Trump inherits mess- how Obama's failure in Syria continues to haunt us

[Montecresto]

People I know where living in Damascus when this kicked off --- they said that men, no-one knew who they were, suddenly appeared out of no where and shot up some walls - next day all the News crews where there, standing in front of the walls, telling ridiculous stories ---- Then in a peaceful protest over money matters in Daraa from within the crowd and from buildings snipers began to shoot police and protesters -

Look up Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley if you want the truth - they will lead you to others.

There’s no videos of the Syrian military shooting protesters either.

 

[Raoul_Luke]

Prime example...you do not have facts here, you have opinions....and while leverage may have been greater or just as bad in the 1990s that ratio of leverage was in violation of banking rules prior to the 2003 change in policy and when you add that degree of leverage to the rapid drop in the derivatives market...the banks had no cash and were insolvent...something that didn't happen in the 1990s...

And where did I post anything supporting the official government position on the Mortgage Downpayment Assistance act or the gutting of SEC enforcement and investigations functions?

Your opinion on the effect of "bailing" out Bear Sterns and not bailing out Lehman...is an example of you pretending your opinions are facts. Another problem with your opinions...if you want to disagree with the facts and opinions I bring to the table...no problem...but your tendency to resort to name calling shows just how sharp that intellect of yours is.

As I've pointed out...Zerohedge has Zero credibility. That is a problem that any media has as they publish bullshit and invent facts to support it. I looked at the Zero article about the memos between the FBI agent and lawyer. It was 90% supposition..."here is what they meant when they said that"....

The banks had commercial paper - trillions of it in fact - and couldn't sell any of it - because the market had seized up and nobody trusted anybody's balance sheet. That isn't because of leverage. It wasn't because of derivatives - the derivatives market held up quite well during the crisis:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-financial-derivatives/unregulated-otc-derivatives-steady-in-credit-crisis-idUSN0630620520080507?sp=true

True to form, you parrot the Financial Crisis Commission's big government white wash when the facts indicate otherwise. If it was derivatives that caused the crisis, why is it that the money market "broke the buck?" How many money market funds held derivatives? Yeah, none.

It was the overnight credit market that froze up and nobody could convert even short term debt to cash. That wasn't because of derivatives, it was because none of the big banks were willing to step forward and bid on credit of any type. None of them were willing to negotiate sales with a counterparty that they had no idea if the next day they'd be the next Bear Sterns or the next Lehman Brothers. If Bear had gone under, credit trading could continue to occur (at reduced prices) - or if Lehman had been bailed out, credit trading could continue at normal prices. By confusing the market, the Bush Treasury Department created the mother of all market uncertainty and nobody could price debt, so the price went to zero. That had nothing to do with derivatives.

What is comical about your typical stance is your reverence for big government interventions. Government can fix broken markets, government can keep failed businesses afloat indefinitely, government can guarantee health care. In your view it seems government is all powerful. Yet you can't envision a single circumstance where all that power can produce more harm than good. It is an absurd (dare I say laughable) stance, but you do it day in and day out.

Yes, it was supposition, just like your "supposition" that the Russians hacked the DNC emails. Your problem is you want everyone to treat your suppositions as facts, and refuse to entertain any alternative interpretation than the one the establishment has decreed, when we've seen again and again and again that these fact free "official" narratives so often fall apart under scrutiny. That's pretty silly too. But you don't see me running after you rating all your posts "funny" because I'm not juvenile.

 

[Dawg]

Who ?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/no-charges-for-officer-who-killed-wichita-man-in-swatting-prank/ar-AAvPrgw?ocid=spartandhp

You sound like an uninformed OWL-------WHO WHO WHO WHO WHO WHO

 

[Raoul_Luke]

Yeah, pay no attention to that giant drop in GDP in 2008...which was probably Obama's fault anyway....It isn't like the numbers from 2008 actually show the worst economy since 1929.

You are conflating the recession with the lack of a recovery. The picture tells the story:



Of course you assume that this flagging recovery is the best we could expect, because you refuse to entertain for one instant that maybe, just maybe, big government isn't the way to build a strong market based economy...

 

[sear]

You sound like an uninformed OWL-------WHO WHO WHO WHO WHO WHO
D #183

Or a zealous advocate for the World Health Organization?

