President Obama announced officially last week he will run for re-election in 2012. Having become the first black president, Obama now sets his sights on a new distinction: the first candidate to raise more than a billion dollars. Last week’s filing was intended to give him a jump start on fundraising to meet this goal.
Many who voted for Obama were motivated by the desire for a break with the pro-corporate policies of the Bush administration. As a minority, it was believed a black president would be more sympathetic to the poorest layers of the population, particularly African Americans.
Halfway through his first term, this illusion has been dispelled. Obama has overseen an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the richest Americans premised on a frontal assault on the living standards of the working class, the likes of which has not been seen in decades. This bitter experience with the bankruptcy of identity politics led to the desertion of the Democratic Party witnessed in last year’s mid-term election.
Whether or not Obama’s race eventually assumes its rightful place in history as a mere footnote to his presidency is yet to be seen. But any serious analysis of his administration would have to conclude the class interests he represents and not the color of his skin determined his policies foremost.
That Obama will most likely become the “billion-dollar candidate” is thus entirely fitting. Such levels of funding must necessarily come from the billionaires of America. This wealthy layer has benefited most from Obama’s policies and comprises his real constituency.
Wall Street recognized in Obama a pliant tool early on, backing him significantly over Republican John McCain in 2008. With the wealthiest Americans behind him, Obama raised a record $779 million in 2008 – more than twice the previous record of $375 million set by Bush in 2004.
Obama’s presidency so far has largely been spent returning the favor of his wealthy backers. The stock market is up by more than 70 percent from its low in 2008, adding $1 trillion in 2010 alone. Corporate profits reached record levels last year, up by 36.8 percent.
Moreover, CEO pay rates have returned to their levels prior to the onset of the economic recession. According to the Wall Street Journal, “CEO bonuses at 50 major corporations jumped a median of 30.5 percent, the biggest gain in at least three years.”
As former President Rutherford B. Hayes once pointed out, “Pauperism is the shadow of excessive wealth.”
Indeed, Obama’s bonanza for the wealthiest Americans has cast the shadow of impoverishment over broad sections of the population through high unemployment, workplace speed-ups and slashed benefits on the one hand and austerity budgets, gutting of social services and massive tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy on the other.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute concluded the economic recovery has “proceeded on two tracks: one for typical families and workers, who continue to struggle against high rates of unemployment and continued foreclosures, and another track for the investor class and the wealthy.”
Democrats and Republicans now demand the working class sacrifice to pay for this looting of the country.
The two parties of big business differ only in what is to be cut and by how much, not in the basic premise that workers must shoulder the burden of supporting these rapacious elite.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich alluded to the real source of the deficit on NPR last week.
“If the rich were taxed at the same rates they were taxed a half century ago,” Reich contended, “they’d be paying some $350 billion more this year in federal taxes. That would be trillions of dollars over the next decade – a major contribution to eliminating the deficit.”
The obscene levels of wealth being siphoned from society by the richest Americans will likely translate into record campaign contributions to Obama for services rendered. In both cases, one is reminded of the old adage of French novelist Balzac – behind every great fortune lays a great crime.
