Jim Ledbetter: Your article on the economic woes of this country and the economists you quote completely miss the point.

Economists LOVE to make the argument that Americans must retool for a different marketplace because it means that all the blame for the anemic economy can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the working man: He costs too much. He knows too little. He’s not flexible enough. We need him to be fully qualified and experienced in our high-tech position but cheap enough to be competitive against his counterparts in India and flexible enough to work unpaid overtime after moving to a different city. Pardon me while I gag.

For the love of god, employers are not hiring because people aren’t buying their products and services. People aren’t buying their products and services because they, by being un- and under-employed, don’t have the money to.  It’s really as simple as that.

Obama’s problem is not that there is no government solution, as you suggest, but that governance and politics in general is the art of the compromise and as it stands the only thing compromised here was the obvious answer: A large, direct injection of cash into the economy through government works programs. FDR did it. China shrugged off this last economic bust by spending a trillion on infrastructure. But our current circumstance forces half-measures, and even those come at the cost of political expediency: Greasing the right palms, kickbacks to the right subcommittees and special interests, tax cuts for the rich and ever more corporate welfare.

The problem isn’t our stupid workers, it’s our stupid Congress, stupid.

Foreign Policy magazine is coming down on Obama for failing to create much positive headway in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Israel. “Zero for Four.”

To which I ask, who has made headway with them in the last 30 years? Stephen Walt says he’ll be blamed for “losing” our two wars. We knew they would be lost in 2003. There is no other possible outcome. I suppose Obama could have said “damn the consequences,” fallen on the grenade, gotten us out of the wars post-haste, watched the region go to shit and had a world of bad press kill the Democratic party’s mandate as the Republicans mocked him for being a second Carter while secretly thankful that we were out of that mess, but… seriously now.

That said, what I got out of the article – the indictment – was that, by so much as having that byline, he has insinuated that Obama could use an executive mandate to fundamentally alter America’s antagonistic stance towards Iran and chummy relationship with Israel. Arguably, Obama does have more official power as the executive than anybody in this or the last century thanks to Bush’s policies and party, aside from, perhaps, the mandates of FDR. Whether that translates to real power, however, is up for debate.

The anemic ministrations of this current administration can only mean two things:

a) The Democratic party was unwilling to use the mandate it got in 2009

b) The Democratic party was unable to use the mandate it got in 2009

Just so I don’t go mad, I’m going to assume the latter. At which point we have our most damning indictment of democracy – its utter inability to turn the ship around in any time-line remotely necessary to stave off disaster.

to put it succinctly, the only problem is that nothing is in the way of this liberal elite radical socialist madrassa-trained Islamic Kenyan Nazi (who, by the way, is Black) from forcing his agenda down America’s throat, and that his administration has all the resources they need to deal with the current oil spill* (right after he wins both wars, stops torture, bans lobbyists, restores faith in government, saves the economy, ends corruption, resurrects the Democratic party, quells American fear, solves the Middle East crisis, fixes health care, bails out the states, balances the budget and gives us all jobs).

Who does he think he is, king?

*And really, us liberals know that all Obama really needs to do is part the Gulf of Mexico so that BP engineers can just walk up and plug the pipe, but that he’s holding back so he can put the screws to evil capitalist corporations…

Obama gave a speech last night to address not so much the BP Oil Crisis, but the media narrative surrounding his involvement with it, for the two have little in common. That didn’t stop the narrative from plodding right on, but then nothing Obama can do is ever remotely in the right direction (so sayeth the narrative).

a) The Oil Spill was somehow Obama’s fault. This allows opponents to draw parallels to Hurricane Katrina (because there are only two sides to every issue and every partisan move has a direct analog, right?). Yes, the government bears responsibility, but not in the way the narrative implies.

b) The government has the resources to address the spill, with the implication that it isn’t mobilizing those resources. The governor of Louisiana got the troops he asked for. The appropriate authorities have put up barriers all along the Gulf. The government leaned on BP to provide billions in an escrow account (arguably the biggest hostile government takeover of private assets in Obama’s administration to date, yet the least controversial) to pay damages, and yelled at every American oil corporation for having basically the same policies as BP. It remains to be seen whether MMS and other regulatory agencies will have cleaned house by the time all this is done, but that’s basically the extent of government involvement. The issue, after all, is not whether the government can plug the hole itself (it can’t; nobody can), but whether it can stop corporations from breaking what they can’t fix.

