STOP BEING SO CLUELESS PRESIDENT OBAMA

SCHEDULE AN OVAL OFFICE ADDRESS AND IGNORE CONGRESS

President Obama should ignore Congress and make an Oval Office Speech directly to the nation at a time when there are no major television conflicts. What’s so important about a speech before a joint session of Congress when the majority of its members probably don’t want to listen to him anyway?

The President and his advisors should look over the scheduled professional and college sports calendars, popular television programming, and pending political theater for September, and then set an oval office address to the nation that most of the major networks will cover “live.” They should expect FOX news to decline coverage for obvious reasons.

Just because the Administration realizes a focus on “jobs” is now important after almost 3 years in office, they may need the extra time to really come up with some bold and novel ideas to captivate a majority of the U.S. electorate. If they can’t get their basic scheduling and policy-making acts together at this point in time, they might need to make alternative career plans for January 2013.

WATCH WHAT OBAMA DOES NOT WHAT HE SAYS

I must admit that I don’t stop my life to listen to the President. In fact, I rely upon colleagues at TMV and other news sources to suffer through those addresses and then I’ll read their opinions and the official transcripts later. I voted reluctantly for Senator Barak Obama in November 2008 because I felt the Republican ticket was worse and rather clueless. Being an extreme independent, I have never had high expectations from either political party or any oval office occupant.

My Obama expectations were lowered significantly once I learned about his appointments to his Cabinet and close advisory boards. There is so much dissonance between what Obama has said and what he has done, it is often painful to listen to him speak for any length of time.

The Obama Administration’s utter disinterest in investigating and prosecuting the many Wall Street financial criminals who caused the massive financial, housing, mortgage, banking, and global economic collapses, and an utter inability to enact meaningful regulatory reforms and help the general public with meaningful housing and mortgage relief, speaks volumes about his competence and where his allegiances truly lie – and they are not with the vast majority of Americans.

If you help destroy the public’s faith in our justice system and public institutions, significantly reduce the fair treatment of all citizens, and effectively legalize fraudulent and criminal behavior for the wealthy and well-connected, then your claim to re-election is very hard to sustain. All his other policy successes and failures pale in comparison to this massive lack of understanding of what made America’s rule of law unique and how our political and economic systems should function again for the benefit of all citizens – not a financially well-connected few.

REPUBLICANS IGNORE THE PRESIDENT COUNTING DOWN TO NOVEMBER 2012

However, this whole “kerfuffle” about House Speaker John Boehner for the first time in U.S. history refusing a Presidential request to address Congress is laughable. Republicans have not been particularly cooperative with the President since he was sworn into office back in January 2009. Why would they change their “modus operandi” after they revived themselves politically in November 2010 by such complete obstructionist and oppositional tactics? I get the feeling that the President and his advisors are still completely dense on the unrealistic ideal of post-partisan or bi-partisan cooperation being possible in this nation.

President Obama’s much-anticipated proposals for a jobs “stimulus” (or whatever he wants to call them) will be “dead on arrival” in the Republican-controlled House and pretty much moribund in the Senate with its 60-vote super majority requirement to do anything but take another recess. Thus he is free to make any and all bold, unpredictable, and even “crazy” proposals that he is willing to run on for his 2012 re-election bid. At this point, he really has nothing to lose except the Presidency considering his current low popularity in every national poll. Whether he has it in him to rise to a level of leadership that our current national crisis requires, is not something I would bet on.

It would be helpful and refreshing for the President to admit that the first stimulus did not work as expected for a variety of reasons. He should then clearly state all the facts – both good and bad – that led to that mixed outcome. He really needs many color pictures, charts and graphs about spending, debt, porous global monetary policy, unemployment, corporate cash hording and real taxes paid, plus a full disclosure of the bank bailout and where the 2009 tax cuts and specific infrastructure spending went.

President Obama should admit that this particular recession and our overall economy have changed significantly from the 1980’s. He needs to give supporting evidence based upon objective reality, not self-serving fabricated official data churned out by various government departments. He and his advisors must explain that some Keynesian and Monetarist policies are no longer applicable to the nation’s current situation, but some new and old ideas might still work in novel and transparent combinations. He should not be nihilistic but he cannot be a false optimist on what faces the nation over the next decade and how long tough economic times will continue until things improve.

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS BLAME THE PRESIDENT

Every President is an unknown mixed bag of principles and priorities when he takes office. He also inherits all the policies and mistakes of his predecessors. However nice the speeches, each occupant of the oval office must be judged on what they did and accomplished during their term as Chief Executive. The U.S. electorate should also stop blaming the President for everything that goes on in the nation and world while he occupies the office through childish and irrational causal connections. This might be impossible recognizing the extreme partisanship that permeates our society today. Many in the U.S. have short attention spans, are impatient and easily distracted. We may simply be “bored” with our current national leadership and want something new to entertain us after 2013.

Things go wrong for a variety of reasons that cannot be attributable to particular groups or individuals. The nation sets in motion general political and economic policies that do not produce good and bad results for several years or decades. Our current problems are a combination of poor choices made by both political parties (and the American electorate) over the past 30 years. However, most of the blame (if one must allocate it) can and should be attributed to conservatives and Republicans. They have held control over Washington DC and dominated the national debate for far more years than Democrats did since 1980. During the last 30 years, liberal and progressive ideas have not been widely embraced by the general electorate or enacted into law by any Congress.

