President Barack Obama:
I read your letter, published on Thursday in The Daily and other student papers, with great interest.
You express concern over the economic prospects of young Americans, and you preside over a country which, according to CIA surveys, suffers from a greater degree of class inequality than many developing African nations and former Soviet satellites. For most Americans born into the lower economic stratum of society, life outside of that stratum will be forever unattainable.
You criticize Wall Street organizations for their “failure to adapt,” precipitating the current financial crisis for which the American worker must foot the bill. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup were among the key Wall Street contributors to the crisis; as you’ll recall, they were also among your largest campaign contributors in 2008.
Goldman Sachs associates provided you with more than $1 million during the run-up to the election, according to records released by the Federal Election Commission and collated by the Center for Responsive Politics. Then, after you assumed office, you appointed former Goldman Sachs Co-Head of Finance Gary Gensler as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman Robert Hormats as Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs. Former Goldman Sachs Vice President Mark Patterson also became your administration’s treasury chief of staff.
Your discomfort with Wall Street’s failure to respond to public needs hasn’t prevented you either from accepting enormous sums of Wall Street money or appointing former Wall Street executives to high positions in your administration.
You emphasize that you are just like us, that you share our concerns about debt and the affordability of college. You are devoted to making certain that we all have a fair opportunity to obtain an education.
Oddly, this hasn’t stopped your administration from supporting regimes that deprive millions of people of education and other basic rights. Last year, your administration sold $60 billion worth of military aircraft to the Saudi Arabian government in what Al-Jazeera reported as the single largest U.S. arms sale in history. The dismal state of human rights under the Saudi monarchy is well-known; in 2010, the U.S. State Department admitted that the Saudi government subjected its citizens to “torture and physical abuse ... arbitrary arrest and incommunicado detention ... [and] restrictions on civil liberties such as freedoms of speech.” Saudi women are subject to a level of officially-sanctioned dehumanization virtually unknown in similarly developed nations.
Though the Saudi state educational system is relatively well-funded, its curricula are packed with stultifying religious dogma and Saudi women are often compelled by government-sanctioned societal conventions to avoid pursuing higher education. Thirty percent of Saudi women are illiterate, according to CIA figures.
Despite the deep concern you evince about the accessibility of education and other human rights, you choose to strengthen autocratic regimes that intellectually as well as physically impoverish millions of people. Then again, the Saudi public won’t be voting in next year’s presidential election.
At home, your administration has overseen an enormous upward migration of wealth and a slashing of social programs, ostensibly to repay the debts created by your Wall Street campaign donors. At present, 50 million Americans cannot afford health insurance, let alone a four-year stint in college. The impoverishment of American workers combined with an absence of socialized medical care results in about 45,000 deaths per year, according to Harvard Medical School research.
And the palliative you offer, in the face of the suffering and inequality facilitated by your administration, is a scheme to improve student loan interest rates. To borrow a phrase from journalist Ulrike Meinhof, I do not wish to insult you, but neither do I wish the public to be insulted by letters like yours that appeared in The Daily.
Zac Smith is a journalism junior.
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cacremin 6 months, 1 week ago
If you think Smith's criticism have any thing whatsoever to do with the views on Fox News I find it hard to believe you read past the title.
Overall this piece had valid criticisms of the administration's priorities, but lacked focus.
Nolan_Kraszkiewicz 6 months, 1 week ago
This made for a great laugh; I love that the Op-Ed section of the OU Daily has now just become satirical work of fallacious thought and an excellent parody of Fox News. This student paper has gone down the crapper.
collegegirl0889 6 months, 1 week ago
Have you been reading this section lately? Even this article appears to be recommending "socialized medical care". That is about as far from Fox News as it gets... Also, every other politically related article I've read in the Daily recently has been either for Obama or against Obama because he hasn't been liberal enough. I don't think I've ever heard that sort of argument from a Republican, so again, not even close to Fox News. It would be lovely if the Daily would express both sides of the political spectrum rather than varying degrees of one. It is an embarrassment to our school that our journalism cannot be a little more objective- if not in what they write then at least in the articles they publish.
This is the first article I've seen in the Daily this semester that hasn't completely insulted everything Republicans believe in. It's a step, but perhaps next they could actually include an article from a Republican perspective, rather than just one from a person (who seems to hold some pretty obvious Democratic beliefs) who sees through some of Obama's BS.