People are pissed.
More than 70 percent of Americans say big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts, a Bloomberg National Poll shows.
An additional one in six favors slapping a 50 percent tax on bonuses exceeding $400,000. Just 7 percent of U.S. adults say bonuses are an appropriate incentive reflecting Wall Street’s return to financial health.
Boy, now THERE'S an issue Democrats could own, if they weren't so beholden to Wall Street themselves. In fact, Democrats are so captured by nefarious Wall Street interests, that Obama himself will be groveling at their feet in a couple of days.
President Barack Obama will sit down with top chief executives on Wednesday for a full-day summit, in his first major meeting with big business since admitting he painted corporate America as “the bad guy” too often during his first two years in office [...]
Business groups have had reason to be cheerful since Mr Obama’s “shellacking” in the November 2 congressional elections, which handed Republicans control of the House of Representatives and reduced the size of the Democrats’ Senate majority.
As I've written several times already, only Obama would apologize to those assholes for helping create their best business climate since forever. There's this:
Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line, even though U.S. corporations are on track for the biggest earnings growth in 22 years and the stock market is headed for its best back-to- back annual gains since 2004.
And this:
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.
The captains of industry, fresh off looting America, are hurt that anyone might have said mean things about them! And while Obama should be leading the pitchfork and torch brigades, he's groveling at their feet instead.
It should be the other way around. Corporate America should be praising Obama to the high heavens and kissing his feet for protecting them from the mob, bailing their asses out, and refusing to get serious about reforming, taxing, and regulating Wall Street and other such industries.
Yet like his lame apologies to the GOP for not reaching out enough, Obama is now trying to "mend fences" with the people who have destroyed America, and will soon gear up to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat him and other Democrats in 2012. Instead of rallying populist sentiment, he's doing everything he can to jump in bed with these hated corporatists. And the end result? It'll be more of this (from the 2010 exit polls):
There's no reason Democrats should be losing the populist anti-Wall Street vote. None. Yet at this rate we won't be turning around those numbers anytime soon.
This would be a better use of his time:
So how about holding a summit with the unemployed, and taking their suggestions? This might "ease strained relations" between the unemployed and the country's leaders and their policies.