Anthony Facey
Laura SamalEnglish 101 – 05
May 2, 2014
Dear Monsieur de Tocqueville,
In 2008, we elected a new President and it seems that all people do is blame and complain about him, with “Obama this, Obama that.” The president has become the idol for blame to the American citizens. This blame can be seen all over the media, blaming him for the economy crisis, Obama care, and supposedly not passing laws that could better the United States. Now, Obama Care was a law created by the president for affordable health care. It was made to offer more benefit rights to the lower and middle class citizens.
The American people have had this thought in their heads throughout his entire presidency that Obama was the cause of the economic crisis. This is actually extremely untrue, but it seems like the “people” of America love to use the leader as a scapegoat in a way. Obama came after President Bush and even then, people blamed him for something he could not help. Obama was simply left with a mess and it takes time to fix. I did some research and what I found helps my argument towards the people scapegoating the president. During President Bush’s term, there were a few big things that ended up leading to the economy crashing, which in the end began the “Great Recession.” The first thing that happened was that the government under his term kept the interest rates too low for too long. Keeping the rates low led to excessive credit and speculative asset bubbles in the housing market. In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt, another president of the United States, suspended mark to market accounting. Unfortunately, the George Bush administration brought it back in 2007. Mark to market accounting is an accounting device that requires financial institutions to adjust their balance sheets and capital accounts whenever the value of an asset they own increases or decreases. What I learned is that the problem is it requires banks to show paper losses for assets they may have no plans to sell. Steve Forbes wrote in 2009, “Of the more than $700 billion that financial institutions have written off, almost all of it has been book write-downs, not actual cash losses.” The words above may have no meaning to you whatsoever, but in all simplicity, if the people of America would do their research they could find that this crisis happened long before Obama took office. It is no simple project, but the President is expected to clean up the entire country, even in a trillion dollar debt. You once said something along the lines of, if we the people do not trust their leader it will cause a corruption of leadership. I believe this to be true and this scapegoating of the leader is a prime example.
News sources, such as FOX, MSNBC, and CNN have a big role in showing the bad parts of Obama’s leadership by showing all the things they think he is doing wrong, but never anything he is doing right. In your text, Democracy in America it states, “The practice of Americas leads their minds to other habits, to fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving, without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend.” Many of these news sources, such as Fox, are known for their bias opinions towards Obama. Even still, the people listen to these “Anti-Obama” media sources and make judgmental criticisms based on what they have heard. The coming of the new age has brought along the age of Automobiles. Automobiles are machines that use oil to help them accomplish things such as movement for long distances. In this modern day society the American people rely heavily on the use of automobiles. So the need for oil is greater throughout the country making the loss of oil There was a big oil spill a few years