'Arab Spring is a scapegoat for US economic failure'

30 Sep, 2011 02:58 / Updated 13 years ago

President Barack Obama, who has always hailed the Arab uprisings as a victory for democracy, now says they have contributed to sloppy economic recovery in the US.

The US leader found someone to saddle with the blame for the country’s struggling economy. He claims the Arab world's uprisings are shaking Westerneconomic foundations because of hiked oil prices.But Michael Jones, an editor of Culture Wars magazine, explained to RT the sudden change in rhetoric.“He needs to find a scapegoat for the bad economic situation in the US,” he said. “The issue is un-repayable debt. The country simply cannot pay back this debt. It is the same issue throughout the entire world. The world is in a debt that it can’t pay back. And so the question is: What are we going to do about that, who are we going to blame, and what measures are we going to take?”“The debt is largely a result of the wars in the Middle East,” he went on. “So, in order to get to the heart of the matter, you have to repudiate America’s foreign policy since 9/11. And Obama apparently does not want to do that.”But after American and European banks trading bad debts for several years, Jones said, the people now simply won’t believe the story.“I don’t think the people will buy it," he said. "I think they will see through what he said as just an attempt to find a scapegoat, which is now the Islamicworld, which he conflates with terrorism and the threats to the US – and divert people’s attention from the real problem.”Jones is convinced that whenever  capitalism overburdens the economy with un-repayable debt, the first thing the government tries to do is to cut wages.“And this invariably only speeds up the intensity of the debt spiral,” he said. “What Obama needs to do is to put the money into real economy and break free of the bankers."

Ari Rutenberg from the TheDailyBanter political blog believed that President Obama is playing to the Wall Street crowd for whom these issues are very large."It seems to me it is going to be a new mean that his advisers came up to help him stand a little taller in the Wall Street’s eyes.," he told RT/ "I cant help but think they had some pressure from someone else, from outside of the White House to discuss these issues."