TALENTED RIGHT – INCOMPETENT LEFT

Republicans and Conservatives (along with their extreme right-wing Tea Party friends) are talented in stirring up anger, resentment and fear, along with repeating many outright lies until they are believed by enough of the electorate. These fabrications include claims that liberal and progressive policies and ideas are threatening America, but reality shows just the opposite.

What many Republicans decry are older Democratic policies and programs that date from the 1930’s through the 1960’s that have shaped the very fabric of U.S. society. All government programs need periodic and thorough reviews and reforms, but returning to some fantasy past is not a solution. We need an honest and rational debate over the role of government, including the social and economic bane of huge public and private debts, in a complex and interdependent 21st Century world of many finite resources.

Liberals, Progressive and Democrats have failed for decades in that they cannot present simple, unifying and comforting national policies. Noting that our wealthy oligarchy has transformed both political parties into two sides of the same coin, the choices presented to Americans may be irrelevant. Only the policies that best protect the status quo and our dominating oligarchy and plutocracy are the ones that will be pursued by Washington DC. The message every two or four years may vary, but the overall trajectory of the nation has been fixed for the past 30 years.

WHO REALLY RUNS AMERICA

Over the past 30 years, we have seen a massive transfer of political and economic power to a small minority of very wealthy individuals and large multi-national corporations. This was a political choice – not an independent result of globalization, technology or the bogus “magical invisible hand” of the free market. This group has effectively “bought” a majority of our Congress and members of both parties so they effectively represent only the top 10% of our nation and private enterprises – the vast majority of citizens, households, and small businesses are of little or no concern to our elites in Washington DC.

Big corrupt government now solely represents the interests of big corrupt business, particularly the pathologically greedy, short-term goals of the financial, banking, military industrial, old energy extraction, and healthcare (“sick-care”) sectors. Lawyers and Unions are also major national lobbying groups but they pale in overall influence and organizational abilities when compared to the oligarchic business cartels (particularly financial and banking) that dominate our nation today.

For our elected “elites” to ignore massive income and wealth inequalities while demonizing the weakest in our society are evidence of sheer nastiness, mendacity, moral and ethical bankruptcy, and an abandonment of the best long-term interests of our nation and the vast majority of its citizens. We live in a corrupt crony cartel capitalist country that is an anathema to the beliefs of our founding fathers and our nation’s shared religious beliefs. It is also a travesty of a fully-functioning, rationally-regulated, and level-playing-field basis necessary for any free enterprise system.

CLUELESS AND DIVIDED U.S. ELECTORATE

Sadly, through massive and willful ignorance, extreme partisanship, childish impatience and distractibility, broad-based anger, bias, prejudice and fear, plus an overall lack of honest and objective analysis, the American electorate either does not participate, or is not competent to participate, in most national debates. The extreme partisans on the left and right live in separate worlds with their own facts, cult-like ideologies, and media echo chambers. Almost half the nation fits into these two groups. They regularly demonize the other side and refuse any type of compromise.

About 20 to 30 percent of the electorate are so crazy, lazy, dumb, disengaged, or a combination of these attributes, that they can never participate in the national discourse. Finally, another 20 to 30 percent of the electorate is independent, moderate, sane, and completely sick of the rest of the partisan and ignorant nation – but that group is too small and so distrusted by the rest to wield any significant political or economic power.

Within and connecting each of these 4 overall groups, the nation is hopelessly divided on religious, ethnic, racial, educational, sexual, age, geographic, and sports preferences, plus height, weight, skin color, and sexual orientation. The fact that our political system is completely dysfunctional and paralyzed is not surprising because the American electorate is the same.

The American electorate generally rewards politicians and political parties that are resolute, confident, aggressive and entertaining. The particular ideas and policies need not be popular, sane, or capable of being fully implemented. Republicans have long known this and continue their winning ways despite pursuing many policies that are anathemas to a large majority of the electorate whenever the specifics are presented.

However, when things go wrong as a result of pursuing for years many wrongheaded partisan policies, or by merely holding office at the time when things go wrong, the electorate will punish many politicians in office. Couple these facts with the majority of the electorate being willfully ignorant, congenitally stupid, disengaged, fearful and angry, most elections are won by the party that presents the general voting public with enough emotional comfort by using simple and quasi-conservative messages.

Many polls may show low overall disregard for Congress, but they must be viewed in light of other polls that show people are generally supportive of their own elected representative. Considering the demographic partisanship of most Congressional districts, there will not be much change in the political makeup of Congress after the 2012 National elections.

PERPARING FOR NO HOPEY CHANGEY BUT THE SAME OLE POLITICAL THEATRE

I am preparing myself to be underwhelmed by the upcoming Presidential address on jobs, whether presented in front of Congress or directly via an oval office televised speech to the nation. I’m not exactly looking forward to a possible President Perry as our nation’s top entertainer after 2013. He may be clueless as our current President, but just in different ways. Perhaps a President Perry would be a form of comic relief from the utter incompetence and banality now afflicting the Obama Administration.

The nation’s mold for the next decade is set with an imminent decline and collapse of the empire lying ahead. Our only choice is to enjoy the show and keep our heads above water during its last two acts. Don’t count on our leaders in Washington DC to help anyone outside the beltway except themselves and their well-off friends. At least popcorn is cheap and fairly nutritious compared to starvation.

Submitted the first of September, 2011 by Marc Pascal ranting happily from Phoenix, AZ. Please feel free to criticize me directly at avenir99pm@yahoo.com because I don’t directly respond to TMV comments but appreciate every one of them nevertheless. I may not respond even via email but I reserve the right to steal any of your good ideas for a future TMV post.