One by one, nearly every country in the Middle East has seen violent uprising by citizens eager to overthrow the existing government. Many Americans, driven perhaps by nostalgic thoughts about America’s own birth from violent revolution, have concluded that something beneficent was happening in the Libyan uprising.
Gadhafi is dead and Libyans are celebrating, but now comes the hard part. Attempting to establish democratic rule in a country that long suppressed individual freedoms will not be easy, given age old conflicts and disputes between the numerous feudal tribes that rule Libya.
Will Libya suddenly become an orderly, lawful and harmonious society now that Gadhafi is gone? Or will Libya descend into chaos, anarchy and civil war which will bring forth perhaps an even more oppressive government ruled by Islamic fundamentalists? The example of Egypt, for which so many had high hopes, suggests that Libya may also have a dark future.
Gadhafi In Better Times - courtesy navytimes.com
“I’m afraid the opposition is going to start fighting among themselves now,” said Michael Rubin, a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School and a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. “I’m afraid it’s going to be a far bloodier period in Libya.”
Libya has no experience with democracy, it is awash in arms and independent militias, and it is divided by geography and tribes. Islamic fundamentalists also pose a threat, and the new government could face resistance from Gadhafi loyalists who go underground.
“There is no unity, no consensus right now on what the future model of government in Libya should look like,” said Fawaz Gerges, director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.
Conflict within the Libyan opposition already has begun, said Mansour El-Kikhia, a Libyan-born professor of politics at University of Texas at San Antonio who advised members of the Transitional National Council until about six weeks ago.
“It’s going to be very painful to come to terms with the vacuum Gadhafi has left,” El-Kikhia said. “The struggle for power will lead to the demise of the state. From what I’ve seen in the last month or so, I’m scared.”
Gadhafi had been a check on Islamic extremists in the region, and now those extremists are collecting the weapons Gadhafi stashed across the country.
“I don’t see anything resembling reconciliation right now,” Gelb said. “It is inevitable there will be more bloodshed.”
Democracy may be a noble tradition in the minds of Western scholars and politicians, but for Libya it is probably the most unworkable and destabilizing form of government possible.
The latest Rasmussen poll shows only a minuscule 6% approval rating of Congress by the American public, the worst approval rating on record. Skepticism runs wide and deep that Congress is able to improve the life of the average American. Only 9% of voters think Congress can make a positive difference and the latest outrageous example of Solyndra solar company should change the minds of this misguided 9% of the public.
The poll numbers indicate that what most Americans already know - the U.S. political system rules without the consent of the governed, and even worse, has consistently taken actions that work against the average American. Rasmussen polling shows that 43% of voters think that members of Congress are corrupt and an astounding 81% believe that members of Congress put their own interests ahead of the public.
Record levels of poverty and unemployment along with plunging income levels for those who still have jobs does nothing to deter Congress from continuing to funnel money to groups represented by corrupt lobbyists and special interest groups. The $535 million loss for taxpayers on loans given to solar company Solyndra was due to incompetence and insider dealing. Consider Obama Team Backed $535 Million solyndra Aid As Auditor Warned On Finances.
Solyndra LLC’s workers making solar-power panels in a California factory subsidized by U.S. taxpayers showed “the promise of clean energy isn’t just an article of faith,” President Barack Obama said on a visit to the company in May 2010.
Two months before Obama’s visit, accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP warned that Solyndra, the recipient of $535 million in federal loan guarantees, had financial troubles deep enough to “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
The Obama administration stood by Solyndra through the auditor’s warning, the abandonment of a planned initial public offering and a last-ditch refinancing where taxpayers took a back seat to new investors.
“People including our government put blinders on and did not want to believe in the obvious,” Jonathan Dorsheimer, an analyst in Boston for Canaccord Genuity Inc. of Vancouver, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government. “The fact that the government chose Solyndra as their white horse is mind- boggling.”
Days before filing for bankruptcy, Solyndra executives had the audacity to request additional money from the Energy Department but was turned down due to revelations by the media regarding questions of corruption and public waste. In addition, it was revealed that billionaire George Kaiser’s family trust controls 37% of Solyndra. Kaiser visited the President 16 times over the course of two years and has raised millions for the Obama campaign. Solyndra also spent $480,000 of taxpayer money lobbying Congress for more loans.
Kaiser risked nothing but if Solyndra had ever gone public, he would have made huge profits. Meanwhile, executives at Solyndra have an armful of excuses for their failure and have blamed everyone in sight, including Chinese solar companies.
Now that the Solyndra loans have become a public scandal, investigations and hearings were announced by the same villains in Congress who made the dubious loans to Solyndra to begin with. Given the circumstances, the only ones who might believe that justice will be done in this case are the 9% of misguided voters who still believe that Congress acts in the public’s best interests.
World financial markets are imploding, unemployment is at depression levels, the economy is slipping into recession and the world banking system is beginning to collapse. Who in the world would want to tackle this mess instead of going on vacation?
Obama playing golf with wealthy pals in Martha’s Vineyard while the country is spiraling down the drain has provided critics with a big fat target and they are zeroing in.
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan had some harsh words for the poor timing and ironic symbolism of the Presidential vacation. Obama’s retreat to his summer island while the country falls apart leads Noonan to argue that nothing has worked for Obama and he is basically giving up.
He has made big mistakes since the beginning of his presidency and has been pounded since the beginning of his presidency. He’s got to be full of doubts at this point about what to do. His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness…He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.
Nothing worked! And nothing’s going to work.
Mr. Obama shouldn’t be faulted for wanting to rest, relax and spend whole days with his family. But the timing of this vacation is incongruent, and so is the location.
