Jim Hightower : Obama is Waltzing With the Devil

Dancing with the devil. Drawing from Decoded Stuff.

Obama, Inc.:
With Daley and Immelt on board,
our president is waltzing with the devil.

By Jim Hightower / CommonDreams / February 9, 2011

When you dance with the devil, never fool yourself into thinking that you’re leading.

That would be my 50-cents-worth of advice to President Barack Obama as he remakes his presidency into a Clintonesque corporate enterprise. Following last fall’s congressional elections, he immediately began blowing kisses to CEOs and big business lobbyists, and he’s now filled his White House dance card with them.

First came Bill Daley, the Wall Street banker and longtime corporate lobbyist. In early January, Obama brought him to the White House ball to be his chief-of-staff, gatekeeper, and policy coordinator.

Then Obama tapped Jeffery Immelt to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is supposed to “encourage the private sector to hire [Americans] and invest in American competitiveness.” This is a bizarre coupling, for as General Electric’s CEO, Immelt was a leader in shipping American factories and jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Today, fewer than half of GE’s workers are in our country.

As an AFL-CIO official notes, “Highly globalized companies don’t have the same interests as the United States. There is no company more emblematic of this than GE.”

In his recent State of the Union speech, Obama offered only cold comfort to the millions of Americans who are unemployed or barely employed, saying blandly that “The rules have changed.” Well, yes — and who changed them? Self-serving CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt, that’s who.

America’s working families — our endangered middle class — have a right to expect Obama to fight for rules that are fair to them and our country, not meekly accept rules that have been skewed by an elite corporate class to profit them alone. Instead, our president is waltzing with the devil.

He’s rebranding his presidency, all right. It’s becoming Obama, Inc.

[Jim Hightower, a radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, edits the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. This article was posted to OtherWords and distributed by CommonDreams.

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3 Responses to Jim Hightower : Obama is Waltzing With the Devil

  1. Gilleez says:

    Typical hate mongering from Hightower, with his usual lack of interest in solutions. See Richard Flacks, Rag, Feb 2. “Equally important, there is a loss of “vision” — an absence of articulate expression of how a better world might look.
    Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do.”

  2. One really IMPORTANT “vision” is easy to see, the devastation already caused by the same people President Obama is currently selling America to.

    They broke America yet they’re to be trusted to repair it? Fat Chance.
    Calling them Devils is more disrespectful to Satan than it is to them.

    The “vision” of what’s to come if we go right back to following THEIR lead is all around us. Our local Right Wing newspooper the Gazette says this town is one of the top ten for turnaround in the housing market. Yet if I ride down the street to the grocery store I’ll see ten houses with Foreclosed signs in front of them. Their labor policies are no more “visionary” (maybe “Hallucinatory”) than their capitalist “voodoo economics”, give more money to Thieves and somehow, some way, they’ll magically start to give a Damn about anybody or any group of Anybodies (anybody and somebody are singular nouns) other than their fat sloppy piggish selves.

    Is THAT hateful? How is it less hateful than their assigning the blame for economic collapse on the poorest of the Working Class?

  3. Brother Jonah says:

    errr… “More Hateful”.

    The capitalist meme is that we, the workers, are inferior to their Very Learned Selves thus, deserve nothing better than a lifetime of Wage Slavery and to be discarded when worn down or broken or otherwise “damaged goods”.

    The policy makers Mr Obama is dancing with don’t believe that anybody other than themselves are Intellectually Capable of deciding what is adequate and fair compensation for our labor or for their liability once they break us so thoroughly that we’re no longer able to continue feeding them.

    Which is what we do for them. They don’t produce anything but “leadership” which is obviously “Being able to swindle large numbers of people into supporting their Parasite Class”.

    That doesn’t show any Intellectual Superiority, it instead shows that they’re Ethically Challenged.

    They’ve gone to an ancient root of Capitalism, pillage. They pillage the Working Class in every nation over which they claim ownership. Those who resist, they convince (with lies, threats that “the others” will get us if they don’t let them have their way) to go to their nations or their villages within our nation and force the “terrorist rebels” to comply.
    And kill the “rebels” if they don’t comply.
    The Rich Bitches like Cheney and Bush and Blankenship and Palin and any others in their pathetic cowardly tribe don’t deign to fight with their own hands, they have to convince others to do their thefts and murders for them.

    It’s the whole purpose and focus of FOX News and the Tea Potty.

    They do it at public expense then not very politely decline to pay their share of the bills for the pillage which feeds them.

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