In a speech last Wednesday at the pro-Democratic Party Centre for American Progress in Washington DC, US President Barrack Obama decried the growth of inequality in America, which he described as the ‘defining challenge of our time.’

“The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe,” he declared.

Obama lamented that ‘our way of life’ has become a celebration of avarice for the few and a nightmare for the many.’

The president went on to note: “The top 10 per cent no longer takes in one-third of our income, it now takes half. Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more.” He added that “a family in the top one per cent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.”

One statistic, he omitted, is the fact that during his administration, 95 per cent of income gains have gone to the richest one per cent of Americans.

Anyone with a respect for the views of ordinary people would have felt obliged to explain how this happened under his watch. But Obama did no such thing. Instead, he proclaimed that “over the course of the next year, and for the rest of my presidency,” his administration would ‘focus all our efforts on fighting inequality.”

It is quite surprising that Obama is presenting himself as a partisan of the average American and opponent of concentrated wealth. He also supports a congressional proposal to raise the minimum wage to a level, in real terms, lower than it was four decades ago.

“I’m going to keep pushing until we get a higher minimum wage for hardworking Americans across the entire country,” Obama said. The proposal, put forward by Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Democratic Congressman George Miller, would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. With this wage, a full-time worker supporting a family of four would fall below the federal poverty level.

Obama called for “making high-quality preschool available to every child in America,” even though his administration signed off on budget cuts that this year removed 57,000 children from the Head Start preschool programme.

Since taking office, Obama has focused his efforts on preserving and increasing the wealth of the corporate-financial elite at the expense of the vast majority of the population. Over this period, median household income has dropped 4.2 per cent, while America’s billionaires have doubled their wealth.

Obama has worked to pump trillions of dollars into the financial system by expanding the bank bailout and supporting the Federal Reserve’s near-zero per cent interest rate policy and money-printing operation, all of which have combined to drive the stock market to record peaks in the midst of an ongoing slump in the real economy.

In 2009, he intervened to scuttle legislation to block $165 million in executive bonuses at the insurance giant AIG and limit the compensation of executives at bailed-out banks and corporations.

The White House’s 2009 restructuring of the auto industry made the imposition of sweeping wage and benefit cuts a precondition for the provision of federal funds to bail out General Motors and Chrysler, setting the stage for wage-cutting throughout the economy.

The administration rejected federal assistance to states and municipalities facing budget crises, leading to the elimination of over 600,000 state and local government jobs since Obama took office. The White House helped organise and intervened in court to defend the bankruptcy of Detroit, setting a precedent for the destruction of the pensions of millions of public employees across the country.

The Affordable Care Act, which Obama cited in his speech as a democratic and egalitarian measure, has already been exposed as a scheme to cut medical care and increase out-of-pocket costs for the working people.

Obama spoke the same day that Harvard University’s Institute of Politics published a poll showing that the majority of 18-to-29-year-olds disapprove of the Affordable Care act, and that less than a third of young people who are uninsured are likely to sign up for coverage under Obamacare.

Perhaps Obama and his handlers, living in the bubble of an artificially created ‘public opinion,’ really believe that occasional flights of populist rhetoric will reverse the mounting anger and disgust of millions of Americans. But they are wrong. Obama’s performance last Wednesday, at odds with his policies, was not unconvincing. —Courtesy: WSWS