Barack Obama Seeks to “Scapegoat” the Rich for Nation’s Economic Problems

Newly uncovered comments given by Barack Obama solidify the argument that the president is intentionally fueling an ongoing economic crisis in order to fundamentally transform American society. Excerpted from an interview given to the Hyde Park Citizen newspaper in 1995, the unearthed comments shed light on the president’s divisive and economically painful strategy to “scapegoat” the successful for income inequality in America.

One of the most intriguing sets of remarks ever provided by Barack Obama, the linkages between economy, society, and politics are manifestly shown. The president clearly grasps that the rising cost of living creates intense social pressures and a psychological need for deprived individuals to scapegoat others for their conditions.

The first of Barack Obama’s comments provides a lot to unpack, so analysis will come later in the article:

In an environment of scarcity, where the cost of living is rising, folks begin to get angry and bitter and look for scapegoats. Historically, instead of looking at the top 5% of this country that controls all the wealth, we turn towards each other, and the Republicans have added to the fire.

We will now ponder the next excerpt from the interview, which addresses the president’s view of the top 5%:

It’s about power. My travels made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power. Anytime you have been overseas in these so-called third world countries, one thing you see is the vast disparity of wealth of those who are part of power structure and those outside of it.

These comments are revealing because Barack Obama approaches the American economy as if it internally revolves around a zero-sum or “have and have-not” dynamic. This is a false notion not only describing a characteristic of poorer countries like Kenya, but the kind of static thinking that keeps them poor. What comprises a developed market economy is labor: it is an economic system where one individual’s ambition and effort does not inherently take away from another individual.

Bewilderingly, President Obama acts as if it is impossible for the United States to have become a world economic power without having deprived others of their wealth. Since there is only a set amount of wealth, according to this primitive manner of thinking, as opposed to scarce resources, it is impossible to become richer without stealing something from others; whether money, material, or labor.

The crucial point is that one cannot legitimately become rich in a capitalist system on one’s own without providing something in exchange for money. Bill Gates can be lambasted on the Internet for being a one-percenter by some disgruntled leftist using a Microsoft-run computer. But what the entrepreneur or investor gave to others in order to become rich seems to be utterly forgotten.

By extension, the companies that built this country into a world economic power had nothing to do with stealing from others. Multinational corporations offered people in foreign countries work and those potential laborers had every right to refuse. Additionally, they did not take foreign resources, they paid for them; implying the seller valued the money more than the resources. Microsoft did not need to steal sand from Africa to make silicon microchips.

Such socialist mentality is ultimately spread through profound misconception of the nature of capitalist economy. This is the meaning behind the “we are the 99%” meme — as if the top 1% are depriving those without as much money of their just desserts. It should be pointed out that the top 1% pay nearly 37% of federal income taxes (the top 5% pay nearly 60%).

Beyond Barack Obama’s economic misconceptions, or more accurately, disfiguration is the initial comment, which is the more deeply disturbing of the two provided. The comment is reminiscent of an extended remark by John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace on inflation:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. […]

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. […]

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

It is evident that Barack Obama knows that the essentially Keynesian Fed policy of intentional inflation is both destructive and radical in import. And it is no coincidence that Keynes was a Fabian socialist or that the “centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly” is a plank out of The Communist Manifesto. Barack Obama himself was described by a college classmate as a Marxist-Leninist, which explains his use of the word “scapegoat.” One wonders if the term kulak will slip out next.

The same Federal Reserve system that is financing the welfare state is also turning billions in profit. We are being looted, Americans; and the people whom we call socialists, who supposedly oppose bankers and Wall Street, are merely fraudsters selling capitalists the rope to hang themselves with. And leftists should not consider themselves safe for mistakenly believing they are on the right side of history.