Obama now claims to be a populist!
Howard Richman, 1/19/2010

President Obama is trying to skewer the Republican Senate candidate in today's Massachusetts election for opposing his new proposal to place a special tax on some banks. Here's a selection from the Bloomberg article about the Massachusetts Senatorial campaign:

“Bankers don’t need another vote in the United States Senate -- they’ve got plenty,” Obama said in Boston, signaling a broader political strategy to tie Republicans in this year’s races to Wall Street greed.

In the world of Obama, proposing a $15 billion tax on banks makes him a populist! But on Christmas eve he raised the limit from $400 billion that he is willing to shovel out to banks as part of his mortgage bailout, and he has done nothing about Chinese currency manipulations, which benefit American banks (who get Chinese money to lend), while hurting American producers. And let's not forget the Geithner Plan to rescue the banks from their troubled assets, which, as Paul Krugman noted, invites banks to play  "heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose." 

The top 10 campaign contributors to President Obama's campaign included Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase & Co, yet Obama wants us to think of him as a populist, representing the people against the banks.

He is right, though, when he said "Bankers don't need another vote in the United States Senate." The bankers don't need another Senator; they've got the President!

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