President Obama, One Corporate Puppet Among Many

He's not the one running the show, but rather, his strings are being pulled by Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers like Pete Peterson, who is most of the wallet behind the corporate-funded "Fix the Debt" sham campaign. 

Even one of Fix the Debt's key spokesmen admitted that their goal was to create an "artificial crisis" that would justify gutting Social Security. 

Jack Lew, Obama's Treasury secretary, is leading the administration's doublespeak on austerity. In Europe, he's told political leaders to lighten up on austerity measures. But in America, Lew is telling Congress to endorse President Obama's proposals to cut earned benefits for vulnerable Americans who need them to survive, even though Social Security doesn't contribute to the deficit.

Lew is also a pawn of the corporate and financial string-pullers, coming from Citigroup before his years in the Clinton administration's division of budget. He was even guaranteed a bonus by Citigroup if he was able to secure a "high-level" federal job. 

The corporations running our government want our public resources, too. The White House is currently mulling a proposal to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority, which FDR's New Deal established as the nation's largest publicly-owned power company.

Privatization of public resources is one of the key austerity measures being forced by the European Union right now, particularly in scorched-earth economies like Greece and Spain. 

Privatization of public resources, the selling off of a public good for corporate profit, means that the people who depended on that service are usually subject to frequent price gouging, while under the thumb of an unaccountable private corporation.