This Wall Street Administration
Economist Dean Baker had this commentary about the situation: "Does the Obama administration really want people to celebrate job growth that will get us back to full employment in 2028?
"That's what reporters should have been asking as the Obama administration put a positive spin on the 1.6 million job growth in 2011. The economy has to create roughly 1 million jobs a year to keep pace with the growth of the labor force. With a shortfall of jobs that is currently near 10 million, it will take more than 16 years to get the economy back to full employment at the 2011 rate of job growth.
"Reporters should have been ridiculing the Obama administration for their poor grasp of arithmetic for celebrating such a dismal job performance. They certainly should have pointed out to readers the absurdity of their boasts about the recent pace of job growth."
But it's a presidential election year and this DINO administration wants to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear by pretending that this DINO Clintonite/Rubinite Republican lite rhetorician, panel moderator president is a Democratic populist leader.
After filling his administration, especially his economic team, with one percenters doing the bidding of the 1%, we also have this recent news viaGlenn Greenwald:
"When President Obama last January announced the departure of Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff, many liberals were furious that his replacement was the Midwest Chairman of JP Morgan and Boeing Director William Daley, who was also an opponent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a critic of Obama’s health care bill as too leftist. As but one example, Rachel Maddow harshly condemned the choice, noting Daley was a hedge fund manager and “business lobbyist” and “is known for pushing Democrats toward business interests”; said “liberals are banging their heads against the wall as they try to comprehend this choice”; and then sardonically observed: “mmm – a banker and a lobbyist: smells like change.”
"Yesterday, the White House announced Daley’s departure — he will now co-chair Obama’s re-election campaign, which basically means raising huge amounts of money from his Wall Street friends — and unveiled his replacement as Chief of Staff: Jacob Lew. In 2010, Lew became head of the Office of Management and Budget when Peter Orszag left and then, a couple months later, accepted a multi-million dollar position as a high-level Citigroup official. Lew has spent many years in various government positions, but he has his own substantial ties to Citigroup."For his work at Citigroup, work that included betting on the housing collapse, Lew received a salary of $1.1 million. After Citigroup received its $45 billion taxpayer bailout, Lew — two weeks before joining the Obama administration — received another $900,000 from Citigroup as a bonus.
"Lew (like so many key Obama officials) also participated in the orgy of Wall Street de-regulation that took place in the 1990s when he served as Clinton’s OMB head; after leaving Citigroup to join the Obama administration, he unsurprisingly said in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders that he does not believe deregulation contributed to the financial crisis.
"All of this reflects what Matt Taibbi meant when he wrote last week that “once the primaries are finished, we’re going to be left with one 1%-approved stooge taking on another” and that the election will present “a choice between two different versions of the status quo.”
Comments