Obama's Class War: Wall Street Bailouts Killed Healthcare Reform
James P. Pinkerton, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributor to the Fox News Channel, was a domestic policy aide in the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses.
For his part, Obama seems cool and calm as always. He's happy enough with his economic team, keeping his poise as his healthcare agenda goes down the drain. It's all a question of priorities. As Vice President Joe Biden has said many times, "My dad had an expression, 'Show me your budget, and I'll show you what you value.'"
Well, Obama has done that. Without ever quite saying so, he has made his values clear.
The 44th president has, indeed, played class warfare. But it hasn't been a class struggle in which he sided with the poor against the rich, or even the middle class against the rich. Just the opposite. He has championed trillion-dollar subsidies for the investor class, enshrining bank bailouts as a higher priority than universal healthcare. That is, he has privileged Wall Street over perhaps the most sacred priority that Democrats hold dear: health insurance for all.
One day, rank-and-file Democrats will figure out that they have lost yet another class war—defeated by their own president.
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Reader Comments
health
Were already paying for the poor and illegals. Trying to pretend other wise while stating rationing and denied care are on the horizon is a joke as it happens A LOT here already.You do realize that guy on the other end of the phone that denies your cancer treatment today is a bureaucrat right?
Health care
If you think just throwing 8 million people on medicare is the silver bullet you have no ideal whats really going on in thew health industry.
Im extremely disturbed that republicans and democrats say that health care reform is too expensive. Especially if what the writer says is true about the bank bailouts cost 30 times more then any health care reform bill on the table. What good did it do? Banks that weren't dumb and didn't expect to be bailed out over stupid moves would have risen and taken those spots of the fat banks. It floors me that for so many in congress who live breath capitalism jumped on board the bank bailouts yet scream bloody murder when we actually try to spend money on the you know tax payers?
Class warfare
The only class warfare I have seen was the support of UAW over bond holder of auto bankruptcy. And that is traditional support of unions by democratics. Since UAW is getting smaller all the time I don't see this as a plus. If anything it is a negative. It is too late to save most unions that are in manufacturing.
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