Did you think the health of the American economy was governed by supply and demand, overlaid with interest rates, worker productivity, and other things having to do with how well we make, distribute, buy, and sell stuff? Wrong! The American economy rises or falls based on whether or not the country’s very richest people believe they are being properly respected and made happy. And Politico reports that the sensitive rich people are not happy with the Obama administration:
In the eyes of corporate America, President Barack Obama relied on a healthy dose of industry-bashing to sway votes in Congress for health reform and the new Wall Street regulations signed into law Wednesday.
Now those efforts threaten to undermine the one agenda item essential to Democrats’ hopes in the midterms and Obama’s chances for reelection: turning around an economy still just a half step out of recession.
The nation’s corporations, Politico says, feel wrongly blamed for the economic crisis, so now executives don’t want to hire people or spend money.
Billionaire and pundit Mort Zuckerman told
Politico
, “There is still a great deal of anxiety over the demonization of business, and it is a serious problem”:
Executives “really feel there is a deliberate attempt, as a populist political measure, to blame the business world for all the problems we have been having, when, in reality, the housing bubble was provoked by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And it wasn’t business or the public that lowered interest rates and created the credit bubble. It was the Federal Reserve.”
Why didn’t those reckless government affiliates listen to wise titans of business, like Mort Zuckerman, before they went ahead and inflated the housing bubble till our whole economy collapsed? Here’s Zuckerman in 2005 :
What we’re seeing today is a re-enactment of a historic American homeowning tradition….Today, homeownership has become the single most important element in the widest participation in an era of rising wealth. This is an ownership society for real.
Anyway! That was old news. What matters now is that if Zuckerman and his peers don’t get treated better, they will stop trying to participate in the economy at all, and we will all just have to stay in this recession till we’re sorry.
The Obama administration, Politico reports, already blew one chance to make things better when it failed to include leaders of the banking industry in the signing ceremony for the financial reform bill they had tried and failed to defeat:
“The obvious political thing would have been to pick the 25 biggest financial companies impacted by this bill and personally invite the heads of each one,” a financial executive said.
Through this insensitivity, Obama made it look as if the banking industry was opposed to reform. Why is the president endangering America by insulting our financial leaders this way?
