Paraphrasing: Our tax cuts in December put us on the path to prosperity bla bla bla...
...but the world has changed and it's been painful bla bla bla...
And then:
I've seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts of once busy Main Streets. I've heard it in the frustrations of Americans who've seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear...
Yes, we've seen that too.
...proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game. They're right. The rules have changed.
That's right. Changed by corrupt politicians who sold out their fellow Americans and passed laws that allowed American companies to pack up and move their operations to countries that effectively have slave labor.
In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100. Today, just about any company can set up shop, hire workers, and sell their products wherever there's an internet connection.
Oh that's it. It's technology's fault. 40,000 factories have closed in the last 10 years because robots took over the Earth. It has nothing to do with the trade policies you are touting later in the speech. Nothing.
Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science.
That's true. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the transfer of our manufacturing sector to these countries. As though you need advanced degrees in math and science to work in sweat shops, assembly plants, and dog food factories.
This is just more Clintonian bullshit that we can educate ourselves out of ridiculously harmful trade policies. Just from a slightly different angle.
Obama then goes on to blow his Business Roundtable dog whistle for all those listening in Davos about sacrifices we need to make, and austerity (freezing federal spending) cloaked in Orwellian guise of "investment" and "efficiency", and the corporatization of our education system under the guise of "reform".
The most nauseating thing about this speech, which could have been delivered by any centrist Republican (channeling Bloomberg?) was the framing of our economy as a competition. This is the sick, technocratic sociopathy that defines the modern Ivy League class. Cold and dehumanizing. It depicts economics as merely a game to be won or lost. And for the Wall Street set, I'm sure it's all very sporting to make a cool billion sacking 20,000 workers from your payrolls.
But to the 20,000 families who just lost their source of survival, and for the children who are evicted from their homes, pulled out of their schools, separated from their families, condemned to live in shame for being homeless, I can assure you it's not a game.
This isn't a fucking game. It's as though we are operating under the same values system as those Enron traders caught on tape talking about screwing "grandma Millie". Have we become so detached from the plight of our fellow human beings that we are willing to allow them to perish for the sake of an ideology? Some sick notion that if they can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps then they get what they deserve?
To be fair, Obama is just using the tools he was given. Whether you're Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, Goldman, Sachs or Barack Obama, you are the product of your conditioning. And like all Harvard and Yale graduates, you are conditioned to preserve your class first and foremost. This is so fully ingrained that even when a member of that class tries to do good in the world, like Jaime Johnson of the Johnson and Johnson fortune, the choices they make, the methods they choose are limited by the primary directive they were conditioned to obey: never betray your class.