May 10, 2012
MEDIA ROOTS — So, on side we have the Republican Party and we know they are antithetically opposed to socioeconomic justice. Their political messaginglargely preys on the prejudices and fears of their constituents, racial antagonisms, US nationalism and exceptionalism, and fears of the other, fears of Muslims, terrorists, and so on.On the other hand, we have the Democrat Party, which is ostensibly the party of the working-class, ostensibly in favour of socioeconomic justice, of increasing equality. They seem to prey on the false hopes of the uninformed or misinformed, the uncritical.
And that’s just the fraction of the people who still believe in democratic elections. A great many are increasingly disaffected. US election voter turnout in 2008 was something like 57%. In 2010, it was less than 38%. Many see no hope in socioeconomic justice through democratic elections, or fighting for free and fair elections. They prefer to subvert the system through other means, including abstention.
So, of that fraction of the population, which still believes in democratic elections, the fraction within that, which cares about socioeconomic justice, the majority continually fall prey to the false promises of the Democrat Party. But the Democrat Party’s political track record doesn’t justify the faith placed in it. Obama’s JOBS Act, for example, which he signed into law last month, is not the progressive legislation Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) would have the citizenry believe with its erosions of important financial regulations resulting from the international race to the bottom dynamic where US financial regulators lower their standards to compete with foreign capital markets. Here’s how expert white-collar criminologist William K. Black describes Obama’s bill:
“The JOBS Act is something only a financial scavenger could love. It will create a fraud-friendly and fraud-enhancing environment. It will add to the unprecedented level of financial fraud by our most elite CEOs that has devastated the U.S. and European economies and cost over 20 million people their jobs. Financial fraud is a prime jobs killer. […]
“This bill will kill millions of jobs because financial frauds are weapons of mass financial destruction. It will start an international fraud-friendly deregulation race to the bottom and will become the basis for further criminogenic U.S. Congressional actions.”
Yet, we have celebrity activists, such as Van Jones who dedicate much of themselves to selling the ostensible virtues of re-electing Obama and the Democrat Party in 2012. Fortunately, we do have observers, such as William K. Black and Glenn Greenwald to keep the focus on the realities of what Obama's presidency and policies mean for the working-class and the ruling-class in the USA.
Messina
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SALON — Of all the ignominious actions of the Obama administration, the steadfast, systematic shielding of Wall Street from criminal liability is probably the most corrupt in the traditional sense of that word. InNewsweek this week, Peter Boyer and Peter Schweizer have an excellent examination of what happened and why, tying together crucial threads. First they lay out the basic facts, including the core deceit of the President’s campaigning for re-election like he’s some sort of populist crusader:
“With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent–a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, “a guy who had a Swiss bank account.” Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.
Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. . . . Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” . . .
Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street–around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting–his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama’s supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.”
Read more about Wall Street’s Immunity.
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