Obama et l'histoire, ça fait deux

Toujours à l'affût d'une bonne photo ou d'une bonne pose pour les journaux télévisés, Barak Hussein Obama (BHO) n'en rate pas une. 

Ces derniers jours, il a frôlé l'ubicuité pour célébrer le 200e anniversaire de la naissance d'Abraham Lincoln.

Proclamé grand homme pour avoir émancipé les esclaves en 1863, BHO avait tout simplement omis de préciser que cette émancipation ne concernait que les Etats du Sud, les esclaves dans le Nord n'étaient pas concernés.

Le quotidien de gauche espagnol Publico, rappelle fort opportunément sous la plume d'Isabel Piquer que Lincoln était bien un homme de son temps et qu'il ne lui serait jamais venu à l'esprit de partager un dimanche en famille avec M. BHO et Mme BHO.

Raciste, négrophobe, Lincoln ne rêvait que d'une chose : renvoyer les Noirs en Afrique et en débarrasser l'Amérique pour toujours.

Ces vérités irréfutables, tout comme le fait que Martin Luther King était un plagiaire et un érotomane, ne sont jamais évoquées dans la presse américaine.

Merci Publico !

Estados Unidos ha celebrado con gran pompa el 200 aniversario del nacimiento de Abraham Lincoln (12 de febrero de 1809, Hodgenville, Kentucky). La cosa se hubiera quedado en las conmemoraciones históricas de rigor de no ser por Barack Obama y la recesión.

La decisión de Lincoln de proclamar la emancipación de los esclavos en 1863 (que confirmó dos años más tarde la decimotercera enmienda a la Constitución) allanó el camino para que un político negro pudiera llegar a la Casa Blanca. La dimensión del hombre que presidió el país durante el momento más oscuro de su génesis, la guerra civil entre el Norte y el Sur, sigue sirviendo de referencia en la crisis por la que atraviesa EEUU.

El libertador de los negros se opuso a darles el voto y a las bodas interraciales

Lo recordó Obama durante una celebración en el Capitolio: "Me siento especialmente agradecido a esta figura singular que hizo posible mi propia historia. Su capacidad de prever el futuro, incluso en un momento en el que nuestra nación estaba dividida, es la que quiero compartir".

Obama viajó a Springfield (Illinois) donde Lincoln ejerció de senador para honrar a un político en el que se arropó desde el inicio de su campaña, precisamente en las escaleras del antiguo Capitolio.

Pero recientes publicaciones sobre el 16º presidente (se han escrito unos 14.000 libros en EEUU sobre él) han desvelado un aspecto más complejo del personaje: Lincoln era un hombre de su tiempo y no le gustaban los negros.

Intentó convencer a los afroamericanos de que emigrasen a Panamá o Haití

"Lincoln estaría muy extrañado de ver a Obama en la Casa Blanca", dice el historiador y experto en el tema Henry Louis Gates. "Estaba totalmente en contra de la esclavitud, pero no era un gran fan de los negros. En un discurso de 1858, se pronunció en contra de los matrimonios interraciales, de otorgar el voto a los afroamericanos e incluso de permitirles luchar en el Ejército de la Unión".

De hecho, la proclamación de la emancipación de los esclavos fue ante todo un acto político para preservar la Unión y debilitar al Sur. Antes, Lincoln nunca había sido especialmente abolicionista.

Tampoco creía que negros y blancos pudieran vivir juntos en EEUU. "En agosto de 1862, invitó a cinco afroamericanos a la Casa Blanca para convencerles de que fundaran una nueva nación en Panamá", contaba en las páginas del The New York Times John Stauffer. También "propuso una enmienda constitucional para animar a los negros a emigrar a Liberia o Haití".

Lincoln tomó medidas polémicas durante la guerra, como suspender el hábeas corpus (uno de los dos precedentes históricos antes de las medidas de excepción de Bush), encarcelar a disidentes sudistas y cerrar diarios.

La mitificación de Lincoln (asesinado, el 14 de abril de 1865 por el actor y activista sureño John Wilkes Booth) ocurrió inmediatamente después de su fallecimiento. "Es el cristo estadounidense", dice Gates. "A las 48 horas, se transformó en una figura nacional y todo el mundo se olvidó de que durante su presidencia hubo momentos en que fue muy impopular".

