower. The rest have either been puppets or ineffectual.

not quite. Obama never had a policy in the first place. He could have shut down Guantanamo. He didn't. He could have sent the Khard trial to a real court in Canada. He didn't. He could have kept the war from spreading to Pakistan. He didn't. He could have vetoed the idea of presidential power to assassinate American citizens with no declared reason. He didn't.

Any president for the last forty or fifty years has had some powers, if severely liimited ones. Obama has no choice but the follow the general  foreign and economic policies that the rich want. But there are a few areas where he could have done something - and didn't.

He is now the president of the developed country with the greatest gap between rich and poor in the world.

The tea party movement is not just a protest against policies. It's scream of rage and distrust of all government. It's largely a movement of comfortably off whites. But there's a scream coming from the poor and black, too. It's the same scream.

American democracy, in practical terms, ended a long time ago. I take no joy in saying that because it is likely to lead to very serious disorder and upheaval - which will be won by the rich and the army. And we will suffer the fallout.

 Obama is worse that Bush?? I disagree.

On foreign policy, the president's plan is to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan starting in July, 2011. He can thus put an end to two wars that have cost the American people dearly in terms of lives lost, money and reputation. Bush never had a plan when he invaded Iraq. He  had no exit strategy and absolutely no idea of how much the war would cost. Much of the $1,3 trillion deficit the president inherited from Bush can be blamed on the cost of the war. Obama realizes this but unfortunately he also realizes that he can not appear soft on defence so he sent 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and has recently ramped up the use of drones in northern Pakistan.

President Obama has some very tough issues to deal with, but in my opinion, he is handling the job very well and the American people should be more appreciative of his efforts.

easydoesit is quite right about the situation. I can't see where Obama has done the job very well. Exactly what has he done?

I actually pity Obama. He was handed a disaster (or more accurately a whole bag of disasters) not of his making and people are upset that he hasn't been able to wave a magic wand and make it all go away.  Sadly he can't just say he want such-and-so done and have it just happen, he has to get things pushed through a congress that is actively obstructionist.  Bush got the US and the World into a panic and stampeeded a lot of nations into creating a disaster.  Unfortunately the process doesn't work in reverse.

 http://www.libertadlatina.org/Crisis_Indigenous_LatAm_Guatemala_Index.htm

Above is a link which takes you to an article  in York University's Womens Studies publication discussing the genocide against the Mayan population of Guatemala which is, I believe, the genocide that graeme refers to in his post above.  The President of Guatemala at the time was Mr. Rios-Montt.  The Spanish arrested him and tried to put him on trial for war crimes in much the same way as they did with Pinochet.  The Spanish Supreme Court found that Spanish Courts did not have the jurisdiction to do this and so the prosecution was aborted.  The article describes American complicity with the Guatemalan government of Rios-Montt in the perpetration of this crime.

Israel has been a constant supplier of arms and other resources and materiel (such as intelligence software and computing systems used to direct the repression of the Mayans). 

Another story that outlines Israel's involvement in Guatemalan oppression can be viewed at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Middle_East/Israel_Guatemala.html 

At  http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/spv/pdf/smyth_frank.pdf  you may find a scholarly article which deals with the commonalities of several genocides including Guatemala and Rwanda.  This article confirms the reports of 200,000 deaths that graeme has mentioned in his post along with the American and Israeli connections he mentions.

I learned about it quqite by accident. There was an itme in the paper that the body of a priest in NB had been exhumed, some twenty years after his death, and remobed to Montreal for an autopsy.

That sounded strange when none of the news media mentioned why this was done; nor did we hear of any autopsy results.

That's what got me poking around, and how I discovered the New York Times story.

they have  no real power except that their financial backers assign to them.

Obama can order a murder. He cannot order medicare.

Beshpin, you've got a brain. Please use it occasionally to say something useful. As it is, you sound like a university teacher.

 Hey Graeme

What exactly, you ask,has Obama done?

I have already written about the president's plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in 2011, so I won't repeat. This is the number one priority on the president's foreign affairs agenda and it will save many lives and help reduce the huge US debt.

Domestically, the president's number one priority is the economy. Two years ago, the financial system in the US was on the verge of a meltdown, thanks to the sub prime mortgage fiasco in which Wall Street had a big part. The president instituted a $700 billion stimulus package (it just ended a couple of days ago) which was successful in preventing another Great Depression. Thanks to this stimulus, companies like GM and AIG are paying back their TARP money with interest to the government, thus allowing many workers to keep their jobs. The Republicans of course bitch and complain about the huge debt and regulation imposed by the government on big business but forget that it was Wall Street that got us into this mess. The Republicans want a quick fix but offer no solution of their own. Hope this answers your question.

