Krugman: Corporate America really, truly hates Obama, Daily Kos, May 23, 2010, by blackwaterdog, quoted verbatim:

Some day more people will understand who’s the real enemy. I don’t know when exactly it’ll happen – and by then it might be too late – but it will happen. And we’re all going to ask ourselves, how could we let it happen.

1. Paul Krugman:

So here’s how it is: They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations.

Much reporting on opposition to the Obama administration portrays it as a sort of populist uprising. Yet the antics of the socialism-and-death-panels crowd are only part of the story of anti-Obamaism, and arguably the less important part. If you really want to know what’s going on, watch the corporations.

///

…Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in “a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury” toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What’s going on?

One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.

/// snip

So what President Obama and his party now face isn’t just, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. For grass-roots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the G.O.P. does well in November.

If this sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security. It comes as no surprise to learn that American Crossroads, a new organization whose goal is to deploy large amounts of corporate cash on behalf of Republican candidates, is the brainchild of none other than Karl Rove.

//// snip

So where does that leave the president and his party? Mr. Obama wanted to transcend partisanship. Instead, however, he finds himself very much in the position Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous 1936 speech, struggling with “the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”

2. John Heilemann, in an amazing, huge New York Magazine feature:

Obama Is From Mars, Wall Street Is From Venus

….In May 20, the Senate passed its bill to reregulate Wall Street by a vote of 59-39, complete with a (watery) version of the Volcker Rule. The story of the legislation’s passage can be told in a number of ways: a tale of conflict or compromise, triumph or capitulation. But on any reading, that story is only the climactic chapter in a larger narrative: how the masters of the money game fell out of love with—and into a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury toward—Obama.

//// snip

…One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as “hostile to business,” “anti-wealth,” and “anti-capitalism”; as a “redistributionist,” a “vilifier,” and a “thug.” A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a “Chicago mob guy.”

/// snip

The issue that most sorely tested Obama’s restraint was that of Wall Street bonuses. Emanuel and Axelrod had reams of data showing that this was by far the hottest of populist hot buttons—and one that could inflict collateral damage on the White House. One day in the winter of 2009, Emanuel was meeting with a senior Goldman executive and offered some Rahmian advice. “You don’t f*cking get it!” he said. “You’re making $600,000 a year and you think you’re a fucking saint—because you were making $50 million before. But as far as the guy across the street thinks, you’re still a f*cking pig! Reduce it to zero and he’ll love you!”

/// snip

Though the Senate bill will still need to be reconciled with the House measure, it’s all but impossible to imagine that what emerges will be regarded as moderate by Wall Street. At Goldman and elsewhere, the belief is strong that the case against Wall Street’s most storied firm was politically motivated; lately, Blankfein has taken to trashing Obama to his friends in unusually brutal personal terms. Dimon—who is fond of declaring, “I’m a patriot!” in meetings with White House officials—recently described himself publicly as “a wavering Democrat.”

And even those less bruised than them have found the experience traumatizing. “They’re not accustomed to being engaged in politics this way,” says a private-equity investor. “Their skin isn’t toughened. They actually take [the attacks by Obama] personally. This is a profession with a lot of smart people, but who aren’t necessarily terribly introspective. They think they actually deserve to make all this money. So any attack on their livelihood is, ahem, unpleasant.”

/// snip

3. The New York Times, David Leonhardt:

A Progressive Agenda to Remake Washington

With the Senate’s passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.

//// snip

….Alan Brinkley, a historian of the Depression, added: “This is not the New Deal, but it’s a significant series of achievements. And given the difficulty of getting anything done under the gridlock of Congress, it’s pretty surprising.”

/// snip

Will this new progressive project succeed? There are any number of uncertainties: whether enough charter schools will succeed, whether the new health insurance markets will function well, whether the Fed will learn to become an effective regulator of Wall Street.

Some of those questions won’t be resolved for years. But one issue should become clear much sooner. Mr. Reagan, Mr. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt cemented their changes by retaining enough allies in Congress and serving more than four years in the White House. Mr. Obama has yet to do so.

*
Wake up, people. Wake up.

Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Apparently the whole business community is in lockstep against Obama, and I DO mean almost without exception. What a shame that institutions like the Chamber of Congress are now pure right wing institutions dedicated to bringing Obama down. Also read and watch Massey Energy & Don Blankenship: Million-dollar Tea Party sponsors, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Meet Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship is also on the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce. In this speech above, he denies climate change, derisively refers to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and others as “greeniacs”, and calls them all crazy. Watch the speech, you’ll see. In his mind, “the greeniacs are taking over the world.”

Massey Energy Company, Blankenship’s highly successful strip-mining and mountaintop removal operation is the parent company of Performance Coal Co, where a tragic explosion occurred on April 5th. As of this writing, 25 miners have died and 4 more are still missing. Twenty-five families are without a loved one. Four more may discover they have lost someone they love too. 29 families in all, forever changed by one single, violent event in a coal mine. One single violent event in a coal mine run by a company so obsessed with profit it runs roughshod over employees’ and neighbors’ health and safety.

Here’s something else about Don Blankenship and Massey Energy Company: Blankenship spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year’s Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the “Friends of America Rally.” Here’s Massey’s pitch. Note how he makes it sound like he isn’t one of the corporate enemies of America.

The Friends of America Rally featured such notables as Sean Hannity, Ted Nugent, and Hank Williams, Jr., and was graced by Blankenship himself going off on a diatribe that seemed strange at the time, but has come to be commonplace these days. It concerned President Obama, Democrats, and any one who doesn’t salute God, coal, and apple pie. Oh, and we’re also going to ‘steal their jobs,’ if Hannity is to be believed.

Blankenship and Massey Energy spend millions to defend unsafe workplaces….

Finding evidence of a right wing business conspiracy to take down Obama isn’t hard to do. Even back in the days of the campaign people as high up as Bill Clinton were saying the right wing was essentially in a conspiracy against Obama. Do we think the right wing has grown kinder and gentler???

It’s time to rally in support of our President. He has tried very hard to work with the GOP in Congress and in the business community and all they have done is stab him in the back every way they can. It’s time to support our President, who has made a remarkable program of progressive reform an actual achievement. We “purists” have too much concentrated on the compromises and the failures to fully institute purely progressive legislation. It’s time to stop and realize what Obama is up against and get behind him in support of what is possible to do in the current climate of right wing hatred and lockstep opposition. I strongly feel that if we don’t support the President now, we’re really going to be sorry.

It’s just possible here, if you want at the whole process of warfare going on between the right and the left, or conservatives and liberals, in terms of good and evil, that MONEY is the root of all the evil. And sex and power flow from the money. That how it seems to be in Kapitalist America. Obama is getting in the way of coporate America’s and rich people’s profits.

Let’s tell Barack Obama “good job”, we know you’ve done what is possible and then some. Send an email to the White House and show your support. ~ Paul Evans

*****

To make a Word or .pdf document of an article, or share or email it, simply load the individual article by clicking the dark blue title at the very top.

We know, if you come here repeatedly,
you like Evans Liberal Politics. So, all we ask is that you
Tell Your Friends About Evans Liberal Politics!

88 Great Electronic Rock and Pop Tracks
(Listen to hours of music while you surf the web!)

#1 Rated by Google