Ari Melber Quotes

Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street.

In his first term, President Barack Obama played a cautious manager navigating the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and cleaning up the messes left by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barack Obama inherited a bankrupt economy, a bankrupt government, and a bankrupt foreign policy.

Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.

I started out in public service in 1998 after the Asian financial crisis of '97.

I think there is a failure in foreign policy. And you have to acknowledge that under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was the architect of that foreign policy. Whether it was malevolent or not, I don't know.

The Icesave matter is complex and it is understandable that the issue has been oversimplified by many. Unfortunately some of the basic facts of the matter have been unilaterally interpreted, and sometimes distorted, giving rise to unjustified criticism of the conduct of the Icelandic authorities.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

Don't worry, America. We survived Jimmy Carter, and we will survive Barack Obama. Only one questions remains... who is the next Ronald Reagan?

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

It's remarkable that the failures of the Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy are not only uniting the Left and Right in Israel but might even be creating some common ground between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something - to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity.

Well, Mr Obama inherited probably the biggest inventory of problems, certainly foreign policy problems, than any American president ever has. I think the entire inventory of problems that he inherited is probably as big overall as any president, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt and maybe, in some cases, worse.

I wrote that President Bush is passing on to President-elect Obama two wars and an economic debacle. I call it a depression. And he is arming Israel against the Palestinians in every way in Gaza.

George W. Bush was a very bad president. The Iraq war was a big mistake. The U.S.A. needed a political change. I hoped Barack Obama could be a good president, but I'm disappointed. He hasn't done well.

If anybody ran a business like that they would be out of business quickly, and Barack Obama's leadership is driving this business, the United States of America, toward a fiscal cliff.

The Tea Party grew out of indignation over the Wall Street bailout - an indignation shared by the vast majority of Americans. But the Tea Party ended up directing its ire at government rather than at big business and Wall Street.

The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.

Obama has been well-received on the world stage, but that doesn't help him operate domestically.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy, things would have been a lot messier without it.

The only reason investors haven't run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.

Most certainly it was a very wrong step to Crush the Private Bank, and set up this Publick Bank in its place

The financial firms—the same ones who were involved in the 2008 meltdown—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And frankly, they own the place.