Obama gives speech in Kansas decrying inequality

President Obama’s speech yesterday in Kansas, in which he said many nice things about the need to fight income inequality and work together for a shared prosperity for all Americans, would be uplifting if we didn’t see this all before.

As someone who voted for him in 2008 under the mistaken impression that he would fight for progressive change, count me now as someone who’s turned completely against him and is downright skeptical or hostile to any statement or position he advocates. I don’t think I’m alone among those who voted for him in 2008 either. 

Firstly, President Obama gives good speeches. That’s obvious. He reads the teleprompter well and knows when to emphasize his points. Secondly, he generally says the right things that a mainstream liberals and probably independents even would like to hear. 

But when he starts to criticize the actions of Wall Street, or the Republican Party, or the health insurance industry, is when I don’t believe, and when you shouldn’t believe, a single word he says.

When he talks about the need to work together to fight income inequality, President Obama seems intent on making us forget that his policies, his actions, and his breathtaking inaction on certain issues, have actually ensured even more inequality and even more Wall Street abuses at the expense of working people.

It was President Obama who selected Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary, who proceeded to fill his staff with lobbyists and officials from Goldman Sachs. 

It was President Obama who chose Larry Summers as his Chief Economic Adviser, when Summers had worked as President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and fought to repeal Glass-Steagall.

It was President Obama who let Tim Geithner oversee the foreclosure prevention program, HAMP, which has shown to be an utter failure.

These Wall Street insiders, have helped shape our current economic dilemma. Before Summers resigned last year, him and Geithner fought for a smaller stimulus package, watered down financial regulation of Wall Street, and PROTECTED THE WALL STREET ELITES WHO COMMITTED MASSIVE DESTRUCTIVE FRAUD FROM PROSECUTION.

Meanwhile, activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement and housing rights advocates successfully re-occupied a home yesterday that was foreclosed upon by Bank of America. I might be exaggerating but I think that’s more homes saved in one day by OWS and community activists than in three years by the Obama Administration.

To close, when you have a President criticize the excesses of Wall Street and the inequality created by their greed, yet you fill your inner circle with Wall Street insiders and psychophants who helped create the economic crisis in the first place, and further to let them have new authority to create new financial and economic policy that continues to favor the financial elites over working people and industry and manufacturing…

You have then achieved the height of hypocrisy.