 

[Queen Titania]

There’s no videos of the Syrian military shooting protesters either.

They weren't even there at first, when they arrived they were ambushed.

 

[Montecresto]

They weren't even there at first, when they arrived they were ambushed.

Early in the protesting stage, the Syrian military used tear gas and water cannons. Once the vermin started crawling in and government buildings began being burnt, things changed and there isn’t a country on earth that wouldn’t live fire once things reached that level of violence, including the US which has fired on civilians itself, INCLUDING ITS OWN VETS, who simply wanted to be paid. I’ve still not seen a video that shows uniformed Syrian soldiers firing upon innocent/peaceful civilians.

 

[Raoul_Luke]

There is an example of your use of your own opinions in the complete absence of facts.
You claimed the LFPR was growing since Trump became president...this graph is as of 3/1/2018

View attachment 38972

Notice that the decline in LFPR started in December of 2000....67% dropped to 64%
before Obama became president. It is now 62.7% or so and hasn't changed much since 2014. It is now about the same rate as it was in January 1981.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

About 7 million jobs were lost because of the Bush recession...At the usual rate of job growth at between 200,000 and 300,000 from 2010 to now...how long does it take to put those 7 million as well as the recent college or high school graduates to work? with an 8% GDP loss in 2008...how long does it take to recover. You seem to think that those millions of workers should have found jobs in the next two years...(2010 thru 2011)....

The fact is that Reagan's recovery took from 1982 (the worst point of the recession) to 1986.

First of all, I merely pointed out that there were some encouraging signs in the labor data series since Trump was elected, and your picture supports that. Lets focus on the post recession timeframe:



Improvement in the trend - check!

One of the worst features of the Obama economy was how many working age men were dropping out of the work force. How is that cohort doing these days?


An increase in "breadwinner" jobs to lure men back into the labor force? Check!

Because the manufacturing sector is rebounding:



Reducing regulation and an anti-business bureaucratic stance unshackling the profit motive? Check!

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the recession. As we already know, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery (well, except when an anti-capitalist is running the economic policies of the federal government):

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18194

So the depth of the recession has exactly nothing to do with the inability of the economy to retrieve its long term growth trend line:



There you go again pretending your opinions of stuff are the facts.

Okay, and throughout Reagan's "slow" recovery the LFPR steadily rose, whereas during Obama's it steadily fell). Your repeated completely dishonest comparisons of the unemployment rate performance between the two periods notwithstanding.

Does any of this mean I am claiming Trump "fixed" the Obama depression? Only mildly around the edges. Much of the bad (read: big government) policies persist, as does the steady decay of the Eurodollar paradigm. The fact that these good trends are overcoming the depressing effects of big government, constant war and a loss of the dollar as a world reserve currency is nothing short or remarkable, and only serves to strengthen my contention that "it's the big government, stupid…"

 

[EatTheRich]

Because the manufacturing sector is rebounding:

Impressive that they have access to the future data required to prove their case.

"The deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery" is the most laughably wrong thing I've ever seen from you. On the contrary, at least during the period of capitalist decay, the deeper the recession, the lower the baseline for the recovery.

 

[middleview]

According the the Left and the sainted defenders of all things Obama, any chemical attacks in Syria took place the minute Obama left office and the weapons used were made that morning............

and according to the haters of all things Obama, it was a bad thing to have forced Assad to give up 1,300 tons of chemical weapons.

 

[middleview]

The civil war started off as peaceful demonstration against Assad in March 2011 and had little or nothing to do with us being in Iraq anymore then the demonstrations in Egypt or Libya did.

But hey you cling to that, anything is better then having to admit Obama sucked.

the invasion of Syria by ISI, later called ISIS...had everything to do with the invasion of Iraq and the catastrophic success of Bush's policies there.

 

[Sickofleft]

and according to the haters of all things Obama, it was a bad thing to have forced Assad to give up 1,300 tons of chemical weapons.

What difference did it make...

 

[Sickofleft]

the invasion of Syria by ISI, later called ISIS...had everything to do with the invasion of Iraq and the catastrophic success of Bush's policies there.

Utterly ridiculous.

