Flim-Flam Obama Man

The “New Democrat[ic]” President's Wall Street Loyalties Get Clearer Every Day

Many on what passes for a left in the United States have been led to believe that Barack Obama is a "Mr. Smith-goes- to-Washington" character eager and ready to struggle against entrenched corporate and financial interests. A considerable number of so-called "left liberals" make curious bedfellows with right-wing noisemakers (including dangerous reactionary nut-jobs like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Bernard Goldberg) in fantasizing that a leftist has taken up residence in the White House. But, as Harper's Magazine president John R. MacArthur notes, this "is an absurd reading of Obama," who MacArthur rightly describes as "a moderate with far too much respect for the global financial class" and as "surely the unleft, unradical, president." [1]

Look, for example, at the new administration's recently leased "financial stabilization" program. Consistent with the president's own recent description of himself as a "New [that is corporate] Democrat" [2], Obama will spend untold trillions of dollars on further taxpayer handouts to the giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign [3]. The in-fact "deeply conservative" [4] Obama is too attached to those firms and their so-called "free market" ideology to undertake the elementary bank nationalizations and public financial restructuring that are obviously required to put the nation's credit system on an at once sound and socially responsible basis. His plan to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries' toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management is (what liberal economist James K. Gailbraith rightly considers) a massive (and deluded) effort to "keep perpetrators afloat" [5]. The unradical liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is understandably "filled with a sense of despair" by Obama's bank rescue format, which "recycles Bush administration policy - specifically the ‘cash for trash' plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulsen"[6]. More

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