what are barack obama's flaws?

la la la they can't read it

i mean duh, Obama HAD to prop up Wall Street and HAD to let the torturers walk, be an ADULT!

Oh, right. No, it kinda put me off that they seemed to think Obama became president in 2007?

the relevant dept only releases its data every 3 yrs so the dataset started with '07 to observe the trend

Obama HAD to prop up Wall Street and HAD to let the torturers walk

These are highly legitimate beefs against Obama and high among the worst policy decisions he made, imo. They stink to high heaven.

Then again, in the presidential shitfest sweepstakes, FDR interred (according to Wikipedia) "between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific coast. 62 percent of the internees were United States citizens." Those internees also did forced labor.

Nobody comes out the presidency smelling like a rose. There are always intense political pressures to do shitty things and unsurprisingly, politics, not ethics, rule the job.

FDR had a bit of a weakness for Mussolini as well iirc, but lots of big names had a dabble with fascism back then, before it was finally defeated forever. *ba-dum-bum-CHING*

I would love to read a serious analysis of the failures of Obama housing policy, but that PPP isn't it. A lot of the analysis is based not on research but on left-wing blogs, and the really awful thing Obama apparently did, he did in 2008 where, again, he wasn't president.

Average monthly job growth in 2017 was 171,000 jobs per month — down significantly from the 187,000 jobs per month that were added in 2016.

thanks obama

Obama’s supporters remain as defensive about their president as Trump’s fans are about theirs, even though Obama, kite-surfing with Richard Branson in the wake of Trump’s victory, and reassuring Wall Street with handsomely remunerated speeches, has affirmed his dedication to the one percent. But we should not be surprised and dismayed that Obama’s audacity of hope dwindled into some humdrum self-cherishing, or that Macron is now derided as “president of the rich.” The actual record of personality cults reveals the mendacity of hope. Real change always comes through the sustained struggles of countless people who often wish to remain unsung.

The meaning of consistent striving, modest self-image, and quiet solidarity in politics is mostly lost today, partly because the last great mass movements for change in the West—the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements—occurred decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s. During their long absence, decreed by the ideological conceit coined by Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, the scope for collection action shrank. Glamorous individuals are increasingly tasked with working miracles. But in societies bitterly polarized by social and economic inequality, the appeal of such figureheads—whether expressed as “Yes, we can,” “Make American great again,” or “En Marche!”—is inevitably limited to specific constituencies. In this demoralizingly fragmented political landscape, many people end up bestowing their hopes upon celebrities with whom they can gratifyingly identify.

It was this politics of narcissistic identification, of fanciful private bonding with the famous, that set us up for, first, the disappointment with Obama, and then, the appalling shock of Trump.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/01/this-poisonous-cult-of-personality/

glosses over obama coming to office while the economy shed a million jobs a month and foreclosures and evictions were an epidemic. comparing where obama and trump started and their accomplishments a year into trump's administration is dicey on lots of levels

The meaning of consistent striving, modest self-image, and quiet solidarity in politics is mostly lost today, partly because the last great mass movements for change in the West—the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements—occurred decades ago, in the 1960s and 1970s. During their long absence, decreed by the ideological conceit coined by Margaret Thatcher that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, the scope for collection action shrank.

This glosses over the environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the alterglobalization movement, and the early aughts anti-war movement, all of which were mass protest movements. To imagine the sense of solidarity lost among the public today presumes it was there to begin with, when studies of these golden era movements suggest they were decentralized activations of people who felt a sense of commonality with their immediate communities knit together into national narratives by canny strategists & the media. The skill in organizing social movements is in looking at what is and having the vision to imagine what can be done. To look at the landscape today and see it as smaller is a failure of imagination, not a triumph of No Alternative.

fair enough, HOOS, but i guess i'm results-oriented enough to downgrade the early-aughts antiwar movement bcz they didn't stop any wars.

Neither did the antiwar movement in the seventies, though?

name any antiwar movement that has

that column is very dumb

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century

he was also the second president of the twenty-first century

Yet, as with Trump and his loyal and captive audience today, support for Obama remained steadfast among African Americans and white liberals.

thinking emoji

you know, after O's duty to the financiers destroyed black homeowning (see above)

and round and round we go

I think there was something else to the housing crisis other than Obama's policies, though?

but the topic at hand is stfu fred

I would love to read a serious analysis of the failures of Obama housing policy, but that PPP isn't it. A lot of the analysis is based not on research but on left-wing blogs,

I'm scanning through the sources and while there are a few left-wing sources, there's also a fair amount of stuff from court transcripts, government reports, and mainstream media (specifically WaPo/NYT/WSJ/Reuters).

and the really awful thing Obama apparently did, he did in 2008 where, again, he wasn't president.