On the timing, there’s an air of economic crisis hanging over everything, a sense that other shoes may drop. Actually it’s a sense of something impending, with unemployment high, Europe broke and the Mideast reaching full boil. A politician who wanted to impart a sense of leadership in crisis, who passionately wanted to keep the presidency, and who was prudently anxious about his prospects just might let such a moment change his plans.
Noonan might have added that taking a vacation while the country is falling apart shows a horrific lack of common sense and concern. I can see the campaign ads already - Obama teeing off while a split screen shows a graph of collapsing financial markets and soaring unemployment. This vacation could become symbolic of Obama’s entire presidency.
courtesy politco.com
courtesy - apocepoch.blogspot.com
While Obama continues to blame everyone and everything for the country’s economic ruin, people wonder what happened to Obama. The answer, according to Norman Podhoretz is “absolutely nothing.”
In short, the spell that Mr. Obama once cast—a spell so powerful that instead of ridiculing him when he boasted that he would cause “the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal,” all of liberaldom fell into a delirious swoon—has now been broken by its traumatic realization that he is neither the “god” Newsweek in all seriousness declared him to be nor even a messianic deliverer.
Hence the question on every lip is—as the title of a much quoted article in the New York Times by Drew Westen of Emory University puts it— “What Happened to Obama?”
To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass. And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) “non-threatening,” all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?
And so it came about that a faithful scion of the political culture of the ’60s left is now sitting in the White House and doing everything in his power to effect the fundamental transformation of America to which that culture was dedicated and to which he has pledged his own personal allegiance.
I disagree with those of my fellow conservatives who maintain that Mr. Obama is indifferent to “the best interests of the United States” (Thomas Sowell) and is “purposely” out to harm America (Rush Limbaugh). In my opinion, he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country.
But I emphatically agree with Messrs. Limbaugh and Sowell about this president’s attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it. That is why my own answer to the question, “What Happened to Obama?” is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.
Let hapless Obama and a destructive Congress take their vacations without criticism. Americans will enjoy a well deserved vacation from their imperial rulers. After spending us into oblivion and passing enough regulations to permanent choke the economy, America needs a break from both Congress and the president. Give them double their pay if necessary and put them on permanent vacation. The country, freed of President and Congress, will eventually heal itself.
Crippling debt and deficits have lead the global economy to the precipice. Finances of world governments since the financial crisis have dramatically deteriorated and confidence in paper money has reached a new low. Equity markets are crashing while gold (the barometer of trust in paper money) soars.
As we stare into the abyss, President Obama stands ready to address the nation. His speech is likely to extinguish the last vestiges of confidence in a US economic recovery.
What will he say?
Based on prior speeches, Obama will reach low and use the standard class warfare blame game strategy. Rather than accepting the warning from S&P that the US is spending itself into bankruptcy, he will shoot the messenger.
Highlights of the speech will feature the following:
- Blame Standard & Poors
- Blame Congress
- Blame China
- Blame Republicans
- Blame (insert name of anyone except Obama)
The trillions of new debt taken on since the 2008 financial crisis have done nothing except push the US closer to insolvency. The trillions of dollars spent on bailouts, stimulus and support for deadbeat homeowners has simply put another burden on an already weak economy. Will Obama talk reality and propose constructive programs to put our free enterprise economy back on track? Or will he simply propose more of the same - tax “millionaires and billionaires”, spend more, borrow more and hope that things get better?
Based on Obama’s disdain for the free enterprise system and businessmen in general, his remarks could easily result in a total vaporization of confidence in the government’s ability to contain the debt crisis. Obama’s speech could easily turn the contained depression which started in 2008 into an all out economic collapse.
It’s a routine event to be excoriated by your enemies - you laugh it off and consider the source. When harsh criticism comes from your friends, however, it should be a wake up call to reassess positions.
Barrick Obama’s wake up call came when Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts recently let loose some very harsh criticism on Obama’s job performance and “weird political philosophy”. Steve Wynn is a giant business presence in Las Vegas and has built and run a large number of casinos including the Wynn, Encore, Golden Nugget and Treasure Island. Wynn’s business skills and determination have resulted in creating thousands of jobs and wealth. Wynn knows business and he knows how to create jobs. He is exactly the type of man who should be consulted for his advice on guiding the country out of depression levels of unemployment.
Unfortunately, the president spends most of his time demonizing wealthy businessmen for a litany of transgressions including not paying enough taxes. The White House’s disdain for free enterprise has not escaped the notice of the country’s job creators. In a conference call to investors, Steve Wynn lamented that businesses are being demoralized and paralyzed due to socialistic government policies.
Wynn said that the “Obama administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I could prove it…I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right, and a President that keeps using that word redistribution.”
Wynn also mentioned that he is a Democrat and a friend of Harry Reid, but “I am telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. Until he is gone, everybody is going to be sitting on [his] thumbs”.
Wynn also said that Obama is “responsible for this fear in America. The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and [the need] to do something to businesses that don’t invest, that are holding too much money. You know, we haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody is afraid of the government and there is no need soft-pedaling it. It is the truth. It is the truth.”
And right on cue, Obama today confirmed Wynn’s worst fears. Although unemployment has been at crisis levels in this country for three years, Obama has ignored the problem other than occasional lip service to the issue. In an announcement proclaiming a new push for job creation today, the President came up woefully short on ideas. The “new job initiatives” announced involve extending unemployment benefits and the social security tax cut, proving Wynn’s contention that Obama, as a socialist, does not understand or embrace free enterprise. More social benefits merely transfers wealth from workers to non workers. These initiatives would be underwritten with borrowed money, deepening the debt crisis. Wynn is correct - until Obama is gone from office, the nation’s economic woes are certain to worsen.
It’s time for a change.
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