Rating Obama

I’d give Obama a 6 or 7 out of 10.  I would give most of his predecessors a 5 or less.

Trump’s election showed that some of Obama’s greatest successes were his biggest failings.  He saved the US from a 2nd great depression, but failed to prosecute any of the guys who caused the recession.  He ripped off the middle class to help the super-poor and the super-rich.  The poor got welfare and the rich got no jail and low taxes.  Income inequality got worse on his watch, probably because it was the easiest course to keep the economy going, but he failed to help a lot of regular people as the rich got richer.  Unemployment is down, but many people have worse jobs than before 2008.

Obamacare expanded government health care, but it was a mess, purposely so to help the health insurance industry, hospital administrators, doctors, etc.  The real solution was single-payer Medicare of all, and Obama didn’t do it.  I would not be surprised to see him on the boards of some healthcare companies and banks soon or making speeches to them, ala Hillary and Bill.

He also failed to get any kind of gun control; his heart was in the right place, but the NRA beat him.

On foreign policy, he did great keeping us out of new wars.  He was right not to intervene in Ukraine or Syria, but he and the EU made a mess of Libya.  Iraq and Afghanistan are still a mess, and will probably collapse into some kind of chaos if we ever leave entirely.  That’s not all his fault, but he didn’t solve it.  The Iran deal was quite an accomplishment; I hope Trump doesn’t destroy it.  Israel hates Obama, bur should love him; he ended up pitting the Arab states against each other, Sunni v. Shiite, Iran v. Saudi, etc., which meant they couldn’t focus on Israel.  Except for the Palestinians (a problem Israel itself created) Israel is safer than it has been for years.  He was right to try to focus on Asia, but failed.  I think the Israeli lobby would not allow him to turn away from the Middle East.

One of Obama’s strengths was his honesty and decency, keeping corruption at bay.  Because he was such a decent person, he probably didn’t perceive how corrupt Hillary appeared to voters.  For Obama’s main failings it’s useful to look at Bernie’s campaign rather than Hillary’s or Trump’s – health care, inequality, guns….

I’m probably the wrong person to talk about race.  I would give Obama pretty good marks for being evenhanded, especially for being black himself.  But I can see that many blacks think he failed them.

He was a great speaker.  I will really miss that.  I think we have gone from a college level vocabulary to a third grade one.  But I speaking may be overrated.  Some of Obama’s most eloquent speeches were about gun violence, and they made no difference.

Obama’s presidency would have been much better, maybe even great, if the Republican Congress had not stonewalled everything he tried to do.

I like being tough on leakers.  When I was in Brasilia, I had several contacts who used to give me information on Brazil’s nuclear weapons program.  I used to report this pretty straight in secret cables, using their names.  CIA reports like that don’t use names; they have some super secret database that links reports to names.  Their reports say something like, “According to a reliable source with access.”  Only the CIA ops guys know who that really is.  If my old cables had been released, my old contacts would have been in big trouble.  So, I’m unhappy Chelsea/Bradley Manning got released.  

Also, when I worked in DC on missile proliferation, we relied on intelligence to to try to stop transfers to bad countries.  The intel agencies often did not want us to use their intel because it might give away their "sources and methods.”  We were forbidden to use their info until they cleared it, which sometimes took weeks or months.  Several times NYT reporter Michael Gordon called me at home around 10 pm to get me to comment on a story based on leaked intel information about something some bad country was doing.  State was always the dove, saying to wait, while the Pentagon wanted to act and beat up the bad guy.  The leak to Gordon was always correct, sometimes of top secret information, intended to pressure us to act.  I aways did the “refuse to confirm or deny” thing with Gordon, but the leak was clearly from the hawkish Republicans in the Pentagon under the G.H.W. Bush admin, probably from people who worked for then Asst. Sec. Steve Hadley, who went on to be G.W. Bush’s NSC Advisor.  

I would like to think that leaks are a dishonest way to push a policy in Washington and should be punished.  

I also didn’t mention immigration.  My first State job was issuing visas in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  I always felt bad denying a visa, because it probably meant that person would never get to the US, while if a Mexican was denied, they could just sneak across the border.  It was a racist policy favoring those who could walk across the border over those who had to fly.  Immigration laws have been like Prohibition, on the books but totally disregarded.  Now that I’m retired and shopping at a lot of discount stores, I often hear more Spanish spoken than English.  Denver has changed just in the years we’ve been out here.  Obama and the Democrats (and Reagan) refused to enforce the immigration laws.  I think that is dishonest and undermines respect for law in general.  Mexicans are inclined to regard American law as toothless, whether it’s about immigration or drugs.  It’s tough to be a law enforcement officer when your boss, the President, says, “Oh, violating this law is no big deal; let them all go.”  I know Obama deported a lot of people, but as in the financial crisis, he didn’t get the job done in a way that pleased the American public.  

