Two Failed Presidencies {Part 2)

      Obama was lucky, very lucky, when it comes to his failed economy.  He became President when the economy was at its low point over the bursting of the real estate bubble from sub prime mortgages. Sub prime mortgages are those that the lender has some doubt that the loan will ever be repaid.  In order to cut losses lenders invented creative mortgage gimmicks and sold these mortgages in packages to investors hidden among good mortgages to avoid or limit losses. Ironically, Obama was one of the attorneys whose action forced the use of subprime mortgages.  In 1995, Obama represented two of the three named plaintiffs, Brooks and Roberson, and was second named for Bucyks-Roberson against Citibank Federal Savings Bank, claiming that they didn't get a mortgage because they were black. In actuality, it was because the bank denied the mortgage based on economics.  Besides the three named plaintiffs, there were 183 that were unnamed.  In 1998 the law suit was settled for $1.3 million.  Each of the three named plaintiffs received $20K, Obama received  $23K from 360K awarded to his law firm. The remainder was to be distributed to the 183 unnamed plaintiffs, but few of the them got any part of the distribution.  The lawyers kept it.

      The bursting of the mortgage bubble resulted in a severe recession.  The Fed was forced to drop interest rates to practically zero. Normally low interest rates encourage employment and growth of the economy, but Obama's required some tricks to make the economy better than it really was.  First, he said that if someone was unemployed for more than 6 months, they were no longer counted in the unemployment statistics.  Even though they were considered unemployed, their unemployment benefits were increased from 26 weeks to 99 weeks.  Therefore he was paying many people who were unemployed not to work or those who worked off the books to double dip.  What was the result of this slight of hand was that the unemployment figures, that were announced on Thursday each week, almost always more than the new employment numbers given out on Friday, yet the unemployment rate appear to drop. Despite all of this, the economy grew at a seemingly positive, but very slow rate.  Obama always blamed his predecessor, Bush, when ever one of his economic policy failed and that occurred frequently.  Despite interest rates remaining near zero for his entire eight years of presidency, GDP grew only at less than 2% per year until the very end of his presidency. Obama hated capitalism, but did support one type of capitalism, crony capitalism, and this resulted in companies like Solyndra receiving hundreds of millions of dollars only to go bankrupt shortly after receiving the money and paying huge bonuses to its executives.  Obama even had a group of CEOs serve as advisors to try and present some favor to American Business.  His favorite CEO was Jeffery Immelt, who drove GE into the ground.  GE was one of the most popular stocks, held by many investors in 401Ks and IRAs for its robust dividend.  Under Immelt, GE crashed and its dividend went to $.01/share  If it weren't for a reverse stock split, the stock would still be in single digits.

      Despite the left's media attempts to favorably compare Obama's last three years to Trump's first three years, the economy was really in shambles.  More of this will be discussed when I talk about domestic policies and who really benefited.  Meanwhile, when Trump came into office, he reversed many of Obama's costly programs and real employment improved, especially limiting crony capitalism, lowering taxes, making America's partners pay their fair share, and getting out of costly agreements that didn't make sense like the Paris Climate Accord, that favored our enemy China.  Unemployment for various groups dropped to record lows and people had more money in their pockets to spend.  The Fed began raising its rates, but inflation stayed very low.

      Then Biden took office and immediately reversed many of the policies that Trump had initiated, restored Obama's terrible economic policies,  and sowed the seeds of inflation.  The Covid pandemic was essentially over, but Biden realized he could still use it to control Americans and the economy.  States that emerged early from the lockdowns did well, and those that stayed locked down did poorly, not only economically, but educationally.  So poorly, that some of these states changed graduation requirements from high schools and that that forced colleges and universities to lower their entrance requirements. (This supports my arguments that China exported Covid-19 from its Wuhan Lab on purpose.)

      Most importantly, Biden's actions forced inflation, supported crony capitalism, and spent money wildly, money that we did not have, so we had to print it. Interest rates soared to the highest they have been since Jimmy Carter.  Instead of trying to help Americans, Biden continued to support more wasteful spending and tried to place a positive spin on his economic disaster, by lying that it was working and called it "Bidenomics", a term to most that had a very negative rather than positive ring to it.  Like Obama, he tried to blame his preecessor Trump for his failures, but this was so ridiculous to everyone that it didn't work. People realized his economic policies were a failure and his approval ratings plunged, even among non NeoMarxist Democrats who had seized control of the Democrat Party.  The thing that most destroyed the economy was climate change, green politics, and the attack on fossil fuels that began during the Obama regime and resumed under Biden. In Part 3, I will offer more specifics about actual programs and policies to show why Biden and Obama were failures.   

I'm Scared

      

        We can forgive (the Arabs) for killing our children.  We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with (the Arabs) when they love their children more than they hate us.  Gold Meir

       I'm scared. Yes, I'm scared. As a Jew, for the first time in my life, I'm scared. I'm an early "Baby Boomer," born nine months after the end of World War II, in University City, Missouri, a suburb just west of St. Louis.  U. City, or Jew City, as it was called, was a predominantly Jewish suburb.  During the Jewish high holidays, 85-90 per cent of the grade school students were absent. At the time, that public school system was also the best in Missouri.  Both sides of my family had immigrated to America in the 1800's, with a portion of my mother's family arriving in St. Louis from Austria in 1850.  They open a used furniture store in St. Louis and sold furniture to the pioneers heading out on the Oregon Trail.  The business grew and eventually became a new furniture store.  My mother  was born and grew up down the street from the house where William Clark lived as governor of the Missouri Territory a century earlier.  Obviously, I grew up in a safe area that was experiencing a growth spurt fueled by veterans returning from World War II, making use of the GI Bill. 

