As Always, Paul Street Nails Down Obama

as a neoliberal sellout who couldn't care less about traditional Democratic Party values:

When Obama’s center-right corporate-imperial presidency yielded the predictable consequence of demobilizing the Democratic Party’s “progressive base” in the mid-term elections and thereby enabling an “historic” right wing sweep in Congress, the president quickly moved yet further to the business-friendly right like a hungry shark to a bleeding seal. Claiming (falsely) that “the American people had spoken” in the Republicans’ Tea Party-fueled electoral triumph of November 2010, Obama agreed to sustain George W. Bush’s deficit-fueling tax cuts for the rich beyond their sunset date of 2010. Accepting the false business and Republican claim that “overpaid” public sector workers were a leading force behind rising government deficits and economic stagnation, Obama froze federal worker salaries and benefits. He published an Op-Ed in the plutocratic editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal – an essay that praised “free market capitalism” as “the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known” and said that government places “unreasonable burdens on business” that have a “chilling effect on growth and jobs.” (The tone of his editorial suggested that it wasn’t neoliberal deregulation that sparked the financial collapse, but all those pesky government rules that crush growth).Obama signed an executive order calling for a government-wide review of regulations to remove or revise those that supposedly inhibited business. He appointed JPMorgan Chase’s William Daley – a leading agent of the corporate-globalist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) under Bill Clinton – as his chief of staff. He put Goldman Sachs’ Gene Sperling (another legendary neoliberal) at the head of the National Economic Council. He tapped General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to head his new “President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness” – an ironic selection since fewer than half of GE’s workers are employed in the United States and less than half its profits come from U.S. activities.

Obama’s January 2011 State of the Union Address falsely claimed that American business was plagued by the highest corporate tax rate in the world and promised to slash that rate “without adding to our deficit.” He offered no bold, large-scale economic stimulus, antipoverty or public works programs to address the mass unemployment and economic destitution still stalking the land. In February, he quickly signed a “deal” that stripped $40 billion from the federal government’s 2011 outlay (the biggest losers were the Environmental Protection Agency and high-speed rail).Unbowed by a terrible summer jobs report suggesting a likely return to technical recession and the urgent necessity of major counter-cyclical government jobs and social assistance programs, Obama has responded to Republican threats to block the raising of the debt ceiling by advancing a hideously regressive long-term austerity program to the right of what even the average Republican voter wants. He hit the fairways with Republican Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to offer a “grand bargain” to reduce federal spending by $4 trillion over ten years,