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Con: Like FDR before him, Obama has saved capitalism by harnessing its excesses

WASHINGTON — EDITOR’S NOTE: The writer is addressing the question, “Is President Obama thwarting economic growth?”

The canard that President Obama is anti-business is a propaganda remnant from Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign.

Obama, after all, was the president who bailed out Wall Street with the Troubled Asset Relief Program. TARP and other Obama corporate rescue programs, after all, benefited such goliath corporations as Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler—saving tens of thousands of jobs.

Romney, who wanted the Detroit automakers to go bankrupt, represents the predatory form of capitalism that swarms all over dead or dying corporations to pick their assets clean by selling them off with huge profits going to the vulture-like middlemen.

Had the former Massachusetts governor won the presidential election, General Motors and Chrysler likely would have been diced and sliced with their valuable assets put in the hands of Chinese, Russian, Japanese and European conglomerates courtesy of financial corpse-preparing morticians such as Bain Capital.

Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus package of 2009, provided direct and indirect assistance to small and large businesses through the hiring of construction companies and related companies to rebuild roads, highways, rail lines, airports and telecommunications infrastructure.

A “Buy American” clause prevented notorious foreign outsourcers from bypassing American workers and manufacturers by seeking out the lowest wage earners and cheapest products abroad.

As the dreaded Jan. 1 “financial cliff” approaches, President Obama is proposing a return to Clinton administration tax rates, which imposed a top rate of 39.6 percent on for those earning more than $250,000 a year.

That’s only a slight bump up from the 35 percent rate put in place by the Bush tax cuts, and together with mandatory cuts and proposed tax increases of about $600 billion, assure a soft landing for America’s recovering economy.

The Republicans and their wealthy backers have cried foul, ignoring the fact that the Clinton tax rates also saw a booming economy, especially with regard to the practically overnight successful “dot com” start-ups, healthy government surpluses and 21 million new jobs.

Unfazed by Romney’s drubbing in the polls and the failure of Republicans to make gains in Congress, America’s wealthiest tycoons have mounted a propaganda effort aimed at convincing all of America that Obama is intent on thwarting America’s growth.

Arch-conservative organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Club for Growth and American Legislative Exchange Council are seeing public support erode for tax-breaks for the rich, cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and slashing of public education, infrastructure improvement, and crucial new research and development projects.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that President Obama may be on the verge of forging a new can-do coalition of Democrats and moderately conservative Republicans that would jump-start economic growth by restoring Clinton-era tax rates while saving the vital health and social services programs popular with most Americans. No wonder that the Koch brothers and their ilk are in a state of near panic.

There is little doubt that if the United States was preparing to inaugurate Mitt Romney as president on Jan. 20, 2013, the world would be talking about America’s disastrous drift into the austerity budgets now forced on such European basket-cases as Spain and Greece.

The president’s election mandate to bring about a public-private partnership economic growth plan will soon be the envy of Europe, but only if the administration resists efforts to place Social Security, Medicare, and public education on the chopping block.

Like FDR in the 1930s, Obama actually is saving American capitalism by reining in it excesses and plowing under its inequities.

Today’s malefactors’ of great wealth already have launched an industrial strength propaganda campaign to discredit Obama’s recipe for economic growth.

The media should combat this insidious assault on common sense by remembering the mission Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne urged on newspapers at the turn of the last century: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Wayne Madsen is a contributing writer to www.onlinejournal.com. Readers may write to him at National Press Club front desk, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20045.