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Robert Scheer: Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

Speech yields little to suggest he would chart a much-needed new course in a second term

By Robert Scheer | @Robert_Scheer | Published on 01.27.2012

I’ll admit it: Listening to President Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to President Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

When Obama declared Tuesday evening that “no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,” wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender? Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no U.S. taxes in the past three years.

It was also a bit bizarre for Obama to celebrate Steve Jobs as a model entrepreneur when the manufacturing jobs that the late Apple CEO created are in the same China that elsewhere in his speech the president sought to scapegoat for America’s problems. Apple, in its latest report on the subject, takes pride in attempting to limit the company’s overseas suppliers to a maximum workweek of 60 hours for their horribly exploited employees. Isn’t it weird to be chauvinistically baiting China when that country carries much of our debt?

I’m also getting tired of the exhortations to improve the nation’s schools — certainly a worthy endeavor — but this economic crisis is the result not of high school dropouts, as Obama suggested, but rather the corruption of the best and brightest graduates of our elite academies. As Obama knows well from his own trajectory in the meritocracy, which took him from one of the most privileged schools in otherwise educationally depressed Hawaii to Harvard Law, the folks who concocted the mathematical formulas and wrote the laws justifying fraudulent collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps were his overachieving professors and classmates.

If he doesn’t know that, he should check out the record of Lawrence Summers, the man he picked to guide his economic program and who had been rewarded with the presidency of Harvard after having engineered Clinton’s deregulatory deal with Wall Street.

That is the real legacy of the Clinton years, and it is no surprise that GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich has been campaigning on his rightful share of it. The international trade agreements that exported good U.S. jobs, the radical financial deregulation that unleashed Wall Street greed and the free market zealotry of then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was reappointed by Clinton, were all part of a deal Clinton made with Gingrich, House speaker at that time.

As Gingrich put it in the first Republican debate in South Carolina, “As speaker ... working with President Bill Clinton, we passed a very Reagan-like program: less regulation, lower taxes.” Even the 15 percent tax break that Mitt Romney exploited for his carryover private equity income was a result of the unholy Clinton-Gingrich alliance. Both principals of that alliance were pimps for the financial industry, and that includes Freddie Mac, the for-profit stock-traded housing agency that Clinton coddled while it stoked the Ponzi scheme in housing and that rewarded the former speaker with $1.6 million to $1.8 million in consulting fees.

There were, finally, some bold words in Obama’s speech about helping beleaguered homeowners, but they ring hollow given this administration’s efforts to broker a sweetheart deal between the leading banks and the state attorneys general that would see the banks fined only a pittance for their responsibility in the mortgage meltdown. Obama could have had success demanding mortgage relief if he had made that a condition for bailing out the banks. Now the banksters know he’s firing blanks, and they’re placing their bets on their more reliable Republican allies to prevent any significant demand for helping homeowners with their underwater mortgages.

Of course, Romney, Obama’s most likely opponent in the general election, will never challenge the Wall Street hold on Washington, since he is the personification of the vulture capitalism that is the true cause of America’s decline. Obama should shine in comparison with his Republican challenger, but there is little in his State of the Union speech to suggest he will chart a much-needed new course in his second term.

— TruthDig.com editor in chief Robert Scheer‘s new book is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Click here for more information. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow him on Twitter: @Robert_Scheer.

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» AN50 on 01.27.12 @ 05:41 PM

Oh, where to begin? First I agree with you Robert, the president is full of hot air, but so were his predecessors. Look, the reason Clinton and BO like these banking deregulations (oddly blamed on the republicans) is that they allow the wealthy to get rich merely transferring wealth rather than making it. After all Robby isn’t that what your socialist liberal philosophy is all about, wealth transfer? You can hardly blame them for that, it’s the culture we have cultivated in this country after we decided that working for a living was too hard and dirty.

The reason we go around in circles on this crap is that no one seems to give a rip about where real wealth comes from as long as we personally get our share. The right will line up right behind the left when it comes to transferring wealth.

I have exhausted this analogy but it fits the model pretty damned well. The wealth of an economy is like a pie. Regardless of who has what parts of the pie or who holds the knife, you are only doing three things with that pie, adding more, eating it or moving it around. The bakers or producers of new pie are a small group really and actually the eaters are few as well. Most economic activity consists of moving pie, which is why Keynesians mistakenly think pie movement makes wealth. Scrambling the pie gives the appearance of growth but it isn’t.

Now what we have in this country is a damned big pie. In fact way bigger than any other country’s pie even though most other countries have more people per pie. So it’s hard for us to see over this vast pie that it is being eaten faster than it is being replaced and we are killing off the bakers at an alarming rate. Oh, we continue to mistake knife holders and pie movers for bakers but they are not making any more pie. To make matters worse we are borrowing way more pie than we bake to make up for that which we eat. Hmmmm, anyone getting hungry yet?

So we teach people in Harvard to move pie and eat pie but not make pie. We punish the bakers and force them to bake pie else where and then borrow it back because we don’t make enough. Then we get all hot and bothered because we don’t like who is getting what pie and who is holding the damned knife but no one is concerned at all about the plight of the bakers. And because it is a large pie we don’t see it getting smaller and smaller being replaced by borrowed pie more and more. In fact we have more borrowed pie now than we have of our own and when those who lent that pie want it back we are in big trouble.

Hope that clears it up for you Roberto. Dump BO and let’s get a republican in there who has experience making pie, not holding a knife or a spatula, but actually baking. BTW – that eliminates all the GOP contenders, so good luck with that one.