Al’s Loupe

Way to go Mr. President… you’re starting to remind me of W

By Alvaro F. Fernandez
alfernandez@the-beach.net

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
— Abraham Lincoln

If the presidential elections were held today and I knew everything I know to this point, I would cast my vote, without hesitation, for Barack Obama. What choice is there, really…? What a place I must live in to have to say this, I tell myself. Choices are few and in between.

And now that I’ve forced myself to write my opening paragraph, let me give you a run-down of why Obama has been a great president — for a select group of Americans. Let us jot down just a few of his accomplishments… on behalf of those whose philosophical beliefs, I was convinced at one time, he had run his presidential campaign against. And at this point I keep asking myself if I’m a fool (strong possibility) or was I simply duped (good chance of this too)?

Who got bailed out?

Let us agree that Obama took over a country on the brink of what one can compare to a bankruptcy. He inherited initial moves made by the Bush administration to bail out what George W had once referred to as “his base.” They were the people, organizations, institution and what have you who had caused our financial meltdown, all for the sake of — greed. A country that still refuses to deal with the word socialism has now created a system of “socialized debt” but “privatized profits:” things are bad; let the government fix it. When the going is good, less government is better…

So what did Obama do? He named persons like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers (who had been mentored by chief culprit Robert Rubin), and a host of others who, how should I say it, had never really gotten their hands dirty working, or if they had, seemed to have forgotten how it felt. Under their guidance, the president spent almost a trillion dollars (that’s a one followed by 12 zeros) to bail out the AIG’s and Banks of America of our world. Many of the same folks who had taken us down the black hole we’re still living in today. Along the way, though, Obama seems to have forgotten to help out those who have suffered because of AIG and Bank of America. Taxpayer-funded bailout money seems to have trickled up; I have yet to see it trickling down.

Also, and possibly most importantly, when the situation merited a strong president to insist, in fact, demand that the financial system be reformed, the president, like an inexperienced rookie pitcher, balked allowing the culprits to advance and recover at our expense, while we continue to suffer.

A different kind of bailout

Obama, who had initially shown great promise on the international front, especially in his outlook towards Latin America, this time metaphorically allowed an illegal spitball to be tossed on Honduras. Led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and under the command of Cuban-American Ambassador Hugo Llorens Acosta, a June coup d’état in the Central American country was neatly swept under the proverbial rug. And because of their comportment, guilty or not, the U.S. must be held partly responsible for what has occurred in Honduras — under President Barack Obama’s watch.

On the foreign policy front I will not even touch the 30,000 new troops being sent to Afghanistan… Some are referring to it as Obama’s Katrina; I’ll call it his potential Vietnam.

Health care reform — a boon to the insurance industry

Forty-five million Americans are without health care insurance. Millions more are underinsured. Forty thousand Americans die every year for lack of health insurance. Obama promised he would change that. More than six months later, a wishy-washy attitude by his administration (and a horrendous Congress wallowing in money from the health care industry lobby) has yet to produce much for those 40,000 who die yearly for lack of health care in the richest country on earth.

I am constantly amazed when I hear the president say that the best case scenario is a single payer system of healthcare — but he has not even attempted to fight for it. A less desirable option is what they’ve called a public option, which, supposedly, would create a quasi-government, not for profit run system to compete with the private sector to keep the greedy SOBs honest. The fact is, though, that as currently being debated, the public option has been watered down to a point that the number of Americans eligible would be so small as to not really create the desired effect of truly bringing down the price of health care in this country.

In the end, amazingly enough, the winners will be the insurance companies who will soon have 45 million more potential clients to gouge. Way to go Mr. Prez…

I often ask myself, how do you explain Obama? A man who showed so much promise. Here are my thoughts. Take your pick:

• The system is broken and it’s going to take much more than an Obama to fix it.
• The president is surrounded by people giving him bad advice, others who’d love to see him fail (then she’d have a quicker chance at the presidency).
• Obama came to his senses and realizes there’s no way he can beat the system, so he’s joined it.
• There are figurative guns pointed at the president’s head… What? You think he wants to take a bullet?

Or maybe, it’s all of the above.