S& sent birthday greetings to Barack Obama

Barack Obama celebrated his half century with great festivity. He, however, got presents he didn’t want; the ratings agency S&P downed graded the US debt from AAA or risk proof to AA+. [Will Moody’s and Fitch follow suit?]
AA+ expresses S&P’s opinion that the borrower, in this case the US, will meet its debt obligations. For this ratings agency, which played fast and furious with mortgages triggering the 2008 global recession, believes the recently agreed on deal in the houses of Congress on debt reduction and raising the debt ceiling is too timid.
To put it mildly Obama is livid, claiming the ‘downgrade’ is based on a faulty computer model. Yet S&P’s position questions the Faustian bargain signed into law by the American president that takes the budgetary knife to the ‘fat’ in budget without raising revenues.
In spite of a slight drop in US employment from 9,2 to 9,1 percent, the economic prospects for less than a snail’s pace recovery is shaky. Where are the jobs? Obama & co. saw in consumer spending a way out of the recession. A less than intelligent strategy, for the plain and simple truth that the average US ratepayer is deep in debt, and by encouraging him to take on more debt makes no sense.
Obama and the Republicans sloughed off the task of creating jobs. It was too difficult but the real un and underemployment stats are edging around 20 percent if not higher.
The Republicans are for protecting the plutocrats and mount the barricades when it comes to closing tax holes on the corporations and raising taxes on the rich and the very rich.
The corporations and banks are sitting on a Fort Knox of cash but won’t lend. They are not hiring only downsizing or sending jobs abroad [and here’s a new wrinkle in the face of greed: the use of prison labour that can be had for as little as us$0,20 an hour!].
Looking at Obama rallying Americans makes GuamDiary if he has lost his ‘mojo’ to move crowds. Pale, if not stunned, he recited his usual platitude of ‘we won’t take this lying down’ and ‘we’re telling the world, we’re going to come through the crisis’ on top, as though he was simply talking for talking sake, not truly believing in his own message.
Poll after poll has shown how out of step Congress and the White House are out of step with the mood of Americans who want to go back to work. Jobs is now on the Obama’s lips, but, pray tell, how is he going to perform miracles in putting the country back to work when he has embraced the Republicans’ mantra of cutting back up and down the budget line?
Obama has his own self to blame for his ‘community’ style of bargaining that gives the store away. At this point, since he swept the sins of the Bush administration under the carpet, he has ended up ‘owning’ the blame for a bad economy, the growing impoverishment of the country, the strengthening of a 1984 state of secrecy and spying, and the like.
The 45 president of the US cannot count on a shoo in return to office in 2012, if the elections were held today. Is Obama capable to showing true grit, taming the Republicans, and getting the US back on the right track?