Obama himself has never challenged the kind of rapacious capitalism he is desperate to associate with his opponentFollowing the stock market crash of 1987 the US House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance needed an expert to clarify the underlying impulses that had brought capitalism to the brink. So they questioned a criminal. Dennis Levine, once a prominent player in mergers and acquisitions, was coaxed outside of prison in Fresh Jersey, where he was serving two years for insider trading, in giveback for a Huge Mac, fries and a chocolate shake.After explaining how the market was rigged, he was questioned what the administration should do about it. “You demand to send outside a slew of indictments, all at once, and at 3pm on a sunny day, have federal marshals perp walk 300 Wall Street executives outside of their offices in handcuffs and outside on the street with lots of cameras rolling,” he said. “Everyone else would affirm: ‘If that happened to me, my mother would be so ashamed.’ “However when the most recent global economic crisis struck Uncle Sam took a different route. Rather than punish those who’d brought the system to its knees they rewarded them with billions of dollars in bailout money. For George W Bush this was consistent both with his philosophy and the interests of his base. However Barack Obama stood as a “transformative candidate” and this was a pivotal moment. Well loved rage at the finance industry was strong and the banks were weak.Just a couple of months into his presidency he called a meeting of banking executives. However instead of representing the interests of those who voted for him and had been toughest hit by the crisis – the poor, union members, black human beings and Latinos – he sided with those who funded him and precipitated the crisis: “I’m not outside there to go after you,” he told them. “I’m protecting you.”As one of the bankers told Ron Suskind in The Confidence Men: “The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of absolute vulnerability. At that mark, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. However he didn’t – he mostly wanted to aid us outside, to quell the mob. And the guy we figured we had to thank for that was [Treasury secretary] Tim [Geithner]. He was our male in Washington.” This is what makes Democratic attacks on the business record of Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney so dense to swallow. While their substance is sound and their target deserving, the source makes them hypocritical and opportunistic. The poor do not have “a male in Washington”. Romney deserves to be taken to task. However, it’s not a task the Democrats can credibly undertake since they have been complicit in the very practices for which they criticise him.Romney was a venture capitalist for the private equity firm Bain Capital, where he was responsible for a abundance of human beings losing their jobs. Whether more were fired than hired since of him is an open inquiry. It’s also claimed he facilitated some jobs going overseas.In a slew of ads the Obama campaign has branded him the “outsourcer-in-chief” and run testimony from workers who suffered at Bain’s hands. In one, Jack Cobb, a steelworker at Kansas Megalopolis Steel, which was bought by Bain only to go bankrupt eight years later, says: “It was like a vampire,” he said. “They came in and sacked the lifetime outside of us.”Republicans’ predictable outrage holds small credibility, not least since the criticisms originated in their ranks. During the primaries Newt Gingrich branded Romney a “vulture capitalist”, while Rick Perry’s campaign made a ring tone in Romney’s voice saying: “I like being able to fire human beings.” Moreover, Romney is standing on his credentials as a businessman, claiming his familiarity will aid him revive the nation’s economic fortunes. That not only invites a critique of his record however demands it.The Republicans are really upset since the ads are working. Polls exhibit that in swing states, where human beings are more likely to have seen the ads, they are twice as likely to see Romney’s age at Bain as a cause to ballot against him – elsewhere the nation is evenly split.At a age when corporate profits are soaring, unemployment is stuck at encircling 8% and poverty is rising, it’s not dense to see why the message would resonate.In his “victory” speech on Super Tuesday Romney described the jobless rate as an “inconvenient statistic” for the White House. “However those numbers are more than data on a spreadsheet; they are worried families and nervous faces,” he said. “And tonight, I’d like to affirm to each of them: You are not forgotten.” However it was precisely by treating human beings as data on a spreadsheet that Bain made its money. Romney never forgot about those worried families since they never figured in his calculations in the first place.The action of buying, slicing, bankrupting, restructuring and selling he practised at Bain is known as “creative destruction”: that method making profits for the shareholders and destroying human beings’s livelihoods if necessary. That’s what capitalism is; that’s what capitalism does. It’s essentially amoral. Its goal is not to constitute jobs, let alone keep them in a certain nation, however to constitute profit.The issue here is not that Democrats offer no alternative to capitalism. Somebody should however they’ve never claimed to. However they offer no challenge to it in its most rapacious, exploitative and ultimately self-defeating incarnation of recent times. It is dense to accept lectures on outsourcing from the party that introduced the North American Autonomous Of Charge of charge Trade Agreement – an outsourcers’ charter liberalising trade between the US, Mexico and Canada. The party that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, loosening regulations that would have mitigated the worst effects of the most recent crisis, has no credibility to preach about business ethics.The Democrats have done a fantastic deal to constitute things simpler for firms like Bain to do the very things they are criticising and precious small to protect the livelihood of human beings like Cobb and his former colleagues in the steel mill.Given the opportunity to reform a banking system where venality, corruption and ineptitude were rife Obama chose instead to prop it up. As such he has proved himself more keen to save capitalism from itself than protect workers from its excesses.He told the bankers at the 2009 meeting: “My administration is the only body between you and the pitchforks.” Following age he should get outside of the path.Twitter: @garyyoungeDemocratsBarack ObamaMitt RomneyRepublicansUS politicsUnited StatesGary Youngeguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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