Socialism is GREAT for profits

Socialism is GREAT for profits

by digby

That is if you believe Obama has thrust socialism upon the good old US 'o A.


That is, by the way, an all time high for corporate profits according to a report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

To paraphrase Robert Reich, why is it they need all these tax cuts again?

Via Steve Benen, who quips:

It's against this backdrop that the right still complains bitterly that the president is a radical socialist who says mean things about "job creators." To ask slightly more of those enjoying record profits, Obama's detractors argue, is an outrage. Indeed, many of the business leaders who've benefited under the status quo invested heavily to defeat the president -- ostensibly because they've been so dissatisfied with the status quo.

Increasingly, their cries are literally unbelievable.

One might conclude that they're incredibly thin-skinned, dumb or greedy. My personal suspicion is, as David concludes below, that they are surprisingly a bit of all three. But they are not entirely irrational --- they have spent a lot of of their huge profits to buy both parties and they want something to show for it. They figured Mitt would be their best bet to make a killing but while they put on a show against the Democrats for appearances sake, they know that at the end of the day they own them too.

The good news is that the people intervened in the election (which I'm sure chaps the millionaires' hides) and it's just possible that President Obama has decided to spend his second term burnishing his legacy as a liberal instead of a centrist. At the very least he seems to have gotten the message that in order to make deals with lunatics he needs to stop pretending they aren't lunatics. We still don't know what he thinks the Democrats should be willing to "sacrifice" or how far he'll go to appease them but it's good news that they're at least starting from a position of strength.

I think we can be fairly sure that the millionaires will be just fine no matter what happens.


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