1. The penatgon has publicly said the US can not withdraw, ever, from Afghanistan. In most countries, a general who opposes the official position of its leader gets fired. In some, he gets hanged. Obama hasn't said boo.

Far from getting out, Obama greatly expanded the war into Pakistan. He is also being publicly humiliated as Netanyahu makes it clears he has no intention of reaching a peaceful settlement, and as he makes it equally clear he intends to bomb Iran - whatever Obama says - and he can do it thanks to the fact that the Obama supplies him with aircraft and bombs as part of the largest "aid" effort in the world. The US ontinues to spends thousands of times what it spends on Haiti to equp Israel for its attack on Iran. It also uses its veto to block any UN criticism of Israel. (He has also NOT delivered on promised aid to Haiti.

2. The greater part of Obama's financing came from Wall St. The infusion of money to the banks and auto companies was proposed by Bush. Obama simply continued the policy, which is exactly the same policy the Republicans had.

It has not prevented another depression. And, like the Repubicans, he has done remarkably little to help those who lost their homes and/or their jobs.

Under Obama, the gap between rich and poor has continued to rise so it is now the largest gap of any developed country. While other Americans suffered job losses and reduced hours, the rich actually got richer over the last two years (as they have for the last thirty or so.)

Obama has changed nothing. And there is no serious sign the recession is going to get better any time soon.

Oh, I should have added he has extended the unofficial wars to several countries in Africa. American drones are in use in Somalia, for example. This is the president who got a Nobel Prize for Peace.

Very good points. We should also remember health care reform. It got watered down some but is still a big step in the right direction. Pres. Obama has made some huge successful changes.

That's a red herring. Obama has laid down an outline for the end of the war in Afghanistan. The pentagon will do what's it's told by the President.

I'm afraid you don't understand, Jon. A general gets fired for saying what Petraeus said. The whole Pentagon has told Obama to go suck an egg. Just as Netanyahu told him. And Obama has not even whimpered.

His "medicare" package did not move a single step in the right direction. What it did is make taxpayers chip in to pay extra profits to private insurance companies and hospitals. It will be easy to put an end to it - and it will be ended in the current economic crisis.

And the economic crisis shows every sign of getting worse - no sign of easing.

As for Afghanistan, Obama has not only stepped up the war but has opened one with Pakistan. There is no way he can get out without being chased out. As for his promises, he is also the man who promised to end Guantanmo and torture. And there was a deadline.Neither has ended.

Obama is either a liar or he has no control.

True enough.

Nonsense. You flat out don't have a case. Petraeus can pontificate if he wants, that's a million miles from defying the President. There's no reason why any president would worry about it. As for Netanyahu, so what. He's the elected leader of another country. He can't tell President Obama what to do and Pres. Obama can't tell him what to do and they both know that. As for Afghanistan I stand by what I pointed out, and you failed to contradict. Keep in mind Pres. Obama has only said that late next year will be the beginning of the end to the Afghan war. No timetable has been set for troop withdrawal. In all likelihood it'll be well into the President's second term. Guantanamo is behind schedule but that's the real world for you. The President immediately cut off sending more prisoners there and has gradually reduced the number held there. It's slow but it's progress.

As for the economy I can only assume that you're just not paying any attention to what is going on in America. We have had 8 straight months of privare sector job growth and soon that will be officially nine straight months. Not only are we in recovery, the recovery seems to be picking up steam. The recession officially ended the middle of last year but it's finally starting to feel like it.

President Obama is certainly not a liar! As for control that's more complicated. Certainly the President doesn't control members of congress, even those of his own party. That's why Guantanamo is so badly behind where it should be and why health care reform got so watered down. The President's control is definitely finite. However saying he has no control is a ridiculous exaggeration to put it nicely.

1. Petraeus contradicted the president on a matter of forieign policy. Foreign policy, inlcuding the purpose of a war, is none of a general's business. That's why Truman fired McArthur. This occasion is worse. The whole Pentagon has publicly contradicted  Obama.

2. Guantanamo does not accept more customers. Big deal. It is only one of a least fifteen such prisons around the world. As well, it was long ago revealed that the US has been sending prisoners for torture (Canadians can tell you something about that - since a Canadian citizen spent a year being tortured by the Syerians and the CIA in Syria.)

