A disaster called Obama

CĂLIN RECHEA (translated by Cosmin Ghidoveanu)
Ziarul BURSA #English Section / 8 noiembrie 2016

A disaster called Obama

Update: The biggest turnout ever in the last century?

American analyst Martin Armstrong predicts that 2016 elections will see the biggest turnout in the last 92 years, while the highest turnout during that period was 63.3% in 1952.

Data from the American Presidency Project (APP), of the University of California, Santa Barbara, show that the lowest turnover 48.9%, was reached in 1924, and the average in the postwar period was 56%.

A significant presence of over 60% favors Donald Trump according to Armstrong, but the American analyst is skeptical when it comes to a Trump victory, because "he won't be allowed to win".

FxWirePro analysts estimate that Trump will win the elections with at least 314 votes of the Electoral College, out of a total of 538.

In the event of a tie, the future president will be decided through a vote of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold the majority.

In the 2012 elections, Barack Obama won the popular vote in 26 states and 332 votes in the Electoral College.

The first preliminary results, based on the exit polls will be published starting with 23:00 GMT, November 9th, and come from Indiana (11 electors) and Kentucky (8 electors).

At 5:00 GMT the last voting precincts will close, those of Alaska (3 electors) and Hawaii (4 electors).

In 2012, Barack Obama was declared the winner at 4:38 GMT.

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I first read the American Constitution in High School, in the darkest years of the "socialist multilaterally developed society". As strange as it may seem, I found the book, published in Eastern Germany, in a library in town.

Since then, I browse it whenever political actions, not just from the United States, make me ask myself how such an involution is possible, when some of the authorities in America, "home of the brave and land of the free", have come to see the fundamental law as a subversive document, which gets you a place on the terrorist list if you read it in public.

That is what has become of the America of Barack Obama, who promised "hope and change" in the electoral campaign before the 2008 elections. One joke in the US goes "10 years ago we had Bob Hope, Steve Jobs and Johnny Cash, and now we have no hope, no jobs and no cash".

Indeed all hopes collapsed one after another, as the new president showed he felt more at home on the golf course than in the White House.

As far as foreign policy, the case of the administration led by Barack Obama, 2009 Nobel peace prize winner, represents the history of serial disasters, which is not surprising, given that the State Department was led by Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

The continuation of the "hot" wars inherited from the previous administrations, a new "cold war" with the Russian Federation and especially the loss of the influence in Asia define the former "community organizer" of Chicago, a city which is now seeing veritable street battles.

That example alone is enough to acutely reflect the increase in social dissensions, to consider that his domestic policies have been a disaster as well, even if we ignore the severe deterioration of infrastructure, amid an explosive growth of the public debt.

US treasury data shows that the public debt has reached 19.79 trillion dollars in the beginning of November 2016, from 10.63 trillion on the first day of his administration, January 20th, 2009.

But the true measure of the domestic effects of his "progressive policy" is the law of health insurance, known as Obamacare, a classic example of "help" that its recipients don't see the benefits of.

The 2,000-page long aberration, about which very influential Democrat leaders have said that "you need to vote for it before you can see what's inside", has been advertised as the definitive solution for ensuring Americans' access to healthcare.

Obama promised that insurance premiums will fall, the coverage rate will increase, and those who are pleased with the existing state of things will be able to keep their doctors and insurers.

In each American state were created "exchanges" of health insurers where the offer of several companies was going to meet with the citizens' demand, in the context of a complex subsidy system for those on low income or with low revenues (author's note: the insurers' lobby had a very important part to play in the drafting of the law).

Unfortunately, reality, defined by great writer Philip K. Dick as "what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it", dealt a heavy blow to the propaganda in less than three years after the Obamacare came into effect.