I suppose I was never smart enough or tough enough to win a leak war; so, I didn’t like them.  And it is against the laws on the books.

On Mexican territory (California, Texas, etc.), my view is that we won it fair and square and it’s ours now.  Maybe it’s like Israel’s West Bank.  We’ve created even more than 2,500 settlements on it.  And what about the Indians?  Do they get the whole country back?

I have thought about Mexico and California in connection with Ukraine.  Ukraine used to be part of Russia, i.e., “the Ukraine,” like “the American Mid-West.”  Both have been breadbaskets of the country, and Kiev was really the first capital of what became Russia when Moscow was still a backwater, the 11th or 12th century.  The Russians established a naval base at Sevastopol in 1783.  California did not become part of the US until the 1800s and the San Diego Naval Base was not built until the 1920s.  Arguably, our forcing Russia to give up its base at Sevastopol is like Russia encouraging Mexico to take back San Diego and force the US to remove its naval base.  Not the same, but there are similarities.

On migration, I just worry that our country is changing.  The Hispanics have been in Colorado for hundreds of years.  Senator and Sec. of Interior Salazar was from one of those families.  But in general, Hispanics have no shared history with the British Europeans who founded the US on the East Coast.  Washington and Jefferson have no ancestral connection to them, as European immigrants have.  Plus they come here for economic reasons, not political ones; so, they don’t have any particular reverence for the American form of government.  It’s okay, but they are used to the corruption in Mexico, too.  Countries change, but we could have controlled how it did.  We passed laws on immigration, but they were ignored.  We had a preference, but we ignored it, and just let nature take its course.  It’s not unlike global warming; if you ignore it, the impact sneaks up on you.

So, who represents this historically elite East Coast establishment that I extolled?  Donald Trump, the Europeans’ answer to Barack Obama.  I am hopeful that he will do some good things by instinct, but intellectually he could hardly be farther from the founding fathers.  I don’t think Hillary was the real East Coast heir, because her appeal was to the newly powerful Americans -- Hispanics and blacks, (with the votes) and Jews (with the money).  She was to be the voice of the new America, not the old one.  Now we have the voice of the old one, and it speaks with a third grade vocabulary.  Oh well….

Jewish Anti-Trump Op-Eds in NYT

On inauguration day the Friday op-ed page for the New York Times contained four articles that were viciously anti-Trump, all of which were written by Jews.  David Brooks’ “The Internal Invasion” is about how Trump lives in a rude, chaotic gemeinschaft world, where everything is personal, while good people live in a pleasant, sophisticated gesellschaft world, everything is impersonal and rule-based.  Paul Krugman’s “Donald the Unready” is about how ignorant and unsophisticated Trump and his cabinet choices are.  “So the typical Trump nominee, in everything from economics to diplomacy to national security, is ethically challenged, ignorant about the area of policy he or she is supposed to manage and deeply incurious.”   Robert Dallek’s “Obama Shouldn’t Go Quietly” is about how after leaving office, Obama must continue to attack Trump.  Finally, Lori Adelman’s “What the Women’s March Teaches Us” is about how women of all colors must support the Democratic Party.  The lead editorial of the NYT, which is mainly controlled by Jews, is equally critical of Mr. Trump for failing to smoothe the divisions from the election with gentle, healing words.  

I find it somewhat mystifying that Jews are so united in their hatred of President Trump.  Of course, there are some who are not, starting with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and some of his cabinet nominees ,such as Steve Mnuchin, but they are the exception.  Even more mystifying is that Republican Jews are critical of Trump, such as William Kristol and Dan Senor.  They are among the Jews who pushed President Bush II to go to war with Iraq and provided him with propaganda in support of the war.  

I don’t understand Trump’s relationship to the Jewish community in New York.  Trump succeeded in high-end Manhattan real estate, competing against some of the smartest Jews in the world on their home turf.  Jared Kushner’s father was one of those Jews, but he ended up in jail, convicted of political corruption by Chris Christie.  Now Trump is President and Jared is one of his main advisers.  How did that happen?  This is something the New York Times could throw some light on, but so far I haven’t seen anything about Trump and the Jews of New York, which of course includes Senator Chuck Schumer, with whom he seems to have some sort of connection.  

In the elections, New York Jews seemed almost universally to support Hillary Clinton, who is neither Jewish nor a native New Yorker, over Trump, who is a native, and Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish.  Hillary seemed to be the candidate of the Jews, which may help explain why they are in such a twit over Trump, but why did they support her over the other choices?  The Clintons have certainly worked on winning over the Jewish community, starting with appointing Robert Rubin as Secretary of Treasury (as Trump has nominated Mnuchin), ending Glass-Steagall, and pardoning Marc Rich.  I’m sure Bill and Hillary have worked on the Jewish vote since Bill left office, which probably facilitated Hillary’s election to the Senate.  

