Obummer

This is one of those if you live long enough, an Ivy Boomer Lady actually holding Obama accountable for his role in helping create the mess we’re in. Obama is entirely culpable for the crime of pardoning our big bank, Wall Street financial system, creating an even greater concentration of money power, not to mention the current criminal financial hysteria.

Marie Gottschalk, professor at UPenn and a Yale and Princeton alum, states,

“Many people in the United States understood that nobody went to jail for that, nobody was charged for that. And I think that that has been a very powerful undermining of trust in government, and also that there was no reckoning with the banks. The largest banks came out stronger than before. People understood that hundreds of billions of dollars went to save the banks, but the Obama administration supported a very shoddy foreclosure plan that as Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, we now understand, said, ‘Well, the only reason for that was to foam the runway for the banks,’ to slow down the foreclosures a little bit so they could process them. It wasn’t really to help the people who were in threat of losing their homes.”

Then,

“Obama campaigned in 2012, ‘The economy is back, we’re back.’ But for many parts of the country, we were not back. And many parts of the country understood that this traumatic economic event happened. Millions of people lost their homes. We had the biggest mass migration of people since the Great Depression. People lost their pensions. People lost their healthcare. And it was a rebound from the Great Recession that was very unequal and that the coastal areas, the high-tech parts of the country, rebounded while many other parts of the country were mired in this economic distress. Tax bases were eroded, public spending didn’t come back, spending on public health didn’t bounce back. And I think that was for many people a crystallizing event of experiencing this economic trauma and nobody was to blame for it.”

Thus,

“There’s a common argument that, the support for Trump is largely racially driven, but there were millions of whites who voted twice for Obama (and then voted for Trump). Obama won states like Indiana, which we can’t imagine the Democrats right now winning, right? And if you listen to Trump’s final commercial, his main commercial in the 2016 election, it could be a commercial by Bernie Sanders except that the voice is unmistakably Trump’s. But it’s pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the so-called global elite, the oligarchy, and it’s interspersed with this multicultural, working-class people of seemingly all different races, ethnic backgrounds, etc. And it’s a very, very powerful commercial about this perception that these people have been abandoned in the United States.”

It was no "perception."

So, here we are. The whole piece is worth reading or I suppose if you’re under 50 watching. I wonder when her eyes were opened? For you old cultural revolutionaries who consider the professor an intellectual class traitor don’t despair, she states of the Democratic party, “Until the elite finally reconcile with what their responsibility was for where we are, we can’t start rebuilding.” Lord.

Long ago talking with Caddell, I said to him, “You think they’re (our elite) going to see the errors of their ways. That’s not going to happen. They need to be pushed out of the way.” However, swapping personalities isn't enough. The problems are systemic. We need to reorganize politics, government, and our leviathan corporations. This should be a time of unlimited political imagination, not continued denial, ignoring, and hand wringing.