While we were sitting in Iraq, Iraq was for the most part stable. ISIS really got going after your beloved President removed our troops for a Campaign slogan. ISIS then discovered they could invade Iraq. Not bad for a JV team.....

 

[middleview]

Utterly ridiculous.

While we were sitting in Iraq, Iraq was for the most part stable. ISIS really got going after your beloved President removed our troops for a Campaign slogan. ISIS then discovered they could invade Iraq. Not bad for a JV team.....

Obama never referred to Al Qaeda in Iraq as a JV team. AQI became IS. IS became ISI and then ISIL before changing their name to ISIS. AQI knew in 2008 that all they needed to do was lay low until 2011 when the US left. They spent 2009, 2010 and 2011 building strength. They got help from Maliki when he refused to absorb the Awakening Militias into the Iraqi army...and put a few thousand men out of work...again. When Maliki turned the Iraqi officer corp into a cash cow, selling Generals stars to the highest bidder...and those "generals" then let more thousands of Iraqi troops go on unemployment...there were supposed to have been 50,000 troops in the Sunni triangle...there weren't. That is why ISIS so quickly took over. The fake generals ran, followed by everybody else.

Obama removed the troops as a requirement of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement which George W. Bush signed.

 

[middleview]

What difference did it make...

If it is something that Obama accomplished...that is always your response. If Trump got North Korea to give up their WMDs, would you feel the same way?

If Assad had an additional 1,300 tons of chemical weapons...would have have used them more often? Don't know...but it certainly is a probability.

In any case it cost us nothing at all and it certainly reduced the amount of those weapons Assad had. Cutting off all access to chlorine or even the chemicals necessary to make mustard gas would have been difficult, if not impossible.

 

[sear]

"Obama removed the troops as a requirement of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement which George W. Bush signed." mv

I have read that the terms under which U.S. military combat / occupation forces were withdrawn during the Obama administration were established by the Bush administration, and thus substantially beyond President Obama's authority to negate.

 

[Montecresto]

I have read that the terms under which U.S. military combat / occupation forces were withdrawn during the Obama administration were established by the Bush administration, and thus substantially beyond President Obama's authority to negate.

Wrong, anything can be renegotiated. That’s a nice excuse however. Obama withdrew troops because he campaigned on doing so and that’s what his supporters wanted. Iraq should never have been invaded to begin with. In fact, the entire ME was a more stable place with Hussein, Mubarak, Gaddafi and and Assad then it is today. USFP in the ME SUCKS!!!!

 

[middleview]

I have read that the terms under which U.S. military combat / occupation forces were withdrawn during the Obama administration were established by the Bush administration, and thus substantially beyond President Obama's authority to negate.

It is @Sickofleft's opinion that the Bush treaty "was meant to be re-negotiated"....

In truth the US spent most of 2011 talking to the Maliki representatives in an attempt to negotiate some residual force to remain in Iraq. Maliki, in the end, said no. He would not agree to allowing US troops, accused of a crime, to stand trial in a US military court. Insisting that they stand trial in an Iraqi court. Obama refused. That is the bottom line.

 

[middleview]

Wrong, anything can be renegotiated. That’s a nice excuse however. Obama withdrew troops because he campaigned on doing so and that’s what his supporters wanted. Iraq should never have been invaded to begin with. In fact, the entire ME was a more stable place with Hussein, Mubarak, Gaddafi and and Assad then it is today. USFP in the ME SUCKS!!!!

Obama attempted a renegotiation. Maliki refused the new treaty. In any case, ISIS would only have been prevented from taking over northern Iraq if US troops had done the fighting. If Iraqi soldiers won't defend their country why would we?

The dictatorships of Mubarak, Gaddafi and Assad were destabilized by the citizens of those countries. Not by the policy of the US.

 

[sear]

mv #198 has smacked down Mc #197 fairly well.
I add:

"Wrong, anything can be renegotiated." Mc #197

Many things may be subject to renegotiation.
But what I read of it corroborates mv #198.
Maliki was a weak leader under much domestic popular political pressure to oust the occupiers.
Even if Maliki wanted U.S. there, it seems he'd not have been able to authorize it without placing at increased risk his own tenure.

I'll bottom line it for you Mc.
Blaming Obama for the terms of the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq is at best ignorant.
Those withdrawal terms were set in international law by President Bush (younger).