3. Abamo has done nothing to pepare for withdrawal. In fact, he as stepped up the war with more troops, more drones, more assassination squads, a;nd invaded Pakistan. The peace talks we just learned of today were begun by Taliban and the Karzai government. They have no connection with Obama.

4. I don't want to disillusion you, by a president can and does tell another president what to do - especially president one leads a country bastly bigger, gives president 2 annual aid that is the largest share given to any country in the world, and underwrites president 2's defeince budget, and is the chief supplier of its arms.

Netanyahu has now twice publicly humiliated Obama - and there have been no repercussions. He has now refused to extend even for a short time a freeze on settlements in order to save peacetalks. (In fact, they never was a freeze. Nethanyahu continued the building througoh the "freeze", and humiliating Obama who had negotiated the freeze but who dared not even notice what Netanjahu was doing.) Netnyahu might be talked into  a freeze extenstion. If so, there will be one hell of a price on it, and he will continue, as last time, to build anyway. Nethanyahu doesn't give a damn about peace tallks. And he doesn't give a damn about Obama.

5. There has been a slight rise in the American economy. That has done little, if anything, to affect average income, or the auto industry future, or anything of signfificance. That enormous debt still hangs over the US. The American auto industry will never recover against world competition. And the real recession hasn't even hit yet. Oh, and the US has reached an income gap that is the biggest tne the history of modern, develooped countries.

Don't be taken in by statistical games. the risses in employment are slight; and they take no account of the new employment - wheither it is part time, or lower paid than before..... It also ignores the parallel rise is rates of poverty.

As well, they no longer count in most of those who are unemployed of they, for example, have given up looking or are just rated unemployable. The real unemployment rate in the US is probably well into depression range.

Oh, The Blackwater Group of mercenary suppliers lost favour under Bush for a wild record of fraud, corruption, drug dealing on a massive scale, and for murders, rapes and robberies committed by its soldiers. Obama just restored it to favour with a ten billion dollar contract to supply mercenaries for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hi graeme

I'm reading along. It seems the US will stay in Iraq forever? They have that huge embassy there, cost 700 million, the biggest in the world.

They are building a new embassy in Eng. at a low cost of 1 billion.

It is a semantics thing the troops who remain are not there as "combat" troops, that is that their chief mission is not ongoing combat.  Of course there are a whole lot of things that could still be their main mission...

To understand this, you really have to read The Project for the New American Century. You can google it.

The objective is world domination. )referred to as imposing American leadership to spread American values, etc.) And it's not really a project of the US. It's a project of the very, very wealthiest in the US. This has been the consistent  policy from Bush through Obama to whoever is next.

I am not at all sure that even the tattered remnant of American democracy can survive another five years of this.

I say that with no joy at all. My children and grandchildren have to live with that.

Mickael Robinson in a report for pew Research center reinforces Jon's comments.   What he says is the 'crisis' is created by the political class including Journalists who have create a polarisaion where none exists.

Graeme,\

you don't go far enough back.  The policy you outline is simply the old Manifest Destiny doctrine expanded to a global level.  I would also suggest that this "tattered remnant" is more like what has existed since 1776 (when originally it was only white landowning males that counted) than the mythic history of American democracy and the American Dream

Gprd. I'm afraid there's a lot of truth in what you say. And I fear terribly that our chldren and theirs will pay the price for it.

Parentheism - journalists created Newt Gingrich's following, and Sarah Palin's and Bill Clinton's and Obama's and Bush's? That's a somewhat diverse collection. Jouranlists created the peace movement and the war movement? Journalists created the demand for medicare and the oppoisition to it? How very diverse.

Journalists create situations? And they do it in defiance of their owndership?

So, which of the divisions I list above do not really exist except in the news media?

My the way, Jon is also wrong, I'm afraid on the recovery figures. US employement was predicted to rise in August by some 20,000. In fact, it was announced yesterday that it fell by 39,000. And many of those saved were saved by becoming part time or at lower pay.

The US is not recovering. Neither is Europe.

an addendum. I've just learned that even more jobs were lost in September. There is no recovery.

