Ever since Election Night 2008, millions of Americans including thousands here in Central New York, swell with pride at the fact that a black man now resides in the White House.
Given our nation’s abysmal history of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow and countless other inequalities, it is rather amazing that a black man with a white mother and a Muslim name now leads our land. But those dazzled by the racial significance of his presidency remain blinded to one important fact: the color most important to Barack Hussein Obama is green.
He won reelection last November after accepting millions of dollars in campaign contributions from Wall Street businessmen and corporations. Among his 2012 benefactors were JP Morgan Chase and Co., the Goldman Sachs Group, Wells Fargo & Co., Microsoft, corporate attorneys Kirkland and Ellis and Jay Snyder, a New York financier who bundled hundreds of thousands of donations from self-interested Wall Street players.
Prosecutions avoided
On Jan. 22, PBS-TV’s “Frontline” aired a new one-hour report on the Obama administration’s most shameful failing: the lack of even a single prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. “Frontline” clearly demonstrated that Obama’s justice department, specifically its chief crime-fighter, Lanny Breuer, never made any effort to hold the high-level criminals accountable.
Why not? Because they own Barack Obama. They paid his price, and so he lets them walk free.
Heck, in his first term he even appointed Wall Street shyster Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury! Pretty good deal — a guy who should be in a prison cell gets a cabinet position instead.
The rich get richer
And the rich continue to get richer. According to a Bloomberg News analysis, corporate profits have risen by 171 percent under Obama, the most in the post-war era.
Pat Garofalo, an economist who writes for both The Nation and U.S. News and World Report, average annual corporate profit growth under Obama is the highest since 1990, whereas profit growth declined during both Bush presidencies.
And while Obama claims to care about America’s dwindling “middle class,” this profit deluge has not been shared by workers whose wages as a percentage of the economy have fallen to all-time lows. Workers also got dinged by the recent re-institution of the payroll tax which was large enough to wipe out a minimum-wage increase in some states.
Obama’s corporate cabal
A few days after he was elected in 2008, I wrote, “For a reputed socialist, Obama enjoys a curious quantity of capitalist backing.
“Though Rush Limbaugh worries that the new president will wildly increase entitlement programs for the poor, what should really concern us is that Obama’s corporate cabal will continue waging that awful war in Iraq, juggle the economy to benefit the rich and prevent investigations into insider wheeling and dealing.”
A month before his reelection last year, I wrote, “On the surface, Obama looks like a licentious liberal, but take a gander at his campaign contributors, and you’ll see a president beholden not to the little people but to big bucks…Obama clearly favors Wall Street over Main Street.”
I’m sad to say I told you so.