Nope.

The recession was addressed in first months of the Obama administration, with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an economic stimulus of $831 billion.19 For homeowners, the largest source of potential relief offered early in the Obama administration was a piece of the bank bailout called the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (hamp). In the rush to pass the bailout in the last months of the Bush administration, a bloc of Democrats refused to vote unless it contained some provision for homeowner relief in addition to bank money.

Still, these struggling homeowners did not get the hundreds of billions in cash and trillions in credit that the banks got. Instead, they got an unspecified appropriation to “prevent avoidable foreclosures,” specifically
mentioning the possibility of lowering interest rates or principal amounts for homeowners, but leaving the execution entirely up to the president. The Obama administration responded to this provision by allocating
$75 billion to mortgage relief. In a memo to lawmakers, the White House promised to "reduce the number of preventable foreclosures by helping to reduce mortgage payments for economically stressed but responsible homeowners, while also reforming our bankruptcy laws and strengthening existing housing initiatives.22 Unfortunately, the program would neither be funded nor managed well enough to protect families, especially black families, as the financial crisis unfolded.

"In 2008, Obama pressured lawmakers to take such a provision out of the bank bailout and the Recovery Act, promising he would push for it later,64 with Larry Summers promising bankruptcy reform in writing.22 Then, under the influence of Tim Geithner and Summers, he reneged."

The footnote 64 is to 'Shadowproof'.

That's the thing that he definitely, absolutely, completely - if you believe the sketchy sources - did on his own. The other way the crisis could have 'easily' been averted was if he'd revived a famously racist program from the 30's, removed the racism from it, and passed it through congress. That's not solely on him, though.

how can anything a president does be *solely* his fault, though? that seems like a dodge

also isn't all contemporary US policy basically just old policy with the (overt) racism taken out lol

No. Because if you take out the racism, you can't pass it.

The footnote 64 is to 'Shadowproof'.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, January 9, 2018 6:35 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

... a post that's a transcript of a joint obama/donna edwards statement where obama certainly appears to "promise he'd push for it later"

https://shadowproof.com/2008/10/03/donna-edwards-explains-her-yes-vote-on-bailout/

I *think* Fred was just stating what the number signified

ya but am i wrong in thinking, fred, that you named its location at shadowproof to reiterate insufficient rigor in the report?

Yeah, it's an example of bad footnoting. I've been trying to find several other links which seems counterintuitive as well. And that transcript doesn't really say what the report says - that Obama himself got the money taken out.

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5a81c47c000dc822199a690b/master/pass/PA_NPG_18_55%20Obama%20R.jpg

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5a81c4873190b30b3b77b312/master/pass/PA_NPG_18_57%20M%20Obama%20R.jpg

best official portrait

Yeah, watched the unveiling. Those are both excellent.

they really are except that i see a little bit of fred armisen in barack's

his eyes are too light or something

it's missing a cigarette

The Michelle one does not look much like her imo. The body does but not the face.

the wiley one is p cool, and I like the way michelle's body/dress is painted but honestly I think the face sucks and she should have done it over

Barack's is Kehinde Wiley on autopilot. Michelle's is the fat better one, IMO. True that there's something off about her face at first glance. But she's definitely there. Also, there is a beautiful sadness in her expression.

And that dress!

Barack's is Kehinde Wiley on autopilot.

that may be true, but i'm sure that's exactly what everyone involved in the commission wanted, and the result is still the best presidential portrait ever (except for maybe casselli's reagan, which is creepy af, appropriately).

¢℅×∆~``•• A E S T H E T I C ••``~∆÷×℅¢

xp - yeah, I still like both. As presidential portraits go they are too notch.

Top

Your autocorrect is killing it today

I'll never forgive Barack Obama for buying into the Right's Faux *austerity politics* & hence inculcating a whole generation of Liberals into buying into the same bullshit.

— #GeniusTweeter (@prisonculture) February 22, 2018

Entire Dem party was guilty of this, yet strangely the US overall did not fall for this nearly as badly as our counterparts in Europe.