 Robert Reich just posted a blog entry at the Huffington Post entitled 

The Secret Big-Money Takeover of America

I would say that it is a fairly open secret that the rich are driving the bus in the US but nevertheless Reich (former U.S. Secretary of Labour and Professor at Berkley in California) explains how the "takeover" is proceeding.  The link below takes you to the blog post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-secret-bigmoney-takeo_b_754938.html

Not true. The private sector has added jobs for nine straight months. The only real loss of jobs has been temporary jobs with the census. The private sector added 75,000 jobs in September. The recovery is slow but undeniable.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/07/news/economy/initial_claims/index.htm

Frankly I think your pet theories are just flat out goofy.

I think you have a reading problem. Look at the AP resport. It does NOT say what you think it did.

 As well People who have been  out of the work force for an extended period or have simply given up hope in finding a job are no longer considered unemployed.They are taken off the list. Similarly, people who have lost full time jobs to accept part time ones are counted among the employ

As a rule of thumb you can consider official unembployment figures to be about half the total of real unempoloyment.

It seems to me that there has been an attempt here to deflect the criticism of the "Obama Disaster" by making it turn only on the issue of economic performance.  Beside the fact that economic performance is only one measure of a nation's success there are all the other issues that graeme mentioned.   The gap between rich and poor, the delivery of justice (or injustice), avoidance (or not) of complicity or involvement in the commission of human rights abuses, perversion (or not) of democratic processes, the prosecution (or not) of wars, success or failure to use national resources for the benefit of the citizenry, the use of or the squandering of resources in the prosecution of war while following doubtful doctrines of world domination ... all might also qualify as better yardsticks.  Perhaps you can think of others.  

If you don't think this is true consider that economically Saudi Arabia is doing great ... but would you want to live there?  Why not?

At the best of times the economy is not considered a determinant of the success of a society.  Right now it is difficult to even reach a consensus about what the economy is doing.  For instance, Investment Executive is a publication aimed at financial professionals.  The story on the front page of their magazine began this way ...

"There’s always uncertainty about how economies and financial markets are going to perform, but there has seldom been as much confusion and different interpretations of data as there is now.

Case in point: a convincing argument can be made that the U.S. is still in recession and, at best, is likely to grow only very slowly for many years." 

They go on to outline the various viewpoints on the economy now in the future.  Some say just as graeme does that  the US is still in recession.  Others see growth now and in the future.  

You can read the article at:

 http://www.investmentexecutive.com/client/en/News/DetailNews.asp?IdPub=200&Id=55055&cat=27&IdSection=27&PageMem=&nbNews=

 There is also an interesting analysis of the "Obama Disaster" in the February issue of  Harper's Magazine.  It expands on some of the themes that graeme is introducing here.  I will place a link at the bottom of this post but will also place an excerpt in case the link will not work for you.  The article is called "The Mendacity of Hope".  It is written by Roger D. Hodge the editor of Harper's Magazine.  Here is the excerpt ...

A year and more has passed, yet we have not been delivered. Some believed that Barack Obama had come to restore the Republic, to return our nation to the righteous path. A new, glorious era in American politics was at hand.  If only that were true. We all can taste the bitterness now.

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantánamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass. As president, with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date. Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has declared that the kidnapping and rendition of foreigners will continue, and the Bush Administration’s expansive doctrine of state secrets continues to be used in court against those wrongfully detained and tortured by our security forces and allies. Obama has adopted military commissions, once an unpardonable offense against our best traditions, to prosecute terrorism cases in which legitimate convictions cannot be obtained; when even such mock trials provide too much justice, he will make do with indefinite detention. If, by some slim chance, a defendant were to be found not guilty, we have been assured that the president’s “post-acquittal” detention powers would then come into play.

The principle of habeas corpus, sacred to candidate Obama as “the essence of who we are,” no longer seems so essential, and reports continue to surface of secret prisons hidden from due process and the Red Cross. Waterboarding has been banned, but other “soft” forms of torture, such as sleep deprivation and force-feeding, continue—as do the practices, which once seemed so terribly important to opponents of the Bush regime, of presidential signing statements and warrantless surveillance. In at least one respect, the Obama Justice Department has produced an innovation: a claim of “sovereign immunity” in response to a lawsuit seeking damages for illegal spying. Not even the minions of George W. Bush, with their fanciful notions of the unitary executive, made use of this constitutionally suspect doctrine, derived from the ancient common-law assumption that “the King can do no wrong,” to defend their clear violations of the federal surveillance statute.

