OBAMA, THE "ANTI-BUSINESS" PRESIDENT

From Paul Krugman's blog:

That’s basically the thrust of Mort Zuckerman’s op-ed accusing Obama of “demonizing” business.

The op-ed contains the usual — false claims that Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis, false claims that fear of government policy — as opposed to weak demand — is holding back investment and hiring. But I was struck by this passage:

The predilection to blame business was manifest in one of President Barack Obama’s recent speeches. He was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. Instead he lashed out at “unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restriction on activities that might harm the environment, take advantage of middle-class families, or, as we’ve seen, threaten to bring down the entire financial system.”

This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonisation – widely seen in the business community as a resort to economic populism on the part of Mr Obama to shore up the growing weakness in his political standing – is exactly the wrong approach.

That sounded odd, since Obama is not, in fact, given to random business-bashing.

More here.

Right. Indeed, Obama is business' chosen messiah, the man who the wealthy elite allowed to ascend to the nation's highest office in order to save the private sector from thirty years of neoliberal orgy and excess, a corporate Democrat cut from the same cloth as Bill Clinton, who spoke in liberalese, exuding good vibes, while ramming NAFTA up labor's chronically raped butthole. Obama Care came pre-approved by Big Pharma and the HMOs, a nice window dressing allowing the health care business to go on pretty much as it has in the past, but now without any threat from future legislative assault. And the Wall Street bailout came with very few strings: most of the top players who caused the financial crisis in the first place are still at the top--hell, a lot of them are working directly for Obama in the White House!

You've got to be a real conservative wack-job to even entertain the notion that President Obama is somehow "anti-business." Such an assertion dies immediately of absurdity upon utterance.

But what intrigues me here is the notion itself of being "anti-business." What, exactly, does this mean? Unless you're a communist, who believes that workers should own the means of production, or a socialist, who believes that the government should own all enterprise, you can't really be described as being "anti-business." Contrary to the psychotic ravings of various FOX News personalities, President Obama can in no way be described as a communist or a socialist.

Dig a little deeper, and "anti-business" gets a little weirder.

There are millions of businesses in this country. Some sell lemonade; some sell automobiles. Some employ hundreds of thousands; some consist of a single individual. Some compete against each other, while some just try to get out of the way of the big guys. Consider, for instance, all the fishermen put out of business along the Gulf Coast because BP, a major player in a totally unrelated industry, had an oops. Are you "anti-business" if you rhetorically condemn the oil giant for destroying all these small businesses? Or are you pro-business?

If I understand the term correctly based on usage, it seems that one is "anti-business" if he asserts anything that any business anywhere on the planet doesn't like. That is, it's like being "anti-American" or "anti-Israel." It is essentially a meaningless epithet used to slime a political opponent with whom one disagrees.

It's almost amusing. Slime is all the conservatives have left to play with these days.

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