or just the usual CEO greed?So here’s how it is: They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partyers? No, I’m talking about the corporations.
Much reporting on opposition to the Obama administration portrays it as a sort of populist uprising. Yet the antics of the socialism-and-death-panels crowd are only part of the story. If you really want to know what’s going on, watch the corporations.
How can you do that? Follow the money — donations by corporate political action committees.
Look at the campaign contributions of commercial banks — traditionally Republican-leaning, but only mildly so. So far this year, according to The Washington Post, 63 percent of spending by banks’ corporate PACs has gone to Republicans, up from 53 percent last year. Securities and investment firms, traditionally Democratic-leaning, are now giving more money to Republicans. Oil and gas companies, always Republican-leaning, have gone all out, bestowing 76 percent of their largesse on the GOP.
These are extraordinary numbers, given the normal tendency of corporate money to flow to the party in power. What’s going on? One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton- era levels.
Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to CEOs, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.
Now, don’t cry for these people: They’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s. Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry.
Nor are taxes the whole story.
Many Obama supporters have been disappointed by what they see as the administration’s mildness on regulatory issues. Yet corporate interests are balking at those modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.
What President Barack Obama and his party face isn’t simply, or even mainly, an opposition grounded in right-wing populism. Grassroots anger is being channeled and exploited by corporate interests, which will be the big winners if the GOP does well in November.
If this sounds familiar, it should: It’s the formula the right has been using for a generation. Use identity politics to whip up the base; then, when the election is over, give priority to the concerns of your corporate donors. Run as the candidate of “real Americans,” not those soft-on-terror East-coast liberals; then, once you’ve won, declare that you have a mandate to privatize Social Security.
So where does that leave the president and his party? Obama wanted to transcend partisanship. Instead, however, he finds himself very much in the position Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous 1936 speech, struggling with “the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Roosevelt turned corporate opposition into a badge of honor: “I welcome their hatred,” he declared. It’s time for Obama to find his inner FDR, and do the same.