c) Obama’s leadership is in question due to his impotence in the problem. I voted for Obama because he was a fresh, vigorous Democrat who looked like a strong leader, sure, but also because there was no way in hell I’d ever vote for the GOP. Obama’s inauguration was historic, sure, but aside from the warm glow of that night, nobody actually believed he was Jesus and JFK rolled up into one. Indeed, such sounds more like a GOP sneer on how strongly liberals supported Obama during his candidacy rather than how liberals saw him. So, to hold him to such a standard where he’s able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and swim to the ocean floor and beat it into submission is disingenuous at best.

There’s things to get Obama on – his criminal negligence of continued illegal detentions, his hawkish stance towards Afghanistan, etc – but he’s a politician, and one with the worst job since Hoover left office, coupled with a far more hostile congress and public than FDR ever had to deal with. We’re at the point where the GOP narrative has so poisoned the well for all government (after defanging regulatory agencies, defunding legacy projects and decades of media campaigns devaluing government initiative) that we have an entire “movement” of so-called Tea Partiers who don’t know what they want except that DC should burn. We’re at the point where reaching across the aisle means liberal Dems making deals with NDC conservative Dems, because the GOP are gleefully and cynically sabotaging government – delegitimizing the current administration – rather than looking to govern.

The idea that the same pundits can criticize Obama for not doing enough (whether it’s the bailouts, the recovery plan, the health care bill, or the BP response) while simultaneously blocking his every move is insane, but that’s the current narrative.

This article makes little to no sense. The facile side-by-side comparison of the reaction to the Gulf crisis and the response for Hurricane Katrina fails because the nature of the two disasters and their respective government responsibilities are much different. That said, the lead-up to those respective disasters could be compared.

Katrina was a disaster due to two very important factors:
* The gutting of the Army Corp of Engineers (through a spending freeze authorized by Bush)
* The gutting of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (with incompetent leadership appointed by Bush)

The Gulf Oil Disaster was a failure for one reason:
* The gutting of the Minerals Management Service (with a revolving door of Oil industry appointees by Bush)

Bush’s policies were a systemic rot on the whole that reached well into Obama’s first term. Obama may have been unprepared for this sort of disaster to happen, but it was not his actions that created that unpreparedness.

Of course, the nature of the disasters are themselves different: Katrina was a record large hurricane but hurricane season is well known to the region and can and should have been prepared for. Both the preparation for and the aftermath to the hurricane are solely the domain of the US government.

The Oil disaster was a man-made disaster almost entirely created by the corruption of BP and the MMS – the company and the government agency tasked with regulating it. Responsibility for clean-up is therefore different, and such is exactly what’s happening: BP must clean up the oil and the US government is charged with cleaning the environment.

Ironic, then, that “Obama’s Katrina” is predicated upon government cronyism with corporations, when Obama is simultaneously being lambasted for being a “socialist” whose goal is to “nationalize industry.” Never mind, of course, the implicit admission of Bush’s culpability in massive policy disasters in the attempt to find parallels between the two administrations. Never mind the ignorance of more salient criticisms on Obama’s dealings with corporate interests, like the number of ex-Goldman Sachs executives working as White House advisors or Obama’s statement on off-shore drilling 20 days before the disaster – let’s get Obama on something that doesn’t even befit his character and absolutely screams Bush.

This isn’t Obama vs Bush on twin disasters. This isn’t “Obama’s Katrina.” This is Bush’s second Katrina.

Andrew Leonard makes a rather tongue-in-cheek article about how Apple fanboys are railing against Obama over a speech he recently made at Hampton University, in which he says,

“Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations; information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”

Leonard ends his article by clarifying that Obama is, after all, pointing out the difference between educating oneself on the world and filling one’s free time with the hyper-grapevine New Media has become. Hey, it’s a valid point and Leonard agrees with it. Which is why Salon titles his article “Obama’s self-hating iPad attack” and gives it a picture of Obama’s laser-beam eyes blowing up an iPad.

Thereby proving Leonard’s and Obama’s point. Irony.