      Though I had no encounters with antisemitism growing up that were personally directed at me, I did begin to learn about the Holocaust was when I was seven years old.  My parents, who were Reformed Jews, decided to send me to an Orthodox Jewish Day School to learn all about my religion, so that when I grew up, I could make an informed decision on how devout I would be. In order to catch up with the second graders at my new school, my mother found a tutor who taught me to read and write Hebrew during the summer.  My tutor was a Czech Jew, Dr. Natham.   He had survived a concentration camp and I noticed he had a number tattooed on his left arm. I asked my mother about it and that is how I first learned about the Holocaust. He gave my mother an 8 x 10 booklet with rare photos and articles about the Holocaust.    My mother hid it away and would not let me look at it as she said it was too gruesome. A few years later, I found it and it was indeed gruesome with photographs from concentration camps and mass slaughter. I will never forget a picture of maybe 200 naked Jews sanding on the edge of a ditch.  The next picture showed the same Jews lying in the ditch having been massacred.  My mother told me I very lucky to have been born in America.

      I attended the H.F. Epstein Hebrew Academy from second through fifth grades and learned more about the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel just a few years before.  Like Dr. Natham, most of my Hebrew teachers had tattoos and were survivors of the Holocaust. I was too young to remember the war the Israelis fought in 1948 to preserve their statehood, but I do remember the War of 1957. Israel again defended itself from is Arab neighbors.  Later joined by the British and French,  the Suez Canal was on the verge of capture. President Eisenhower stepped in and forced a truce. My parents were upset and believed that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Special Foreign Policy advisor Sherman Adams were behind it. This dramatic success of the IDF gave me a sense of pride, occurring only a dozen years after the end to the Holocaust. 

      My only personal  antisemitic encounter occurred while I was in medical school at St. Louis University. A notice on a bulletin board announced that there would be an anti Israel rally at the student union.  The interesting thing was that it was looking for participants mostly from Washington University.  Washington University had a very large number of Jewish students, so this group thought having the rally at the Catholic University would work better. My best friend in medical school was Denny C., a Jew from Minneapolis, and we stationed ourselves at table  near the door of the student union and when about thirty antisemites pro Arab came in chanting and carrying signs with swastikas and messages like "death to Israel", and "kill the Jews", we went into action. We grabbed the signs from the first two through the door, ripped off the cardboard and became swinging the sticks not hitting anyone,  but chasing them back out the door. The campus police quickly arrived and ran them off campus as none had student IDs.

       For the next fifty years, I lived and worked in areas that were not antisemitic, but over the past decade I began to notice the spread of antisemitism at colleges and universities.  Mostly it took the form of the BDS Movement (boycott, divest, and sanction) and later apartheid and now colonization.  This was further advanced by the Obama administration who days before Trump became president, had UN Ambassador Samantha Power abstained from voting on a UN resolution to have Israel return to its 1948 borders  All other Presidents would have vetoed this resolution. It amazed me how either stupid and hateful these people were,  if they boycotted products that Jews were responsible for inventing, they would deny themselves the use of many medicines to treat and cure disease or  the use of inventions such as the cell phone. It is also ironic that most of the Muslim countries in the Middle East are the one guilty of Apartheid as none have the thriving Jewish communities that once existed in their countries.  Jews were either expelled or forced to leave.  Arabs, who did not listen to the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who told them to leave Israel before the Arabs attack the new nation in 1948, but stayed and subsequently prospered and have the same rights as Jewish Israelis.  Those who left were told not to come back and this represents most of the so called Palestinian Arabs.  Al-Husseini was a terrible antisemite who wanted to kill all Jews,  During World War II, he collaborated with Hitler and Himmler and helped raise three divisions of Muslim Waffen SS, who murdered Jews in the Balkans and southern Russia.  Because he was the leader of the Sunni Muslims, it was decided not to indict him as a war criminal at Nuremberg.  Of course, none of the students know this history as this was not taught in their history lessons, omitted by antisemitic professors and teachers who deny the existence of the Holocaust or by corrupt social media.

      The current wave of antisemitism has finally reach my neighborhood.  Last weekend a handwritten note was taped to the door of a Jewish family at a condominium next door, threatening to murder the entire family.  Fortunately, this despicable act was caught on video and the police got involved.  The two perpetrators were teenagers, one of who lived in the same building. 

      Fortunately my children were not exposed to this antisemitic garbage and all three are happy an successful adults approaching middle age.  But I am especially scared for my grandchildren, as they may well be exposed to the antisemitism now so prominently represented at institutions of higher learning and also in social media.  Sadly, most of the non Muslim antisemites are neoMarxists who have promoted other anti America positions like the Black Lives Matter Movement, for example, and those wanting to impose transgenderism. The idiocy and hypocrisy of this amazes me.  Gays are killed or jailed in most Muslim countries and women are often treated like animals, basically to cook, clean, and bear children.  They cannot show hair and in some instances their faces in public. Yet some American feminists  favor this Muslim attitude.

      I was shocked that 25 Democrat congressmen and women refused to condemn Hamas for its brutal massacre of Unarmed Jews including women and infants.  Our weak President who originally condemned the brutal attacks, now equates antisemitism in America with Islamophobia in order to gain the vote of Muslims in Michigan and Minnesota and has the VP charged with stamping out Islamophobia, even though antisemitism has increased more than 400% recently.  Recall Michelle Obama with a sad look holding a sign, "bring back our girls" when Muslim ISIS terrorists kidnapped girls from a Nigerian girls school.  Hamas has taken almost 250 hostages, including women, children, infants, and Americans.  Where is she now?  Her silence in deafening.