Obama: My Policies Are Good For Business

by JASmius

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he really said it.  Heck, he probably even believes it.  But there was a brick in that braggadocious velvet glove:

Barack Obama said corporate America has done well under his economic policies, telling the Economist magazine that CEOs should stop complaining about regulations and show greater social responsibility.

"If you look at what's happened over the last four or five years, the folks who don't have a right to complain are the folks at the top," Obama said in an interview conducted last week and posted on the magazine's website late on Saturday. [emphasis added]

That translates to "Your 'protection' fee is going up.  And then I'll screw you anyway."  CEOs' purported absence of "reasons not to complain" is a rather naked reference to the now-formerly-above-17,000 Dow, lofted to those levels by gargantuan thermals of dollar-eroding Fed currency debasement and subterranean interest rates that encourage precisely more of what this economy needs the absolute least: debt and the "easy money" mentality that comes with it.  If Janet "Old" Yellen ever loses control of rates, God help "corporate America".  Indeed, God help all of us who aren't hocked up to our eyeballs.  And we are, personally and/or "officially".

CEOs may be "The Man," cutthroat jerks who will axe you on a whim no matter how many years of loyal, capable service you've rendered, but they do have ample grounds for their complaints:

Businesses have complained that Obama's signature health care law and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms have hiked their costs.

Business groups are lobbying against his new plan to curb climate-changing carbon emissions from power plants.

All three outrages of which are throttling employment and wage rates and have been for years - or, as O would describe it, "corporate greed":

"I would take the complaints of the corporate community with a grain of salt," Obama said, arguing that his policies have been friendly to business. "They always complain about regulation. That's their job."

Perhaps.  Except, of course, that these are very specific complaints about unprecedentedly fascist economic interventions that have been explicitly carpet-bombed upon them specifically under your Regime, Barry.  About which there would be more widespread complaints from the general public if your Regime weren't fabricating risibly sunny employment and GDP numbers.  And if the general public hadn't been browbeaten, bludgeoned, and bamboozled into subliminal acceptance of the "New Normal" that I predicted over five years ago.

Which makes this comment all the more sardonically giggle-inducing:

"Oftentimes, you'll hear some hedge-fund manager say, 'Oh, he's just trying to stir class resentment'. No. Feel free to keep your house in the Hamptons and your corporate jet, etcetera. I'm not concerned about how you're living," Obama said.

"I am concerned about making sure that we have a system in which the ordinary person who is working hard and is being responsible can get ahead," he said. [emphasis added]

Well, now.  I'm one of those ordinary persons who has worked extraordinarily hard for many, many years, has lived responsibly - including financially - got diddled out of my heretofore secure job by a comb-over corporatist, and I've been out of work for, depending upon the measuring benchmark, five or eleven months, with no end in sight, because the Obamaconomy isn't creating "good jobs at good wages" because Barack Obama and his "social responsibility" fetish has made that process functionally impossible by making small business start ups heinously difficult.  So, Dear Leader, I think you know what you can do with that bovine scatology.

Larry Kudlow argues that the GOP needs another Contract with America to provide a capitalist alternative to Obamanomics.  Which I certainly wouldn't oppose, but it would also give the Obamedia another classist distraction target with which to rally the Donk base.  And with midterms polling continuing to lean Republican, I wouldn't expect any adventurousness coming from their direction, no matter how frustrating that lack gets.

But then, ObamaCare rates for next year are due out soon. So "that rough beast, it's time come back 'round again, will be lurching towards the ballot box to be punished".