I'm not sure who or what prisonculture is, but I suspect they're unaware of or actively seeking to misrepresent the fact that federal spending during the three fiscal years in which it was determined at least in part by the combination of President Obama and a Democratic Congress, that is FY 2009-2011 (the latter year compromised by the threatened government shutdown after Republicans took over the House of Representatives), was larger as a percentage of GDP than any previous fiscal year in American history excepting some of those during and/or immediately following American involvement in the two world wars (FYs 1919, 1943-46), and included as an integral component a stimulus bill that was comparable to or greater than FDR's New Deal spending, arguably the largest such package in American history. Spending during the remainder of Obama's term, during which Republicans controlled at least part if not all of Congress and used that control in unprecedentedly obstructionist fashion, was at roughly the levels that prevailed during Democratic congressional control from FYs 1980 through 1994, when the Gingrich revolution broke Democrats' Congressional stranglehold, and higher than any year that followed until the financial crisis. None of this is to say that it would not have been better to have had an even larger stimulus package in 2009 or more spending thereafter, or that the administration should not have expended more political capital towards one or both ends, but I suspect that the relevant politics are something that prisonculture may know similarly little about. For what it's worth, note that when the Republican Congress dismissed President Obama's final budget sight unseen, the clearest picture of the farce into which the budgeting process has turned, he responded with an appropriately academic proposal described as "aggressively liberal" - https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obamas-radical-final-budget-218944.

LINE BREAKS FFS

otm

To the extent that the government practiced relative austerity during the Obama years, it was a function of legislation passed by the post-Tea Party Republican Congress under threat of failure to raise the debt ceiling, which was estimated to potentially have devastating effects upon the economy.

Moo, are you trying to overlook Obama's offered cuts to "entitlements" that he made to Boehner? That whole "grand bargain" nonsense?

The Great Recession was driven by austerity, but what kicked it off was an all too present weight of bad mortgage debt. This weight dragged down the economy and made the recession far worse than it would have been. Over 11 million residences, roughly 25 percent of houses with a mortgage, were underwater, or had more debt than their household was worth, as a result of the crisis. In retrospect, for all the drama the bailouts were boring, if also far too generous to Wall Street. The real struggle was this $750 billion of bad debts, an albatross tied to the economy that not only drove down spending and investment—the recession was far worse in areas deeply underwater—but also destroyed neighborhoods and communities through foreclosures.

Rather than using the vast authority, discretion, and funding available from TARP, the bailout bill, to tackle this, Obama’s policy response to troubled homeowners was “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Obama’s administration trusted the predatory financial institutions that created the crisis to manage the aftermath and buried investigations finding that predation continued. The debt was only worked down through foreclosures, and even then it’s still with us—negative equity was a solid predictor of Midwestern counties that flipped to Trump.

A void came to define the rest of Obama’s economic landscape. Picture the economy as it could have been growing before the recession, and then picture the economy as it was. This difference is technically called “the output gap,” but it’s best considered as a missing piece of economic activity and prosperity. Trying to make sense of this vacuum was the central political and economic intellectual puzzle of the Obama years. This difference was the difference between full employment and a weak job market, between more robust wage growth and stagnation, between rich investment and decaying infrastructure. Like a wound that never heals, it created an anxiety over all economic policymaking.

Immediately this absence was understood through the left-liberal theories of John Maynard Keynes. Bad mortgage debt kept households on the sidelines; weak demand and purchasing power kept firms from investing; and collapsing state budgets meant austerity would cut jobs and spending more, creating a vicious cycle. The initial optimism of the stimulus and emergency Federal Reserve actions were meant to counter this.

Though it stopped us from falling into a European-level decline, the stimulus was only enough to stabilize the gap, not enough to remove it. Instead we saw a vicious cycle of severe state and local government cuts, households retrenching following the housing trauma, and firms refusing to invest, all causes and results of austerity. This missing piece of the economy stayed missing, distorting the politics of everything around it. After major 2010 electoral losses, Obama turned to the center and blamed the business community’s fear of deficits, regulations, and “uncertainty,” as well as robots taking all the jobs. After that failed to get a Grand Bargain with Republicans to cut social insurance, Obama retreated to promoting the recovering economic numbers as they came. By the end the numbers recovered to where they were in 2007; yet the tragedy was that Obama originally won in part because the economy in 2007 wasn’t working for everyday people, and they wanted change....

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/austerity-obama-years