Most honest followers of politics and even casual observers know that the annual State of The Union Address given by the President is an exercise of feel good, self congratulations mixed with a shred of ambitions and proposals for the new year going forward.  This year was no exception, but given the toxic state of Washington politics, the true state of things, and the fact that this year is an election year, I felt let down by President Obama.  While he pointed out some fairly obvious problems and some simple solutions that could be achieved, were it not for the obstructionist tactics of the republicans, he failed to set the tone needed to wake voters up to the importance this year of holding the Senate for the democrats, and the desperate need to take control away from the House of Clowns.  He also managed to lie with a straight face about his desire to create good paying manufacturing jobs while urging congress to fast track the further outsourcing of American jobs and standards by approving the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

The pre-game hype of the State Address was about how President Obama was going to lay out his new plans to use his executive authority where he could to get America working and to address the growing wealth inequality problem in this country.  It is true that there are a limited number of real things he can do with his executive power, such as requiring all government contract workers to be paid at least $10.10 an hour, but the real point of these moves is largely symbolic and meant to put political pressure on congress to act with legislation.   Raising the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hours is one of the more simple yet effective legislative actions that congress could take to help stimulate the economy and help the working poor.  I would say that in the list of contenders for top soundbites from the speech, “Give America a raise” directed at the republicans who always oppose raising the minimum wage, was the top.  Mr. Obama pointed out that today’s minimum wage was about 20 percent lower than it was during Messiah Ronald Reagan’s time.  This was one a few references and inferences to the undeserving and highly regarded hero on high of the republican party, which Obama still seems to think may win over hardened conservatives.

President Obama also asked congress to re-instate federal unemployment insurance  benefits immediately, that he said congress had “let expire.”  Here, in an election year, I think Mr. Obama should have chosen more honest language.  Calling the heartless and calculated blocking of extending unemployment benefits by republicans as letting “expire” is to me the epitome of what his wrong with President Obama’s tone and strategy in dealing with a republican party that is radical and far right of the majority of American’s beliefs on many issues.  The government shutdown this past year, caused solely by the republicans, was white-washed over, as a “rancorous argument” yet “important debate” that we needed to move past.  He then congratulated both democrats and republicans for a “compromise” budget that was passed.  As I’ve pointed out before, compromise is now defined as giving the super wealthy backed republicans most of what they want that goes against most of what the majority of American voters want.

Pretending that the problem in American politics is too much “partisan” arguing between two sides of good faith people who both want what is good for the country is a cop out by a president who is either blindly naive at this point (which I don’t think he is) or still unwilling to really fight for what is right.  He still wants to ask nicely for the right things while still be willing to settle for only a little of the right things.  The problem is not simply bickering between the democrats and republicans.  The problem is quite frankly, that all of Washington is corrupted to a certain degree by flood of bribery by the all powerful corporations and industries of the top .01 percent of the uber wealthy through their campaign “donations.”  Everyone knows this.  So instead of pretending like congress is just a bunch of good hearted Americans who passionately disagree over issues, the president needs to be more honest and direct and say “it’s true that both political parties are too beholden to the interests of profit over people driven corporations, but the republican party has consistently proven over the past few years that they represent outright contempt for the working class and the poor.  It’s time to throw them out of office altogether.”

He could point out any number of concrete examples, starting with changing his phrase “let expire” unemployment benefits to “killed any hope” of extending unemployment insurance.  He could point out that the Farm Bill was held up by republicans hoping that starving the poor and their children through more savage cuts to the food stamp program would somehow create jobs.  He could point to the record number of filibusters by republican senators that have been used by the minority party of the top 1 percent to undermine the principles of democracy.  He should remind everyone that the government shutdown was caused by House republicans also seeking to undermine our democracy by inflicting enough pain on the general population to cause democrats to surrender to the needs of the super rich.

Instead, he spoke in a lot of generalities, and again, channeling the tired rhetoric of President Reagan, talked about how he was going to “cut red tape” to get construction projects moving quicker and factories getting built.  After all these years of President Obama pledging to use his executive authority to cut red tape to get the economy moving, you’d think his scissors would be dull and there no more tape to be cut.  He also spoke of “job training,” a recycled President Clinton line of bullshit that suggests that there are many high paying jobs out there for average American workers, if only they could get the government training they need to fill those positions.  To solve this problem, he’s appointed Vice President Joe Biden “to lead an across- the-board reform of America’s training programs to make sure they have one mission: train Americans with the skills employers need, and match them to good jobs that need to be filled right now.”  So we have republicans suggesting that unemployment is caused by too many lazy people living off the fat of unemployment checks and not looking for those jobs out there, and the president suggesting that those jobs are out there, they just need government trained and recruited workers to fill them.  Both positions are baseless in facts, both are bullshit.  The republican position just demonstrates their outright hostility towards the working class, and President Obama’s position is just a false hope based on lies that he hopes will motivate people to vote for the democrats instead of the assholes.

Another lie that President Obama keeps propagating is borrowed from the tired playbook of Bill Clinton and Al Gore:  we need more secretive “free trade” deals passed in order to create jobs here at home.  We’ve all heard this crock of shit before, one of the ultimate successes of trans-national corporations, the selling of the myth that trade deals with poor, third world countries that undermine our labor and environmental laws and sovereignty, will somehow create jobs here.  President Obama once said he would oppose any NAFTA style trade deals if he became president, and that he would renegotiate parts of NAFTA as well.  Now, like his bullshit artist predecessors Clinton and Gore before him, he actually said in his address “We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped “Made in the USA.”  It reminded me of Vice President Gore debating Ross Perot on NAFTA, saying he had a family member in the tire manufacturing business being for NAFTA so he could sell his tires to Mexico.

I’ve recently written about how TPP is a larger and worse version of NAFTA that will continue to outsource American jobs and depress wages, but I’d like to include a link here to an excellent Op Ed this week in the New York Times written by David Bonoir, who was a democrat in office at the time of NAFTA.  It is worth the read and articulates very clearly the problem with TPP and so-called “free trade” and the reality behind the false propaganda that Obama now promotes now that he is president:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/opinion/obamas-free-trade-conundrum.html?hp&rref=opinion.  I strongly recommend that you copy and paste the link and read the piece.  

The president did forcefully defend ObamaCare and called out the House of Clowns for it’s forty something votes to repeal it, and highlighted and important and easy to understand benefit:  people with pre-existing conditions can no longer be thrown to the wolves so that insurance companies can continue to profit by denying care to the sick.  I’ve said before that the once the full benefits of the Affordable Care Act are realized and enacted, Americans will realize how much better off they are now with health care in this country than they were before.  We are still a long ways off from catching up to the rest of the world on how we provide heath care to all, but there are real and concrete and life saving and cost benefits that are now being fully realized, even with the fumbled roll out of ObamaCare.

To sum it up, our broken system of democracy will continue to putter along at an unacceptable pace, with wealth inequality unlikely to change anytime time soon, with fundamental problems still bandaged and window dressed up, and our leaders talking about how great we are as our benevolent leaders work hard to compromise us into a better position.  The elections coming up this year are important, but unless the democrats grow some backbone and a willingness to tell the unpleasant truth, the balance of power will not change that much, the poor will go hungrier, and the working poor will work harder for less while the corporate fat cats get fatter.  The president missed an opportunity to use the bully pulpit to light a fire under the ass of voters and his own party, but I guess it’s hard to do when you also work for the rich and powerful that really rule our country.