The King is dead!

This week marks the final days of 8 years under President Obama and I want to take this moment to look back over where we have been so we can see where we are going.
8 years ago we were seeing Liberals decry how terrible the economy was under Bush the Younger. And though it wasn’t terrible it certainly was lackluster. No real growth, and under Bush there was the ending of the dot-com bubble, the economic malaise that resulted from 9/11, and during Bush’s Presidency a housing bubble was inflated to support the economy. The nature of the housing bubble caused people to pull forward demand by cashing out on their homes. This necessitated the collapse of the bubble which started under Bush and continued into Obama’s term. From the time that Obama took office the markets were shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month starting in January of 2008 and ending around January of 2010. This was a continuation of the bubble popping, of course, but there can be no doubt that calling for a takeover of the insurance and medical industries played a large part in businesses looking to minimize their risks and losses.
In the past eight years we’ve seen a tremendous number of people leave the labor force. This removal from the labor force is what has enabled the BLS to claim that unemployment is down. See Shadowstats.com for more informative data on actual unemployment. The common defense of this is that it is baby boomers that are retiring, but BLS numbers have been consistent in showing that it is the boomer generation that has been gaining employment, and the other generations have lost. We have seen the labor force participation rate drop from 66.1% to 62.7%. This is the lowest it has been since 1977.  The population rose 22 million but jobs only increased by 7 million. Looking more deeply we see that employment rates among blacks have fallen under Obama as well. Far from Obama paying all their bills, as one supporter gushed, blacks as a people group have lost out although their numbers have largely recovered. Having started out at a participation rate of 57.6% they are not at 57.1%, after having dropped to 51.4%. Its all of the missed time in the middle that leads to lower household wealth, and lowered lifetime earnings potential.
The past eight years has treated us to constant wars, a sharp increase in the number of drone killings, and one of the worst administrations when it comes to the treatment of whistle blowers. Without these people we would not know a great many things about what our government is engaged in. Snowden confirmed for us the spying that has been going on, and Manning exposed the torture we engage in as well as some of the behavior of our troops overseas. One is in jail, the other is stuck in Russia because the US cancelled his passport, but these are far from the only ones who have attempted to shine light on the darkness and come under attack of this administration.
Here at home we have seen unprecedented numbers of mass shootings even tho overall murder is down significantly from the 80s. One would never know this if one only paid attention to the media, and they are another thing that has changed tremendously in the past decade or two. But it is the election of Obama started the end for the mainstream media. From Chris Matthew’s tingling leg on forward the media has been so biased and upheld the administration so much that it has lost its creditability in the eyes of the public. And this is the only currency they have. Without that trust, they have nothing, and we will see them to continue their slide into total irrelevance in the coming decade.
We have also been witness to the rise of the Social Justice Warrior, as they call themselves. SJWs for short. These are people who will champion every last choice a person could make, as long as it deviates from long standing cultural norms. Particularly sexual confusion and with bonus points if it insults Christianity. In turn SJWs enabled the rise of the snowflakes. The trigglypuffs. The people so offended by, well, everything, that they need their own “safe space” and care packages like coloring books, candy and dolls. There are even calls to give blacks and other minorities their own designated safe space. A full circle from segregation, to desegregation, to calls by these minorities to segregate themselves by removing any whites from their presence. And for those who have somehow remained blissfully unaware of this, I am not exaggerating. This is real.
We have seen “trans-racial” people come to light. Whites posing and living as blacks to participate in their victimhood and therefore making themselves more virtuous in the eyes of the SJWs. We have seen the end of the definition of marriage with homosexual marriage being made the law of the land. There was debate as to what would come next. Much of the talk was that polygamy would then be pushed for next. It seems the logical next step after all but instead we are seeing calls to decriminalize and normalize pedophilia. This goes beyond fringe groups that have existed for some decades, but to now more mainstream calls proving that social mores that have protected the people are fast disappearing.
Next week I will write about what could be expected under Trump, but until then, keep an eye out for what Obama does in his last days. He has been antagonizing Russia which Putin is wisely ignoring. Thank God! And we often see outgoing Presidents grant pardons and commutations on their way out the door, and Obama has already given out more commutations than any other President.