Courtesy of Pam Martens.
President Obama Delivering His 2013 State of the Union Speech
President Obama covered so much ground in his February 12 State of the Union address that it’s easy to lose sight of the four words he failed to mention – even once: Wall Street and campaign finance. Nothing is going to materially change in America in terms of restoring fairness, opportunity, income equality and representative government until those two areas are radically reformed. Instead, the President offers platitudes and empty promises.
To confront the malignancy that is shriveling our democracy, Americans must begin to separate the symptoms from the disease. The diseases are Wall Street’s institutionalized wealth transfer system and the use of that unjustly created vast wealth by corporations and individuals to finance political campaigns.
The President can make endless promises about lifting up the middle class, eradicating poverty and leveling the playing field – but these are just the symptoms of the two areas he refuses to tackle for serious reform: Wall Street and campaign finance.
When the President said in his speech that consumers “enjoy stronger protections than ever before,” what immediately came to mind was the fact that after destroying trillions of dollars of middle class wealth in the dot.com bust of 2000 with rigged stock research and pump and dump schemes, then crashing the market and economy in 2008 through 2010 – creating losses that the General Accountability Office estimates could top $22 trillion — there has been no meaningful reform of Wall Street and no prosecutions of a multitude of criminal acts involved in the meltdown.
And yet, the President has made no mention of replacing Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General in charge of criminal prosecutions of Wall Street. As we have previously reported, the high posts held at the U.S. Department of Justice by former law partners from Covington and Burling, a firm deeply rooted in representation of Wall Street firms, strongly suggests the President is not serious about rooting out corruption and creating a fair deal for investors and the middle class.
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