As the attorney Glenn Greenwald has argued, in his writings for Salon and elsewhere, the rule of law has not been restored but perverted; what had been outlawed but committed, the law now simply permits. Obama’s lawyers, benefiting from Bush-era litigation, can claim conformity with law, but the disgraceful policies continue largely unchanged. Better, smarter legal arguments obtain for policies that should give any decent man nightmares. Our torturers and war criminals and illegal spies and usurpers remain at liberty, unpunished. The wars of choice continue and threaten to spread; 30,000 additional soldiers prepare to “finish the job” in Afghanistan’s graveyard of empires while our flying robots bomb villagers in the mountains of Waziristan. This, we are told, is progress. ...

It is not surprising that unsophisticated children, naive Europeans, and Democratic partisans continue to revere the heroic former candidate, despite everything he has done and left undone. Nor is it surprising that the broken remnants of the old White Supremacy coalition hate and fear the man and will oppose him without quarter (excepting, of course, his war policies). Puzzling, however, is the fact that Obama, until fairly recently an obscure striver in the Chicago Democratic machine, continues to inspire perfervid devotion among intellectual liberals who know their history. Even they say: Be patient. Give him time. It’s hard to change the government. Or, more cynically: He’s the best we can do ...

Perhaps I am wrong to expect a flood of thoughtful apologetics on or around the first anniversary of Obama’s rule. It may be that the bizarre spectacle of a putatively antiwar president standing in imperial glory before an audience of young West Point cadets, declaring that War is Peace even as he promises to send many of them to the grave, will jar the liberal intelligentsia from its affectionate slumber ...

Seeking fresh historical perspective on yet another president with an obscure plan to somehow win an unwinnable war he did not start, I picked up a new book by Garry Wills with a provocative title: Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. The walls of my library are lined with books advertising similar themes, the works of trenchant historians who seek to explain what went wrong with America, how the noble republic of Jefferson and Madison devolved into a globe-gobbling empire ...

... Having embraced and professionalized the powers of force and fraud previously associated with the likes of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, Obama has embarked on a course of war that will certainly invite further abuses of power. His political survival now depends on martial success in a land that has defeated some of history’s most brutal strategies of conquest. Obama has set a trap for himself, but because he is such a clever politician, the spring is just as likely to fall on us instead. Such insidious governance demands serious, sustained opposition, not respectful disagreement or fanciful historical apologies or mournful lamentations about the tragedy of his presidency.  Principles can be sacrificed to hopes as well as to fears.

The link is ... http://harpers.org/archive/2010/02/0082802

 Graeme

Three points you have made need to be examined for factual accuracy.

1.  "Petraeus contradicted the president on a matter of foreign policy." That's news to me. I am wondering if you are confusing Petraeus with General McChrystal who was Obama's commander in Afghanistan until last June when Obama fired him for remarks he made about Joe Biden in an article in Rolling Stone magazine??

2.  "His Medicare package did not move a single step in the right direction."  To my knowledge, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were never on the table for discussion or debate in Congress, at least not in the short term. These are hot button topics that neither the GOP nor the Democrats would touch with a ten foot pole. If by "Medicare package" you mean the Health-Care Reform Bill recently signed into law, remember that 45 million Americans now have access to health insurance that they did not have with the old system of private health care insurance.  That to me is a step in the right direction.

3.  "The infusion of money to the banks and auto companies was proposed by Bush." Correct. Back in late 2007, Hank Paulson who was Bush's treasury secretary suddenly realized that after years of financial abuse by Wall Street, a financial crisis was looming so he began the bail-out of big companies/institutions. He did not want another Lehman Brothers collapse. But it was the Obama administration that has carried out most of the stimulus spending in order to prevent a total collapse of the economy, a strategy that ironically the GOP is now criticizing.

Alas,Beshpin, as you will learn from the response to the citation above, those who disagree either will not read it - or will find some error which, in their view, discredits the whole thing.

I gave stacks of citations for what I said about education. So far as I can tell from the thread, none of those who disagree with me has ever looked at them.

graeme

Ah, that. I am simply using the rule of thumb llong ago adopted by governments. I doubt whether it's official anywhere. If's just that they know the full stats, imcluding those who can only get part time work, those who have given up after months of searching, those who lack adequate skills for the current market and those whose skills are no longer needed or usable in a collapsed economy, those falling into unemployment late in their working years and unlikely to ever find another job....

These and others (it varies from place to place)  are commonly subtracted from the list of unemployed, making the official unemployment figure much lower than it really is.