Obama, le doute s'installe

Hors d'Europe durant deux semaines, il ne m'a pas été possible de suivre l'actualité. Toutefois, à mon retour, je suis frappé par les avis négatifs des commentateurs les plus avisés au sujet des mesures économiques du président Barak Hussein Obama (BHO).

Incapable de convaincre un homme compétent de prendre le poste de secrétaire au Commerce, il laisse le Congrès lui dicter sa politique de relance… Bref, ses premières semaines ne se révèlent guère brillantes en dehors de son art consommé pour la mise en scène médiatique.

Dans les colonnes du Financial Times, le journaliste Martin Wolf rappelle au chef de l'Exécutif que le temps est compté et que bientôt il lui sera réclamé des comptes. Un article à méditer.

Has Barack Obama’s presidency 

already failed? 

In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

What is needed? The answer is: focus and ferocity. If Mr Obama does not fix this crisis, all he hopes from his presidency will be lost. If he does, he can reshape the agenda. Hoping for the best is foolish. He should expect the worst and act accordingly.

Yet hoping for the best is what one sees in the stimulus programme and – so far as I can judge from Tuesday’s sketchy announcement by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary – also in the new plans for fixing the banking system. I commented on the former last week. I would merely add that it is extraordinary that a popular new president, confronting a once-in-80-years’ economic crisis, has let Congress shape the outcome.

The banking programme seems to be yet another child of the failed interventions of the past one and a half years: optimistic and indecisive. If this “progeny of the troubled asset relief programme” fails, Mr Obama’s credibility will be ruined. Now is the time for action that seems close to certain to resolve the problem; this, however, does not seem to be it.

All along two contrasting views have been held on what ails the financial system. The first is that this is essentially a panic. The second is that this is a problem of insolvency.

Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell. The solution, many suggest, is for governments to make a market, buy assets or insure banks against losses. This was the rationale for the original Tarp and the “super-SIV (special investment vehicle)” proposed by Henry (Hank) Paulson, the previous Treasury secretary, in 2007.

Under the second view, a sizeable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities. The International Monetary Fund argues that potential losses on US-originated credit assets alone are now $2,200bn (€1,700bn, £1,500bn), up from $1,400bn just last October. This is almost identical to the latest estimates from Goldman Sachs. In recent comments to the Financial Times, Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor and the Stern School of New York University estimates peak losses on US-generated assets at $3,600bn. Fortunately for the US, half of these losses will fall abroad. But, the rest of the world will strike back: as the world economy implodes, huge losses abroad – on sovereign, housing and corporate debt – will surely fall on US institutions, with dire effects.

Personally, I have little doubt that the second view is correct and, as the world economy deteriorates, will become ever more so. But this is not the heart of the matter. That is whether, in the presence of such uncertainty, it can be right to base policy on hoping for the best. The answer is clear: rational policymakers must assume the worst. If this proved pessimistic, they would end up with an over-capitalised financial system. If the optimistic choice turned out to be wrong, they would have zombie banks and a discredited government. This choice is surely a “no brainer”.

The new plan seems to make sense if and only if the principal problem is illiquidity. Offering guarantees and buying some portion of the toxic assets, while limiting new capital injections to less than the $350bn left in the Tarp, cannot deal with the insolvency problem identified by informed observers. Indeed, any toxic asset purchase or guarantee programme must be an ineffective, inefficient and inequitable way to rescue inadequately capitalised financial institutions: ineffective, because the government must buy vast amounts of doubtful assets at excessive prices or provide over-generous guarantees, to render insolvent banks solvent; inefficient, because big capital injections or conversion of debt into equity are better ways to recapitalise banks; and inequitable, because big subsidies would go to failed institutions and private buyers of bad assets.

Why then is the administration making what appears to be a blunder? It may be that it is hoping for the best. But it also seems it has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress. Yet why does a new administration, confronting a huge crisis, not try to change the terms of debate? This timidity is depressing. Trying to make up for this mistake by imposing pettifogging conditions on assisted institutions is more likely to compound the error than to reduce it.

