Obama's Economy: Recovery for the Few [Paperback]

This book is about our current economy. Not a happy subject, Yet, the author writes easily and comfortably while still packing in lots of useful information. In refreshingly clear descriptive language, Prof. Jack Rasmus presents a devastating indictment of the last four years of utterly failed government policies and their underlying false precepts.

No cheerleading for the private sector cabal of banks and corporations here. Why should there be? What exactly has blind faith in the market accomplished?

Look no further than the very apropos book title - recovery for the few.

Rasmus cites 2011 business journal reports that "corporations have a higher share of cash on their balance sheets than at any time in half a century...rather than invest[ing] in new plants or hiring."

Banks are no different. The author explains that banks are sitting on "$1.7 trillion in excess cash" which they refuse to extend for mortgage relief or as credit for small businesses."

The author breaks down how banks received low interest and, in some cases, zero interest bailout funds of nine trillion dollars, without any obligation or intention to help out millions of working people facing foreclosures.

It may also shock readers to learn that insurance policies reimburse bank mortgage losses at higher, pre-crash market rates. And, Rasmus reveals how quasi government mortgage agencies like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae extend exactly the same favor to their banker friends.

And, just when you think it can't get worse, other chapters disclose one of the most unscrupulous policy scandals of any recovery program. Banks were actually urged to park their zero interest or ridiculously low 0.25 per cent interest bailout funds with the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) where they were paid more millions in interest for doing nothing.

Corporations are no better. Rasmus describes how they are sitting on a huge stash of $2 trillion, much of it resulting from government tax cuts.

Before becoming a trained economist, Rasmus served several stints as a union representative and organizer. He brings that knowledge and experience to his current profession. The last chapter in the book contains a full social and economic program that, in his view, will result in a dramatic reversal of the serious downward trends he predicts will only worsen, perhaps to the point of a global depression just a few years ahead of us.

I strongly recommend this very readable primer for those interested in understanding more thoroughly how economic policy affects us, how it has been shaped by the upper crust and how new radical reforms can earnestly get the attention of the majority whose support and action are so desperately needed to shape a new reality.

The history of economics is the history of man made disasters. As Obama's disaster unfolds, it is clear that the 90% are just collateral damages for the 10%. In making the world safe for banks and insurance companies, Obama has ensured that there is no future for the rest of us: Obamanomics is Bush III. Jack Rasmus's book Obama's Economy: Recovery of the Few, is an irrefutable indictment of Obama's economy and a roadmap for those who would make America work for the many. It is also a superb overview of the "richest economy in the world." with two omissions worthy of note.
Rasmus does not explain why Reagan/Bush I & II ran up huge deficits----after all they are "conservatives" . Nor does he explain why military spending was the chosen vehicle. As to the trillions of dollars of deficits, David Stockman told us why: the deficits were chosen to destroy social security and medicare by financial strangulation and as Rasmus documents, Obama has significantly moved forward toward the destruction of both, cynically timed after the November 2012 elections. As to military spending, military spending creates very few jobs for the trillions of dollars spent: once again, as Rasmus documents, again and again Obama refused to do anything of significance to create jobs but he was more happy to spend more on the military and war. In fact, as Rasmus documents, his only vehicle for job creation was long term infrastructure projects that will take decades to carry out------the job equivalent of defense spending in terms of real job creation.
The lack of Obama job creation is more than just a continuation of the Reagan/Bush I & II economic agenda; it contrasts sharply with FDR. In one of the most compelling sections of the book, Rasmus does a year by year contrast of FDR and Obama. Although both were faced with depressions, at a critical juncture, FDR turned from a bank/business agenda to a job and housing agenda and it not only saved the Democratic party, it salvaged what was left of the America economy. Obama has done neither and the Democratic party is in tatters as well as the economy.
But why is Obama so adverse to job creation? In answering this question, Rasmus is quite helpful: Obama's distaste for job creation is only matched for his hunger for "free trade" agreements which have been instrumental in dismantling the American economy and shipping the real jobs overseas.
The virtue of the Rasmus book is also its downside. The dense detail is convincing but numbing. A billion here and a billion there does add up to real money but the numbers also become meaningless. The problem with the dry language of economics is that it does not convey human damage. Rasmus is not Charles Dickens. Perhaps he should take a tip from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and include photos.
To make the numbers real, consider that tens of million more unemployed/under employed means thousands more bankruptcies, early deaths from lack of medical care, suicides, divorces, child abuse, abortions, wife beatings, homelessness, drug addicts, alcoholics, prisoners----the endless miasma of human misery. Obama and his kind will weep prodigious crocodile tears at the damage caused by their policies but at the end of the day, despite all the cynical political theater of hand wringing, they will do nothing. We should thank Dr. Rasmus for his roadmap out of their economic hell but it will take a million or so people occupying Washington DC to push Congress to recovery.

