Strong specifics, if you can be in the mood for this today. Published on
Wednesday, November 3, 2010 by PR Watch.org
Obama Economic Team Passes Out the Kool-Aid
by Mary Bottari
Center for Media and Democracy: November 1, 2010
It's the day before a hotly-contested national election, where it appeared
the rabble was well positioned to deliver a colossal spanking to the elites
who have too-long ignored their plight, so what does Team Obama do?
They have a press conference to talk about their eagerness to complete the
Korea Free Trade Agreement negotiated by President Bush. "The president has
long said we want to try and address the outstanding issues regarding the
Free Trade Agreement in order to bring it forward for approval," said Mike
Froman, Obama's deputy national security advisor for international economic
affairs. "[W]e're going to put every effort into achieving ... an acceptable
agreement, a satisfactory agreement, by the time the president comes to
Seoul," he told a news conference on Monday.
Are these people nuts?
In case they had not noticed, Democrats across the country were getting
hammered on the charge of exporting jobs to China via the stimulus package.
It does not matter that the charge is false and that Democrats leapt into
action to block U.S. companies who were considering ordering wind turbines
from their subsidiaries in China. The republican ads, which ran in key races
nationwide, cleverly turned a democratic advantage on fair trade into a
republican advantage.
This latest free trade idiocy caps a long list of failures from the White
House economic team:
-Failure to treat sustained high-levels of unemployment as the national
emergency it is.
-Failure to pass a bank bailout package that placed any tough conditions on
the banks.
-Failure to pass a Wall Street reform bill that was big enough or bad enough
to make the big banks reign in those infuriating bonuses.
-Failure to put even a single CEO responsible for the financial crisis
behind bars.
-Shameful failure to address the housing and foreclosure mess that will soon
put one in four families in American underwater with their mortgages.
No wonder the people are voting to throw the bums out.
Much of the blame for the staggering electoral losses has to be laid at the
feet of the president's economic team who seems to think that 14 months of
near double-digit unemployment is acceptable.
"Their primary misjudgment is they did not understand how serious the
downturn would be," says economist Dean Baker who sounded the warning about
the accumulating housing bubble as early as 2002. "Summers, Geithner,
Greenspan, Bernanke, none of these guys thought bubbles were a big deal.
They expect the economy to bounce back on its own, and if it didn't,
unemployment was not such a big deal either."
As a consequence, Team Obama's one shot to get the economy going again --
the stimulus/jobs package -- was not big enough. Christina Romer, former
head of the Council of Economic Advisers recommended over a trillion dollars
in direct job creation funding, but the final package contained about half
of that.
"Summers managed to marginalize alternative views on nearly everything … the
size and composition of the stimulus, whether and how to discipline the
banksters or do a housing refinance," says Joel Rogers, of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and COWS, the national "high road" strategy center. "He
very ably represented Wall Street and the rich against everyone else." But
you can't exactly blame him for success in that. The president declares what
economic discussion should be about, and who's in it.
While some will celebrate the people throwing the bums out, the tragedy of
course is that the bums-in-waiting advocate policies like tightening
spending that is the opposite of what is needed in this type of downturn.
Plus, the best of the best – those who have always stood with the people
against the big banks, the bailouts and even the Obama economics team, are
being swept up in the mob mentality. Wisconsin's Russ Feingold voted no to
every free trade deal, no to the bailouts, no to weak Wall Street reform and
no Tim Geithner's appointment as U.S. Treasury Secretary, but he was beaten
by a self-financed tea party millionaire who will advance exactly the
pro-free trade, pro-corporate agenda that Wisconsinites abhor.
Pass Out the Pink Slips or Receive One Yourself
If this president does not learn the lesson of this election, he will of
course be forced to repeat it.
"In 2008, Obama only won the election because he won the critical states of
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by differentiating himself from
McCain on trade. It's pretty obvious with Dems and GOP nationwide running
against the trade status quo and its job offshoring damage, that if Obama
flip flops now in favor of more job-killing NAFTA agreements, he will lose
those states and end up a one term president," says trade expert Lori
Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch group.
So the pink slips need to go to Summers, Geithner, Froman and the other
henchmen of the failed status quo. Even Obama's new chief of staff, Peter
Rouse, who touted an incredibly uninspiring forward agenda of education and
free trade in a New York Timesmagazine profile of Obama, needs to go.
Obama needs a new economics team, one that does not disregard the suffering
of families facing unemployment and foreclosure, and one that puts job
creation -- not free trade -- at the top of their economic agenda.
© 2010 Center for Media & Democracy
Mary Bottari is the Director of the Center for Media and Democracy's Real
Economy Project and editor of their www.BanksterUSA.org site.
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