I'll admit it: Listening to 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 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 "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 China baiting when that country carries much of our debt?
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