Flim-Flam Obama Man: The “New Democrat[ic]” President's Wall Street Loyalties Get Clearer Every Day

Flim-Flam Obama Man: The “New Democrat[ic]” President's Wall Street Loyalties Get Clearer Every Day by Paul Street on ZNet

Obama briefly expresses calculated outrage against "excessive" executive bonuses at AIG. He makes carefully orchestrated visits expressing concern about poverty and job-loss to hard-hit places like Pomona, California and Elkhart, Indiana. But it's all a public relations game. It's about pricking the boil of citizen fury to more effectively screw the citizenry over. The White House says mean things about capitalist parasites and then proceeds to give the financial overlords yet more of the public treasure - all in the name of restoring the "free enterprise" system.



The real point is to provide faux-populist cover for Obama's corporate, Wall Street agenda. Meanwhile the "mainstream" (corporate) media continues to ignore the new administration's related commitment to the amazingly unmentionable 1$ trillion-a-year Pentagon budget, a giant subsidy to high-tech industry that pays for more than 760 bases across more than 130 nations and accounts for nearly half the military spending on earth - all in the name of "defense." The leading Wall Street investment firm and bailout recipient Morgan Stanley reported one day after Obama's election victory that Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend." [11]



At the same time, Obama's tepid and undersized stimulus plan is deceptively described as "massive" in much of the business press. It is dysfunctionally over-loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and too short on labor-intensive projects to put people to work right away. He says nothing about the overdue labor law reform he campaigned on, the Employee Free Choice Act. He speaks in support of the anti-union, teacher-bashing, and test-based corporate education agenda, advocating teacher "merit pay" and charter schools. He makes a public visit (in support of his stimulus bill) to the headquarters of Caterpillar, a provider of bulldozers for illegal Israeli settlements. Caterpillar was also the first large U.S. manufacturer in decades to break a major strike with scabs.