For not forever will the poor man be forgotten
the hope of the lowly not lost forever
Arise, O Lord, let not man flaunt his strength,
let nations be judged in Your presence.
O Lord, put fear upon them,
let the nations know they are mortal.
Psalm 9

Obama's Economy: A New book by Jack Rasmus

Jack Rasmus's new book, Obama's Economy (PlutoPress, 2012), is a marked departure from his earlier volume, Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Recession (PlutoPress, 2010). Where the earlier effort sought to provide an economic framework to understand the worldwide crisis that began over four years ago, the new book offers a detailed, critical history of President Barrack Obama's policy responses to that crisis. In fact, much of Obama's Economy reads like a vivid, insightful diary of economic life during that period. Rasmus links these events into a powerful narrative that was easy to miss as we lived it.

This blow-by-blow account of economic decline and feeble policy response is all cast in the shadow of Obama's campaign promises, promises that were neither bold nor progressive. As Rasmus demonstrates, Obama -- the candidate - drew his financial support from Wall Street, surrounded himself with corporate-friendly, free market-oriented advisors and preferred caution and compromise to any bold, new vision.

As Rasmus demonstrates, Obama's economic course was largely predictable from his campaign promises.

Rasmus sifts through the seeming chaos and improvisations of the last four years to find three distinct Obama recovery programs implemented in 2009, 2010, and 2011. In addition, Obama's Economy identifies "two and a half" Federal Reserve actions (Quantitative Easings) meant to revive the slumping economy. It is Rasmus's considered opinion that all these efforts failed to restore the US economy to anything like a sustainable vitality. The current abysmal state of the global economy and the sluggishness of the US economy would certainly suggest that Rasmus is right.

Further, he chronicles the bi-partisan, near-consensus debt reduction mania that emerged in 2011, a development that found politicians competing with one another to suggest severe budget cutting and program elimination. Rasmus takes this anti-simulative austerity to augur a "double dip" recession: a forthcoming decline in gross domestic product no later than 2013. In this, he is in agreement with the May 22, 2012 statement by the staid Congressional Budget Office which predicts a GDP contraction in the first two quarters of 2013 unless federally legislated measures are rescinded (the equally draconian state and municipal austerity programs are not a factor in the CBO calculations).

After reading Rasmus's new book, one will find little to justify praise for the Obama administration.

While the three trillion dollars of recovery programs (as tabulated by Rasmus) from March of 2008 until September of 2011 may have staved off an even deeper downturn, they have done little to revive the economy. And more than two thirds of these federal dollars were allocated on Obama's watch.

Rasmus, like the New Deal liberals (a brand of liberalism far to the left of what passes as "liberal" today), offers a people-oriented program that promises to restructure capitalism in a way that would dampen many of the inequalities and injustices generated by the capitalism of our time, though I don't share his confidence that it would revitalize the capitalist economy (Nor do I want to "save" capitalism). His program in Obama's Economy is one that, popularized and adopted by a broad political movement, could serve us all well for the immediate future. It is bold and daring, engaging the government in employment in a way unseen since the New Deal. It reverses the housing crisis and protects and strengthens the social safety net (While it mirrors the programs advocated in Rasmus' earlier book, Epic Recession, it curiously and unfortunately omits a single-payer health care solution in this version).

But unlike with the New Deal liberals, there is no political vehicle for this program. Certainly the Democratic Party has not and will not adopt it. The Democratic Party of the twenty-first century is Obama's Party and not even a vague shadow of Roosevelt's Democratic Party. And today's weak labor movement has shown neither the desire nor gumption to re-shape or divorce the Democratic Party. That leaves the fine Rasmus economic plan outside of US politics looking in.

Nonetheless, I can wholeheartedly recommend the book for its unparalleled recounting of the economic failures of the Obama administration and its detailed, well-argued plan for the opening acts of the founding of a people's economy.