Saturday, February 12, 2011

Obama Performs For the American People, and Illegals, but works for Wall St. Donors!

THE CON JOB THAT IS BARACK OBAMA!



WSWS.org get on their free no ads E-NEWS!

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The media and Obama: Image and reality

28 December 2010

For the past two weeks the US media has been pumping out admiring commentaries on the “comeback” of Barack Obama. As if on signal, the man widely portrayed before and immediately after the November midterm elections as presiding over a failing presidency is being depicted as the protagonist of a political tour de force that has turned defeat at the polls into a triumph of reform legislation.

The key to this remarkable turnabout, according to the media narrative, is Obama’s turn to bipartisan collaboration with the Republicans, who will control the House of Representatives and have a larger presence in the Senate in the incoming 112th Congress. The stroke of genius that set the stage for ensuing legislative victories in the outgoing “lame duck” Congress was Obama’s announcement December 6 of a deal with the Republican leadership in the Senate to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.

Many commentaries go even further, equating the measures enacted by Obama and the Democratic-led 111th Congress—fiscal stimulus, overhaul of health care, financial regulatory reform, repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell” in the military—with the major social reforms enacted under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

All of this media mythmaking is ludicrously at odds with reality. Ignored is the fact that Obama has embraced a whole series of measures that he himself previously denounced as boondoggles to big business and the rich, including health care “reform” that excludes a public option and the extension of tax cuts to the top 2 percent of American earners.

The actual content of Obama’s supposedly newfound bipartisanship—in reality, Obama has sought from the day of his election to rehabilitate the Republican Party—is his wholesale capitulation to the demand of the ruling class for even bigger cuts in its taxes.

The historical analogies to Roosevelt and Johnson are absurd. All of Obama’s “reform” measures are, in fact, aimed at rolling back the social reforms passed in the 1930s and 1960s. His health care overhaul, for example, will slash health coverage for tens of millions of working people and reduce Medicare spending by $500 billion. It will boost the profits of the insurance companies by compelling people to purchase insurance on the private market.

Roosevelt, under the pressure of an explosive growth of working class struggles, sought to save the discredited capitalist system by instituting massive public works programs that hired hundreds of thousands of workers. He won the hatred of large sections of his own class by establishing government-owned and run enterprises such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electrical power to large sections of the South and Appalachia.

Obama and the Democratic leadership have adamantly rejected any government hiring programs and insisted on the primacy of the “free market.”

The financial regulatory reforms that Roosevelt instituted have since been dismantled, and nothing in Obama’s overhaul restores them, leaving the big banks free to continue their speculative activities.

One fact says a great deal about the reality of Obama’s policies: the reduction in the estate tax included in his tax-cut deal with the Republicans brings the tax on inherited wealth to its lowest level since 1931, prior to Roosevelt’s coming to power. Roosevelt during World War II pushed for the tax rate on the highest income tax bracket to be raised to 91 percent and imposed a cap on executive salaries.

Obama’s measures will provide an estimated $70 billion a year in tax breaks for the rich and hand over an additional $23 billion in estate tax cuts to 6,600 families.

The shift on Obama exemplifies the ceaseless efforts of the corporate-owned and controlled media to artificially create political realities by means of image making. Obama’s election was largely the result of a media marketing operation, backed and financed by sections of the ruling class that saw the need for a change in image and personnel after the foreign policy disasters of the Bush years and in the face of public hatred for Bush and the Republicans.

Now, the media is seeking to repackage and repair the badly discredited Obama administration. Why? Because it is dutifully doing the bidding of the financial aristocracy.

Obama is presently being built up because he has made clear that his cave-in on tax cuts for the rich is only the prelude to a further shift to the right on social policy. Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, a multimillionaire Chicago real estate investor who is described as Obama’s liaison to business, said Obama would focus in the immediate future on reining in the deficit and improving his relationship with American business.

The administration has already called for a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending and federal employee pay and backed proposals for cuts in Social Security benefits, increased taxes on consumption, and a broad “reform” of the tax system that will sharply reduce income taxes for the rich as well as corporate taxes.

The content of Obama’s so-called rebound is an accelerated attack on ever-broader sections of the working class.

Not accidentally, the media has in recent days largely dropped the Tea Party movement. Built up by the media in the pre-election period as a mass movement on the right reflecting popular angst over budget deficits and coercive government interference in the market, the Tea Party was used to shift Obama and the Democrats further to the right and engineer the Republican victory in November.

