Meet the New Enemies; Same as the Old Enemies

Krugman uses today's column to talk about corporations' crescendoing fury at the Obama administration:

Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in "a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury" toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. 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. …[T]hey'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 — its embrace of limited financial reform that doesn't break up the biggest banks, its support for offshore drilling, and so on. Yet corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.

From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.

Given the SCOTUS ruling on corporate personhood mentioned in the post below, the notion that corporations will simply buy themselves a new president who will be more sympathetic to their miserable plight of minimal sacrifice is a chilling possibility.

Krugman ends his column by noting that Obama "wanted to transcend bipartisanship" but instead

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 President Obama to find his inner F.D.R., and do the same.

That's a swell idea—provided Obama actually has an inner FDR, a likelihood of which I've seen precious little evidence.