Do New York Jews fear Trump because he beat them in the world of New York real estate?  Most Jews tend to be liberal, perhaps because they mostly came from Russia and Eastern Europe, but there are also some outspoken conservative Jews who also oppose him.  I don’t get it, but the Jewish race seems to have some innate racial hatred of Trump.  Perhaps they see him as a potential new Hitler who would threaten the Jews.  Or they may be acting out the old Jewish traits portrayed in the New Testament, when the rabbis killed Jesus because he threatened their position and power within the Roman state.  American Jews may have thought they were in position to take power in the United States as the power behind the throne if Hillary had been elected.  Now they see Trump as a threat to their position and power as the rabbis did 2,000 years ago.  It’s far fetched, but something is going on.  I hope that Trump can stand up to the withering attack that the Jews have launched against him.  

Mnuchin’s Bank Accused of Misconduct in Mortgage Crisis

This article, “Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin’s Bank Accused of Widespread Misconduct in Leaked Memo,” from The Intercept  is based on a report by junior attorneys in Kamala Harris’ office of California Attorney General.  The report argued for initiating a civil case against Mnuchin’s OneWest bank for errors in foreclosing homes that the bank acquired when it took over the IndyMac bank.  Kamala Harris did not authorize the case to proceed, possible because it was too weak.  

The report indicates that there were a number of irregularities in the OneWest foreclosures, but they may not have been that serious.  If it had looked like a promising case, liberal Democrat Kamala Harris would probably have taken it up.  The question is whether OneWest was putting deserving people out on the street or whether it was just getting deadbeats off of its books.  Were people seriously prejudiced, or did OneWest just fail to dot every I and cross every T when it filled out its foreclosure documents?   

From a taxpayer’s perspective, Mnuchin got taxpayer help in taking over IndyMac, and it seems like he should have bent over backwards to be fair to people who had  mortgages with his bank.  It looks like he was callous, if not dishonest.  The housing business is messy mainly at the low end, particularly after years of issuing mortgages to many people who could not afford them.  Mnuchin knew he was getting into messy business, but he figured correctly that he could make lots of money off of a lot of poor people.  

You would hope that the leaders of your country would come from more respectable occupations, not people who preyed on the poor, even if they violated no laws.  

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/03/treasury-nominee-steve-mnuchins-bank-accused-of-widespread-misconduct-in-leaked-memo/

Wall Street Landlords Evict Tenants More Often Than Traditional Landlords

This article in Bloomberg, “Wall Street, America’s New Landlord, Kicks Tenants to the Curb,” struck me as a particular scathing criticism of Wall Street.  This article is based on a study done by the Atlanta Fed.  The article says

“My hope was that these private equity firms would provide a new kind of rental housing for people who couldn’t -- or didn’t want to -- buy during the housing recovery,” said Elora Raymond, the report’s lead author. “Instead, it seems like they’re contributing to housing instability in Atlanta, and possibly other places.”

In interviews and court filings, renters and housing advocates said that some investment firms are impersonal and unresponsive, slow to make necessary repairs and quick to evict tenants who withhold rent because of complaints about maintenance. The researchers said some landlords use an eviction notice as a “routine rent-collection strategy.”

This second article “Private Equity’s Real Estate Empire,” describes how investment firms got involved in the single family home rental business.  It says one of the first and one of the leaders was Blackrock, whose CEO, Larry Fink, is Jewish.  

“The last time Wall Street devised a plan to make mountains of money off our homes it ended catastrophically,” the Atlanta branch of the American Friends Service Committee said on its blog after a protest at a foreclosure auction that was dominated by private-equity bidders. Economists at the Federal Reserve have noted the same potential for danger.

To the private equity and hedge fund landlords their tenants are not people; they are figures on an income statement.  Their pain and suffering is irrelevant.  All that matters is the bottom line.  These are some of the most callous, heartless, immoral people in the world, but they view their properties from an ivory tower far from the hardships of their tenants.  Many Wall Street investors are  Jewish, although by no means all.  Charles Dickens was often concerned about the poor living in London, where their oppressors were mostly Gentile, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.  On the other hand, Henry Fort was particularly critical of Jewish landlords in his book, The International Jew.  Ford wrote:

The real estate speculations of the Jews are familiar to all, but unfortunately do not constitute their entire land program. Many American cities have changed their characters entirely during the past 15 years by reason of Jewish speculation in residence property, and it is a fact established in the larger eastern cities that the recent exorbitant and extortionate rise in rents was largely a matter of the Jewish landlord. The governor of one of the most important of our commonwealths was loath to sign a bill regulating rents. His hesitancy was encouraged by very heavy pressure brought to bear upon him by the weightiest Jewish financial interests in his own and neighboring states. He finally decided that he would sign the bill and give the law effect, and the fact that decided him was his personal investigation and the investigation of his personal agents into hundreds of cases of abuse where he discovered that it was a common practice among Jewish landlords to transfer the same piece of property round and round to every member of the family in turn, each "transfer" being the excuse for a new increase in the rent. Men have their eyes opened to the Jewish Question in various ways: this was the way a governor had his eyes opened.

