In the past few weeks, I have been disturbed by a number of my well meaning readers, expressing despair at Obama's record and saying that what he has done is not enough and that they were thinking of staying home in the November elections. For many of these so called progressives, the presidency of Barack Obama has been deeply disappointing. To hear some prominent lefties tell it, the New Jesus of the campaign trail has morphed into the New Judas of the Oval Office.
This hyperbole obscures real life: the facts are this president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 36 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."
As president, he has rewritten America's social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.
Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's on track to double America's capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.
On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He repealed the policy of "dont ask, dont tell."He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."
The historic progress that Obama has made is especially evident in eight key areas especially if you remember where the U.S was in 2008 before he took over: In 2008, just two years ago, the country faced a fiscal crisis and a second great depression, we were mired in two wars abroad , we were losing 750000 jobs per month, Dow was at 6000, there were no investments in infrastructure or green technology, the American auto industry faced bankruptcy.......
And what has Obama managed to do in just three years:
1 | Averting a Depression: his economic team has helped prevent the collapse of the US into the second great depression and the world economy
2 | Sparking Recovery: US economy has shifted from a tailspin to some measure of stabilization and some prospect of job growth next year
3 | Saving Detroit: GM is now the largest and most profitable car company in the world
4 | Reforming Health Care: Universal health insurance (with promised deficit reduction!) is now law of the land providing coverage to over 20 million of our fellow citizens, covering pre existing conditions, allowing students to stay on their parents plans - a goal sought by Democrats for decades.
5 | Cutting Corporate Welfare
6 | Restoring America's Reputation:Equal pay for women has been passed into law.
7 | Protecting Consumers: The race to the top in education spending has created reform in a large number of states from the bottom up,.The size of Peace Corps has been doubled, Pell grants increased substantially and a major fillip given to Volunteerism. A new Consumer protection agency has been created.
8 | Launching a Clean-Energy MoonShot:Major investments have been made in green technology laying the foundation for the future.A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and will probably do more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen.
To those sitting on the fence, I only want to remind them of what Dante said: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality” or sit on the fence waiting..
"Corporate welfare bums" is how I would refer to these profitable corporations that continue to make huge profits and pay little or no tax and other super larger and super rich corporations that insist on demanding subsidies at the expense of the little guys who are facing a dead end.
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