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Inside Scoop: The Real Barack Obama Revealed!
By John F. Wasik
Socialist. Communist. Hitler. Racist. The Joker. Has any president in
recent memory been called so many names so quickly in his tenure?
It took a second term for George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Richard
Nixon to achieve pariah status among their detractors. President Obama
is getting the primary-schoolyard name-calling treatment in his first
eight months.
Yet I predict President Obama will defy all of these malicious and
ridiculously undeserved labels to achieve something few maligned chief
executives have been able to accomplish: He will establish social
capitalism as a new guiding political philosophy for the world’s
largest economy.
If Obama succeeds – and I believe he will – he may be able to diffuse
the tired old monikers of liberal, socialist and centrist. Put those stickers in a drawer. They don’t precisely describe Barack Obama.
As I discovered in researching my book The Audacity of Help: Obama’s
Economic Plan and the Remaking of America (www.audacityofhelp.net),
President Obama has espoused a hybrid political philosophy. As a
student of history, I’d say he’s closer to Teddy Roosevelt than
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet he’s got a “Green Deal” working instead
of a “Square” or “New” deal.
Like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, President Obama is keenly aware of
history and is a man of his times. Unlike his Square and New Deal
predecessors, though, Obama has professed no desire to break up
corporations or take them to court – even when you can make a strong
argument for reducing the size of the largest financial service companies.
Inheriting the worst debacle since the Great Depression, Obama has
chosen the path of a social capitalist. He has laid the groundwork for
government being a responsible steward. Not interested in
nationalizing anything, he wants to bolster banks to make them healthy then move onto other national priorities.
As part of his Green Deal philosophy, clearly economic growth is more
important than controlling boardrooms and executive compensation. This
is his University of Chicago intellectual background speaking.
President Obama told CNBC he has a “strong inclination” against a
second stimulus package, although he’s hoping that the first stimulus
plan can spur private-sector jobs in roadbuilding, green energy,
broadband, electrical grid modernization, high-speed rail, medical
research and thousands of other projects throughout the country. Some
of those promises have come to fruition, but a long-range plan on
infrastructure repair and development is necessary if we’re going to
compete with China and the rest of the global economy.
If anything, the Obama stimulus and budget plans have provided
significant but not overly generous seed money for all of these areas
in the hope that private industry will replace the nearly 7 million
jobs lost since the recession began in December, 2007. As such, in
terms of sheer dollars, the Obama Administration (particularly the
Department of Energy) has become the largest venture capital entity in
the country.
If Obama was a true socialist, he would have broken up the
strangleholds that major insurers have in most state and local markets
in health insurance and reduced the size of the largest banks – or taken them over. Even his financial services reform proposal pretty
much leaves powerful insurance companies alone, even though their
abuses in health-insurance claims, annuity and securities sales have
been profligate.
Refocusing on the economy, Obama is hewing close to his blueprint for
financial reforms to save capitalism from itself.
Keep in mind that other than the disappearance of Bear Stearns, Lehman
Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual,
Wachovia Securities and dozens of smaller banks, little has changed on
Wall Street.
The biggest banks got bigger (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, et al).
The government has veer from the “too big to fail” philosophy, which
means we could have another global meltdown again. Nevertheless, Wall
Street likes the deregulated status quo and is lobbying intensely to
kill financial reform.
“I don’t think they’re going to succeed in killing it,” Obama said
bravely of his effort to push through financial reforms. “I’m going to
stop them from killing it.”
Yet Obama’s social capitalism will prevail because wiser global financial forces will demand it. We’ve already seen the devastation of 1929-41, 1974, 1999-2002 and the disaster last year. The next global
iceberg collision will make 1930 look like a Disney musical.
While I’m not sure booms, busts and bubbles can be managed, we can
certainly devise better warning systems and investor safeguards. No
matter what you call Obama, here’s his most boiled-down mantra:
Protect the weak from the ravages of greed. In the words of T.R,
“bully” to that.
Author Bio
John F. Wasik, author of The Audacity of Help: Obama's Economic Plan
and the Remaking of America, is the author of twelve books, including
The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome and The Merchant of Power. He speaks widely
and writes a weekly Bloomberg News column that reaches readers of five
continents and which earned him the 2009 Peter Lisagor award for
journalism. He lives in Chicago.
For more information please visit www.audacityofhelp.net
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