OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

Obama endorses higher minimum wages and offers rhetorical support of unions and collective bargaining, which cost not a penny of federal funds, but balks at a well-financed public works project that employs workers at good wages but might affect the federal budget.

President Obama's 2015 budget request last month revived his abortive 2014 budget proposal to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). What are we to make of a Democratic president repeatedly proposing to sell off the publicly financed and administered redevelopment program, widely seen as one of the great successes of the New Deal? This move tells us much about Obama. [...]

His proposal that TVA be privatized fits well into a neoliberal framework and satisfies Democratic Party circles in the financial world. As the nation's first black president, Obama may represent a greater triumph for the dormant Democratic Leadership Council--which moved the party from New Deal politics to neoliberalism--than its original standard bearer, Bill Clinton, the first figurative black chief executive.

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