The Charade of Phony Crony Populism

The State of the Union address - a state of undress. The emperor without any clothes.

“The Obama administration seems to have very little concern about poor people and their social misery,” scholar and activist Cornel West said in November 2010. More than three years later and entering his sixth presidential year, Obama’s record does little to refute that assessment.

During 2009 and 2010 — when Democrats controlled not only the White House and Senate but also the House — Obama skipped past vital options for working and want-to-be-working Americans. For instance, he never really pushed for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have helped unions regain footing and halt their downward slide of membership, especially after crackdowns in state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere.

Obama presented himself as an ally of federal workers, he neglected to mention at the end of 2010, he signed a bill that prohibited pay increases for most of the federal government’s civilian employees. The pay freeze had come at his initiative.

Instead Obama beat the drum about his executive order to increase the minimum wage for some federal contract employees, which will see few workers affected. His plan is to raise wages to $10.10 for people making a miserly $7.25, but only some of them. And only the new ones.

Obama  is presiding over waves of privatization of USPS assets and services, with grave consequences for its workers and the public, having done nothing to undo the extreme pension-prefunding rules that were imposed during the last two years of the George W. Bush administration.

Obama presents himself as a champion of working people but his appointments of his top economic officials belie the pose.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is a former top executive at Citigroup, where he ran a unit that profited from the housing collapse. The same collapse was also very good to Obama’s current commerce secretary, Penny Pritzker, a Chicago billionaire who profited handsomely from banking operations that methodically targeted low-income people for subprime mortgages. (By the way, Pritzker was the national finance chair for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and a co-chair of his 2012 campaign.)

Obama offers his continuing allegiance to the predatory elites of Wall Street and not to the people. But what politician would make such an admission? But socialists don’t expect anything different. We understand that any hope for real economic change begins with dismantling such a system, getting rid of it entirely & implementing something different and sustainable.

AJJ