Crikey! I can’t believe it’s been so long since I blogged. I could do a roundup of the past 2 months but it was mostly work, so I’ll skip that. I watched a replay of the inauguration today and I think my last post was about Barack Obama, so I’ll talk about that I think.
He really knows how to give a good speech and he didn’t disappoint. It’s going to be really interesting now to see it all pans out for him. I suspect he’s going to make some unpopular decisions over the coming months – well, unpopular to some people anyway. He really doesn’t have a choice. The USA economy is going to be in a slump for a while and it’s going to take some creative policy making to turn that around.
Iraq will be one of the contentious issues, but I do believe that the USA should have pulled out of there a long time ago. When Sadam’s regime was ousted the USA were heroes in Iraq. They were the white knights who came to the rescue of the Iraqi people. By staying over there for so long though, they became an ‘occupying force’ which has caused resentment from many of the Iraqis who originally supported the foreign troops.
Barack Obama mentioned two things in his speech that, at least to me, suggested that he isn’t afraid to be honest about some of the issues that have caused so many problems in the USA and the rest of the world. The first was ‘greed and irresponsibility on the part of some’. He is most likely referring to the company CEOs and directors that have taken obscene payments and bonuses, and the banks and other organisations that handed out billions of dollars in loans to people who were obviously unable to service those loans. It seems that when the going gets tough and the purse strings need to be pulled tight, the people who are siphoning the most money away are the last to get with the program.
The second statement that struck a chord was ‘The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…’. Far too often, governments develop policies and plans and then fail to monitor or assess those plans until it’s too late. It’s just common sense and yet so many government programs fail dismally or blow out to many times their original cost.
Obviously the policies of the USA government aren’t going to affect me – well, not directly at least. I do feel a sense of relief though that the new president is young and full of hope and optimism for the coming years, whilst not trying to kid anyone that it will be a tough road over the next few years.