That, however, is not the peculiarity of Jewish landlords alone; Gentile landlords have played the same trick. But landlordism is peculiarly a Jewish ambition and distinction; the Jew is the Landlord of America.  Any group of tenants almost anywhere in America, except the West, could testify to this.

Nor is landlordism itself reprehensible, things being what they are, unless it is anti-social and anti-American. And just here is where it gets point. Some of the oldest and most sacred shrines of Americanism in the East have entirely lost their character as such by the invasion -- not of "foreigners" -- but of Jews.

Ford, Henry. The International Jew (pp. 120-121).  . Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, the President-elect, Trump, is a Gentile real estate investor who has been criticized for some of his dealings, although he invests mostly in high-end, high-rise buildings that are not linked to this problem with single family homes.  

On Bloomberg TV yesterday, I watched a representative of the financial industry defend its practices regarding rentals.  His name was Tom Shapiro, which sounds Jewish, although I don’t know if he is.  The interview is found here.  He defended the industry by saying that an investor’s owning a number of single family homes is like an investor owning a large multifamily apartment building, which has been common for years.  He said 36% of rentals are now single family homes, as opposed to apartments.  Many more people are renting rather than buying; so, investors are focusing on millennials who prefer to rent.  

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/wall-street-america-s-new-landlord-kicks-tenants-to-the-curb

NYT Op-Eds for 1/2/17

The problem with the op-ed on “Marshall Plans, Not Martial Plans” is that we assisted countries that had been and would be well run before and during World War II.  They could make effective use of the Marshall Plan aid.  I am not sure this is true in the Middle East.  The one exception might be Jordan, which has accepted a huge number of refugees from Syria.  We have already been pretty generous to Jordan, although it is much less than what we give to Israel.  The US provides Israel almost $4 billion per year in assistance, most recently military aid of $38 billion over ten years.  We give Jordan about $1.5 billion, about $800 million of that for refugees.    

If you look at how American assistance was wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan, it raises questions whether these Middle Eastern countries are capable to managing US assistance.  It seems likely the aid would just end up on some politicians Swiss bank account.  I would include Lebanon in this untrustworthy group.  So, I think a Marshall Plan for the Middle East is unrealistic.  

I can’t really relate to the op-ed on “Barack Obama and Me,” since I came from a less than wealthy family in the South,  My family was not a dysfunctional pigsty like J.D. Vance’s.  I agree that Obama brought much more dignity and respectability to the White House than the Clintons, who were trailer park trash with a little Ivy League polish applied to a messed-up, low-class interior.  It’s ironic that Hillary clearly does  not like white men, including her husband, who has been her meal ticket to national politics, thus alienating one of the largest groups of Americans.  Trump beat her in part because he appealed to the white me she despised.  Like Vance, I am happy to see someone who doesn’t despise me as President, but like Vance I am worried that Trump can hardly put together a grammatical sentence at a sixth grade level, while Obama spoke beautifully and had a lofty vision for the US.  I was pleased to hear an Obama White House alumnus say that Obama saw being President as public service, rather than personal aggrandizement.  I’m not sure we will get that with Trump.  

My main object to “Angela Merkel, Russia’s Next Target,” is that it did not mention the fact that the US was caught tapping Merkel’s personal phone.  Arguably we did not use whatever personal information we got to undermine her as Chancellor or prevent her reelection, but who knows what the CIA really does.  I think it is interesting that Russia did not leak false emails about the DNC; no one has declared that they were not the real thing.  Podesta and company are just upset that they got caught.   

In “America Becomes a Stan” Paul Krugman remains unable to accept Hillary Clinton’s loss.  Trump’s Presidency may be a disaster, but we don’t know yet.  It will be different, but he may in fact stand up for America, and may shift some focus back toward the white middle class from the super wealthy and super poor.  Trump may see the Presidency as a chance to make America better, not to make himself richer.  Even in the worst case, there are enough checks and balances in the Constitution of prevent America from becoming a “stan.”  On the other hand, Hillary, as an Ivy League intellectual, is probably very much like most of the women Krugman knows.  He feels comfortable with her, and he doesn’t with Trump.  It’s understandable that he would have preferred her as President, but “You can’t always get what you want.”  Sorry Paul.