Okay, enough with these attacks from petualant progressives. I'm tired of commenting in multiple articles about what Obama has actually said.
Let's end this: Obama interview with Businessweek
Let's look at the record. I can't go through the entire article, but for copyright issues. So I'll paraphrase as much as possible.
Obama, first goes through a question into why his administration is perceived as "anti business" by 77% of the business community. It's pretty obvious, he states. He concludes that there's a large contingency of powerful interests that have been stirred up by his agenda. Healthcare Reform, Financial Reform and Cap & Trade have powerful enemies that have since spread their complaints throughout all of those industries.
But Obama primarily notes that he's doing those for the middle class which hasn't caught on the economic stream that most corporations were going through for the last couple of years:
Coming out of this past decade, there has been a sense on the part of a lot of middle-class families that they have been left behind, even when we were expanding. And I talked during the campaign about the need for us to restore a sense of balance to the compact between business, government, and employees all across the country.
If businesses are making record profits but employees are seeing their wages flatline—and in fact, incomes decline over the course of the decade—that puts enormous strains on families. It puts, I think, a dampening effect on consumers who help drive this economy. We are going to be better off if everybody feels like they have got a stake in growth and innovation moving forward. And I think that balance got lost.
Some other questions come up with a right wing oriented slant, such as why Obama doesn't have a CEO in his cabinet, and he notes that both Summers and Geithner were chosen primarily because of their previous histories with economic crises. Summers for his work during the Clinton years, and Geithner for his work in the Japanese crisis.
But an interesting line comes up when he talks about this:
I thought it was very important to have Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as two of my key economic advisers early on because they had gone through significant global economic crises before.
Whether that's intended or not, it sounds like Obama's not planning on continuing with Geithner and Summers for the rest of the term and only wanted them "early on". Of course, it's possible I'm reading into it, but one way or another, critics wouldn't have even read this line, and simply read that initial statement from huffingtonpost.
The next few questions deal with Obama's tax credit in the jobs package that's coming up and the deficit commission and whether Obama would discount putting any taxes in the middle class. Like ANY responsible President, he couldn't do that. The deficit commission has to look at all sources of revenue.
The next few questions deal with the so called "controversy" because it's been covered so much, I'm just going to go past it.
Obama then discusses the Volcker rule and what the chances of passage are. He says it may happen in this congress, but congress is "dysfunctional." Then he goes through the questions regarding trade agreements that are pending and goes through Obama's issues with the Chinese currency potentially being manipulated and how that was expanding the trade gap. Obama then concludes by explaining how a better American workforce and more capable one is better for business in the long run, and that shouldn't be called, in any sense of the word, Anti business.
So here's the brief synopsis of what Obama said in the Businessweek article. Y'know how we mock Conservatives from not understanding nuances, we just need to learn that Progressives are Just as bad.