The country is in such rough shape that even academics are starting to notice.
One of the president’s Harvard law professors, Roberto Unger, took to the airwaves, via You Tube, to urge the defeat of his former pupil, albeit because he does not see his one-time charge as “progressive” enough. “President Obama must be defeated in the coming election,” Unger said in a video posted on May 22. “He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.”
Actually, some of the items in his bill of particulars sound like Republican sound bytes:
- “His policy is financial confidence and food stamps.”
- “He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices.”
- “He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money.”
- “He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice.”
- “He has reduced justice to charity.”
- “He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to health care in the mistaken belief that he would be spared a fight.”
- “He has evoked a politics of handholding, but no one changes the world without a struggle.”
Nevertheless, Unger is hardly a Constitutionalist or a free marketer. “Our term paper was to propose a means by which to reform the international orgs so that they actually can meet their goals to reduce poverty,” one of his students reported on Rate My Professors. com in his sole rating, although a hugely laudatory one. This tidbit indicates that Unger is in the camp, and by all accounts the majority, of law school professors admiring of international law at the expense of the U. S. Constitution.
Also on May 22, 2012, a University of Maryland economist threw cold water, metaphorically speaking on the White House’s rosy economic scenarios. “The facts are in the three years since Mr. Obama became president the trade deficit is up 40 percent, J.P. Morgan and other big banks are still running their Manhattan casinos, and health care costs keep rocketing” Peter Morici wrote in a blog posted on Fox News. “It’s a lousy economy full of injustice, and Mr. Obama can’t easily claim to have made things better.” Morici has worked in both the Clinton and Carter Administrations so his conclusions are hardly those of a GOP partisan.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
