[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n my last article, I identified what I consider to be Barack Obama’s three greatest achievements as President of the United States. In this article, I will spell out what I view as his three worst failures. You can of course make your own list, and if I had space in this column, the list would be longer.
His first and biggest failure is that he did not prosecute the rich thieves who created the subprime mortgage meltdown of 2008. As many of you will recall, investment bankers and brokers had bundled mortgages together and sold them as securities, touting them as being as safe as cash, even when they knew perfectly well they were not. These mortgage-back securities were such a hot commodity that an incentive was created to write more and more mortgages, which meant extending credit to riskier and riskier borrowers, on riskier and riskier terms, including interest rates which were below the prime rate. When borrowers started to default, the mortgage backed securities lost value, and the whole house of cards came tumbling down. All of this, and still more malfeasance – all of it well documented by now – created the “Great Recession” of 2009. It was criminal activity, pure and simple, and the evidence was abundant.
The Obama administration chose to go after the banks themselves, but left the individual bankers free from prosecution.
The evidence was so great that the banks settled out of court, paying the largest fines in U.S. history – but typically no more than one or two days’ worth of revenue for the company – but admitting no wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the Justice Department, citing a vague fear of “unintended consequences,” took no action against the individual thieves whose actions had cost millions of Americans their jobs, their homes, their retirement savings, their dreams, and it’s fair to say in some cases, their lives.
The result was a bad taste in everybody’s mouth from coast to coast, that the system was and is truly rigged in favor of those with the most money. This created a pervasive mood of disenchantment and anti-government sentiment that lasted the entire 8 years of Obama’s tenure. Then when the 2016 election turned out to be a referendum on the system itself, the American people voted for change, even if it meant electing a reckless, amoral egotist like Donald Trump.
Obama’s second big failure was that he took his eye off the ball in Iraq, leading to the formation of ISIS. George W. Bush deserves most of the blame for ISIS, since the invasion of Iraq was his idea, but when Bush left office, he had successfully bribed the Sunni insurgents into participating in the newly-formed Iraqi government. Nouri al Maliki, Bush’s hand-picked head of the fledgling Iraqi government, had no political experience whatsoever, and needed advice on a daily basis. Bush was providing that advice, for better or worse. When Obama took office, he washed his hands of Iraq and left Maliki to fend for himself. Left to his own devices, Maliki ruled Iraq the way Bush had ruled the Coalition Provisional Authority, to wit, he chose ideological purity over experience and qualifications. In Maliki’s case, this meant forcing Sunnis out of all key posts in the government and the military, and replacing them with Shia. The former Sunni insurgents soon realized they had no stake in the Iraqi government, and bolted to form their own government – ISIS.
Third on my list of Obama’s failures as president was his use of a drone to kill an American citizen without due process. The process was simply that this man’s name was whispered in Obama’s ear by the CIA. No right to face his accusers or hear or dispute the evidence against him, even though he was an American citizen. This set a very dangerous precedent, conceivably opening the way for future presidents to assassinate their political opponents on grounds of “ national security.”
Phil Jones is a local columnist who makes his living teaching math to kids with “learning disabilities”, especially dyslexia and ADHD. He writes original songs through the nonprofit Sunrise Ministries.