Some years ago, I had a friend who was deputy minister of employment for western Canada (I think) and Yukon. The unemployment figure, especially in Yukon at that time, was very high. Usually, he would tell me the real figure. This time, h e just gave a sort of sour grimace and said, we're not even talking about it.

graeme

quote:

"To understand this, you really have to read The Project for the New American Century. You can google it.

The objective is world domination. )referred to as imposing American leadership to spread American values, etc.) And it's not really a project of the US. It's a project of the very, very wealthiest in the US. This has been the consistent  policy from Bush through Obama to whoever is next."

YES I agree . I used to  be in fits and spend hours researching your anti American material . I found it to be true altho' I admit I'm no political whiz kid!  I also agree with what you say about the unemployment  figures  because I once worked in a Trust Co. where I had to fill out monthly reports for the gov't.  Part timers etc. and sometimes we couldn't remember who worked how many days so we sort of bluffed. Nobody cared . They were people sent from agencies probably already on record as employed, a day here, a day there. I also agree that the U.S. is still in  recession big time. Its a hard thing to hide or cover up. I have a neice living in Seattle. The people there are desperate for work. No jobs!

Oh I forgot to say I love Obama for his New Age philosophy:

"All is well and all is well and all shall be well"  (Arminius quote Julian of Norwich!)

I know it isn't true but I love him anyway! He's a bright shining star in the darkness. He has done some good as quoted above. He needs time and the U.S. doesn't have time. Last night CNN said Bush is becoming more  popular than he used to be as he's  now being compared to Obama. I hate to see Obama getting beat up.

There is no time. The war with Pakistan is on.There will be some temporary deal to ease. But the war is on. Afghanistan cannot be separated from Afghanistan. The war with Iran has been decided on, by the US as much as by Israel. For all his speeches, Obama has yet to respond to any iranian request for talks.

The wars in Latin America are just beginning - as we saw in the overthrow of the elected president of Honduras and the continued impoverization of Haiti and the continued suppression of th eMay in Guatemala, and the continued confrontation with Venezuela. Brazil is groing very rapidly, not only in its economy but in its distribution of wealth. US capital cannot allow that.

That privatization of schooling takes us back to the dark ages in Quebec when there were excellent private schools for the rich, and dreadful public ones for everybody else. No democracy can survive that. No country can build an economy on that.

And Ii suspect the time to prevent it  is too short.

graeme

quote:

"The war with Iran has been decided on, by the US as much as by Israel."

  What is your prediction of what a war on Iran will be like? Similiar to Iraq or much more devastating if thats  possible?  Could it lead to a third world war?  The U.S. needs the troops in Afghan. or would Afghan. fall by the wayside in this event? Do you have an approx. date for the war on Iran?  2011?

Note:

Israel and the U.S. signed a deal this week  for Israel's purchase of a squadron of 20 U.S. made F-35 stealth fighter jets. The deal is worth nearly 2.8 billion (Can.) Canada is planning to buy 65 jets  for 9 billion. ( Toronto Star).  These big figures blow my mind!

Hard to say when it will come - though not later than 2011. Israel may decide to wait until Obama is gone - but I doubt it. Netanyahu has shown many times he can stomp all over Obama with no problem. He completely ignored the settlement freeze; he has now resumed building to end a freeze that, in fact, never happened,,, The peace talks are dead meat.

For his part, Obama has routinely ignored invitations for talks with Iran.

The refusal of the Russin to sell AA missiles to Iran is suggestive. They are not weapons of aggression. But they could make an Israeli attack too costly to be worth carrying out. In effect, Israel now has a green light. It also has the right of passage over arab air space on the way to Iran. And the US and Canada have both publicly committed themselves to support Israel.

Perhaps the only question now is the timing of the delivey of new aircraft, and the time it will take to train the crews. I can't see it extending beyond 2011.

As to Afghanistan, the US will stay. It certainly is stretched, and farther than most people know. American troops (and military aircraft and drones) are all over Africa. They are in Colombia. They are in hundreds of bases all over the world. Close to half of them are mercenarties.

Perhaps they're thinking the job in Iran can be done with massive bombing. Perhaps Isrrael is thinking of a nuke. ( a small one, we will be assured.)

It's impossilbe to tell the consequences of such a war. Certainly, it will encourage and all out drive by countries like Brazil to get nuclear weapons. The message is clear. The US will attack anybody who has no nuclear weapons. It's very hard to predict where this will go.