For the present at least, with that mission having been accomplished and Obama making all of the right moves, the Tea Party is being pushed to the background. It stands ready to be revived by the media when the ruling elite deems it politically expedient to do so.

Barry Grey

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ONE OF OBAMA’S GREATEST SUCCESSES FOR HIS WALL ST. BANKSTER PAYMASTERS IS MAKING SURE THERE WOULD BE NO REAL BANKSTER REFORM! ERGO FROM HIS FIRST DAY OBAMA HAD BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTER WELFARE, TIM GEITHNER ON BOARD, AND TWO OF THE BANKERS’ BIGGEST SLUTS, BARNEY FRANK AND CHRIS DODD HAMMERING OUT THE NO REAL REGULATION!

FROM THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, RIGHT IN THE FACE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:



“I’m not here to punish banks” BARACK OBAMA



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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”



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FROM CREOLE FOLKS



Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post

The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything whenBarrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.

(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.



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Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses



BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY





Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

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Next year, I hope to do a better job of annoying ideologues; the people who got rich from doing things that created our financial problems, but are still in power; and Wall Street types who whine about how unfair it is to criticize their eight- and nine-digit pay packages from institutions that wouldn't be alive today were it not for taxpayer support.





Looking back at 2010, writing more about financial 'reform' would have been wise

By Allan Sloan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, December 28, 2010; 12:00 AM

Ihave performed a painful annual ritual ever since I began writing a column about 20 years ago: rereading my work for the year and telling you, my audience, about the things I got wrong and the things I wish I had done differently.

This past year, I wish I'd written more about financial reform - or as I call it, financial "reform." I use the quotation marks because I don't think the system is close to being reformed.

I suspected all along that there would be more talk than action - that's how things were after the Enron and WorldCom scandals and how they always seem to be - but I'm shocked by how little we've gotten right.

We didn't fix the major problems that led to the financial meltdown that produced the "Great Recession," obliterating millions of jobs and dreams. We've still got undercapitalized financial companies that are too big and too interconnected to be allowed to fail; trillions of dollars in asset-backed securities that no one except a handful of experts with access to ultra-expensive databases can begin to analyze, and an incentive system that gives Wall Street types huge incentives to take risks with shareholder and taxpayer money.

I wished I'd been louder and more shrill about breaking up these institutions, establishing publicly available real-time databases for asset-backed securities, and giving shareholders and the government five-year clawbacks for compensation paid to top executives and board members if a company fails or needs a bailout. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, but I'd feel better.

My only hope for real change is the consumer-protection operation run by Harvard bankruptcy professor Elizabeth Warren. I've stayed away from that topic because so much has been written about it, and I think so highly of Warren, whom I've known for many years, that I'm not sure I can summon up the requisite skepticism about her operation.

If she can, in fact, create and require institutions to use a brief disclosure statement, in readable type, that a high school graduate can understand in 15 minutes, she'll be doing God's work. She'll also be doing Mammon's, because we ultimately won't have capitalism in this country if we don't have fairness.

I've been unusually nice to the Federal Reserve this year, a contrast to my usual Fed-bashing and Fed-sniping. For much of my career, I've focused on the Fed's omissions and mistakes while most of my competitors kissed up to Alan Greenspan. Now, with the move in Washington to micromanage and restrain the Fed, I realized by rereading this year's columns that I've changed sides.

We need to have at least one Washington institution that can act quickly and decisively; God knows the Treasury, Congress and White House don't seem capable of it. Let's not screw up the Fed with political-correctness requirements. During Greenspan's now-not-so-glorious days as chairman, those requirements came from the left. Now, they come primarily from the ultra-right.

Finally, there's Social Security, a subject about which I've written a lot over the years, and I expect to write a lot more.

This year, I've managed to annoy almost everyone interested in the topic because I don't have a fixed ideological position. I think the Social Security trust fund has no economic value, but we should gradually monetize its $2.6 trillion in bonds to buy time while we change its benefit formula and increase its revenue.

I also think that switching to private accounts is nuts, because Social Security is an intergenerational transfer program designed to protect vulnerable old people, the disabled and orphans. It is not an investment program.

Finally, I've written that the program isn't a Ponzi scheme, because Ponzi promoters deceive you, while Social Security tells you everything you need to know about itself and is run by high-grade, honorable people.

Next year, I hope to do a better job of annoying ideologues; the people who got rich from doing things that created our financial problems, but are still in power; and Wall Street types who whine about how unfair it is to criticize their eight- and nine-digit pay packages from institutions that wouldn't be alive today were it not for taxpayer support.

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