From the very beginning of 2016, news started coming into the American media about insurance companies withdrawing from the Obamacare "exchanges", as payments to hospitals have skyrocketed, while the premiums paid did not raise to the expected levels, because young healthy people have preferred paying the fine to the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year, instead of paying monthly health insurance premiums of thousands of dollars. And why would they have paid, when all the insurance policies are with a franchise which often exceeds 10,000 dollars and is an almost impassable barrier to accessing treatment? For next year's insurance contracts, the premiums will increase, on average by almost 50%, and franchises will also see a significant rise, as some states, such as Arizona, are facing a doubling.

The true nature of the Obamacare program has been revealed since 2013, precisely by one of its main architects, professor Jonathan Gruber, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a videorecorded conference, Gruber stated that the law was designed in such a way that the Budget Department of Congress would not consider it a new tax and to hide the fact that the healthy would be paying for the treatment of the sick. "The lack of transparency represents a huge political advantage", the MIT professor further said, who also admitted that the "draft law also passed because of a critical aspect, which you can call, if you will, the stupidity of the average American voter".

Law professor Josh Blackman writes, in his book "Unraveled: Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power", that in order to force the passing of the new healthcare insurance law, (ACA, Affordable Care Act), president Obama "violated the promise to maintain the existing insurance contracts, has exceeded the traditional limits of executive power and has violated religious freedom".

Beyond the explosion of direct costs, Obamacare has created, on behalf of increasing the quality of healthcare, a regulatory framework that has resulted in burying doctors in paperwork.

In this context, instead of witnessing an increase of competition between hospitals, a decrease of the competition between them was seen, amid the numerous mergers in the sector.

Doctor Bob Kocher, special assistant to the president between 2009-2010 and one who played a significant part in the preparation of the ACA, recently wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, that he was wrong about the effects of Obamacare.

"The consolidation that we have foreseen occurred, but I now think that we have made a mistake when we favored it", Kocher writes in the WSJ. "Studies evaluated by Harvard Medical School shows that improving healthcare is especially the result of the work of independent doctors, and not of the major medical centers", the former Obama advisor further states.

If the news and the analyses about Obamacare had only appeared in the conservative press, its supporters would have been free to claim that it was all "right-wing conspiracy". But what are you going to do when there aren't any supporters of the mistake?

Even New York Times and its famous editorialist Paul Krugman, Economics Nobel prize winner in 2008, admitted that there have been serious problems with Obamacare, but that they can be resolved through an even greater involvement of the state, perhaps through the nationalization of the healthcare system.

The speed of the collapse has caused one of the journalists of Forbes magazine to ask whether the "grandiose" Obamacare failure was actually "designed" to happen.

But Barack Obama doesn't want to see the disaster his administration is leaving behind. In a recent editorial in the "The Economist" magazine, he brags about his "achievements" (author's note: "The way ahead", October 8th, 2016), even if reality contradicts him. Had it confirmed it, Donald Trump wouldn't have been on the candidates list, and the Democrat candidate would have been declared the winner by default.

In the little time that he has between two rallies, where he sings the praises of Hillary Clinton, and "instructions" to the Justice Department, Barack Obama is busy working on his "legacy" and on TV interviews.

The latest was on HBO, where he told Bill Maher that "America is the nation that is indispensable in the world, thanks to its military strength", even though "our interventions in the world often have unforeseen consequences, which result in even more problems".

Is that the only thing that constitutional law professor Obama got out of the undeserved Nobel prize that he got without deserving it? From that point of view, actor Ronald Reagan proves to be clearly superior. In his goodbye statement, president Reagan stressed that "America is the shining city on the hill, whose light guides freedom lovers everywhere".

I don't know if the Founding Fathers of the United States have written the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the goal of creating "and indispensable nation". Even if that were the case, the indispensable nature would have been given by the persistent pursuit of the ideal of freedom and not by the biggest army in the world.

When will Americans elect a president that checks first of all the honoring of the citizens' fundamental rights, mentioned in the Charter of Rights in the Constitution, and to once again reignite, through a new proclamation of the Republic, the torch of the Statue of Liberty?

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