Assume that the problem is insolvency and the modest market value of US commercial banks (about $400bn) derives from government support (see charts). Assume, too, that it is impossible to raise large amounts of private capital today. Then there has to be recapitalisation in one of the two ways indicated above. Both have disadvantages: government recapitalisation is a bail-out of creditors and involves temporary state administration; debt-for-equity swaps would damage bond markets, insurance companies and pension funds. But the choice is inescapable.

If Mr Geithner or Lawrence Summers, head of the national economic council, were advising the US as a foreign country, they would point this out, brutally. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director, said the same thing, very gently, in Malaysia last Saturday.

The correct advice remains the one the US gave the Japanese and others during the 1990s: admit reality, restructure banks and, above all, slay zombie institutions at once. It is an important, but secondary, question whether the right answer is to create new “good banks”, leaving old bad banks to perish, as my colleague, Willem Buiter, recommends, or new “bad banks”, leaving cleansed old banks to survive. I also am inclined to the former, because the culture of the old banks seems so toxic.

By asking the wrong question, Mr Obama is taking a huge gamble. He should have resolved to cleanse these Augean banking stables. He needs to rethink, if it is not already too late.

Journaliste ignorant

Dans ce savoureux extrait, un journaliste de télévision remet à sa place un vociférant animateur radio. Ce dernier, un rabique soutien de George W. Bush et un adversaire acharné de Barack Obama, attaque le candidat démocrate en l'accusant de « munichois » parce qu'il envisage de parler aux ennemis de l'Amérique, comme par exemple le Hamas.

Durant près de dix minutes, le journaliste demande à l'animateur ce que Chamberlain a donc fait à Munich pour mériter le nouveau qualificatif de de « munichois », un mot dont l'animateur radio se sert à longueur de journée pour attaquer Obama.

Après un long dialogue de sourds, l'animateur finira par avouer… qu'il ne s'est pas ce qu'il s'est passé à Munich en 1938.

Le journaliste lui clouera le bec en lui rappelant que Chamberlain avait été critiqué, non pas avoir rencontré et parlé avec Hitler, mais pour les concessions faites au Führer du Reich allemand sur le sort de la Tchécoslovaquie.

Le journaliste conclura en disant à l'animateur :

— A l'avenir, avant d'utiliser une référence historique, prenez la peine de vous renseigner !

Et si les journalistes français en prenaient de la graine ?

Les arguments contre Obama

Barak Obama, est-il l'homme qu'il prétend être ?

Il est possible de connaître dès à présent quels arguments qui seront utilisés lors de la prochaine campagne électorale contre le candidat à la candidature démocrate. Certes, on ne les entend pas beaucoup car personne dans le camp républicain ne veut brûler ses cartouches, mais on peut supposer que les argumentaires sont fin prêts.

Pour avoir une idée de ces arguments, il est utile de lire le réquisitoire que vient de mettre en ligne l'éditorialiste vedette de quotidien numérique Asia Times on line. Répondant au pseudonyme de « Spengler », il argumente que l'on peut savoir qui est vraiement Barak Obama en étudiant les deux femmes de sa vie : sa mère l'anthropologiste Ann Dunham (décédée en 1995) et son épouse Michelle Obama.

Selon l'éditorialiste, les deux femmes se caractérisent chacune par une forme différente de détestation de l'Amérique. La première, aurait été une militante d'extrême-gauche qui a épousé successivement deux de ses sujets d'études et la seconde, un exemple typique de cette génération d'Afro-Américains motivés par un profond ressentiment racial (voir cette vidéo).

Ces arguments sont-ils vrais ? il est trop tôt pour se prononcer, mais il ne fait aucun doute qu'ils vont être utilisés à fond si jamais Barak Obama remporte la course à la candidature démocrate.

Voici quelques extraits de la tribune de Spengler dont je recommande la lecture.

"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America.

Michelle Obama, une femme aigrie ?

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Ann Dunham photographiée avec ses parents.

"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.

Ann Dunham photographiée avec son époux indonésien Lolo Soetoro
et leur fille Maya. Barak Obama est assis à droite.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

Merci au bloggeur Andrew Cusak qui m'a mis sur la piste de cet article.