Is Obama's stimulus plan another windfall for big business?

[dcsmart]

In his first major policy speech since winning the presidential election, Barack Obama on Thursday pushed for speedy passage of his economic stimulus plan, painting a dire picture of the consequences should it fail to be rapidly implemented.


“We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime,” he declared, “a crisis that has only deepened over the last few weeks…. Now, I don’t believe it’s too late to change course, but it will be if we don’t take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years… our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that at some point we may not be able to reverse.”

From one standpoint, the speech was a remarkable, if backhanded, acknowledgment by the incoming president of the failure of capitalist market economics and the prospect of a full-blown depression. The past year has exploded all of the nostrums—the infallibility of the market, the virtues of financial “risk-taking,” the wizardry of Wall Street—that for decades were promoted as incontestable truths.

“The result,” Obama said, “has been a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our government.”

However, apart from a few general denunciations of “irresponsibility” and “greed,” made to appease public anger, Obama failed to make any analysis of the causes of the crisis or the social interests that are responsible for the unfolding disaster. There was a glaring contrast between the historic dimensions of the crisis, as portrayed by Obama himself, and the banal explanation he provided of its roots.

Obama failed to address the global dimensions of the crisis or deal at any level with the deep-seated structural contradictions of the US and world economy. He cited undeniable facts—“Wall Street executives made imprudent and dangerous decisions, seeking profits with too little regard for risk, too little regulatory scrutiny and too little accountability”—without attempting to explain the underlying processes that made such practices all-pervasive. There was no mention of the vast decline of America’s manufacturing base, itself inextricably bound up with the growth of financial speculation. He could not, therefore, present a coherent argument as to why the policies he was announcing could even begin to tackle the crisis.

On the contrary, Obama’s proposed solution—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan—will allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds, the bulk of which will flow into the coffers of the very banks and corporations that reaped massive profits from the policies that precipitated the crash of 2008.

In a number of interviews leading up to Thursday’s speech, Obama made a point of stressing that in formulating his stimulus plan he had consulted Republican politicians and economists—that is, the very forces who have been the most ferocious advocates of the “free market” policies that contributed to the crisis and who most directly aided and abetted the corrupt practices he criticized in his address.

FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j09.shtml


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