What??? The socialists aren't happy with Obama? Read and see for yourself.

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SocialistWorker.org January 7, 2013 Editorial

YOU DON'T have to be a socialist to see that Barack Obama has used the "fiscal cliff" tax deal to once again stiff workers, coddle the rich and further the corporate agenda.

Here's the New York Times on the agreement with Congressional Republicans that made the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich permanent on income less than $450,000 per year, while raising taxes on all working people by ending the payroll tax break:

Just a few years ago, the tax deal pushed through Congress on Tuesday would have been a Republican fiscal fantasy, a sweeping bill that locks in virtually all of the Bush-era tax cuts, exempts almost all estates from taxation, and enshrines the former president's credo that dividends and capital gains should be taxed equally and gently.

Nowadays, though, the deal is being sold by liberal Democrats as "progressive," with all but three Senate Democrats voting in favor of it. When a majority of House Republicans rejected the agreement, complaining that it didn't include spending cuts, it was Democrats who backed it overwhelmingly, assuring its passage.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka criticized the fiscal cliff deal as it emerged in the final days of 2012. But he soon changed his line, praising the agreement for sparing Social Security and Medicare from cuts and extending unemployment benefits:

The agreement passed by the Senate last night is a breakthrough in beginning to restore tax fairness and achieves some key goals of working families...A strong message from voters and a relentless echo from grassroots activists over the last six weeks helped get us this far.

snip
LIBERAL CRITICS seem to think Obama's problem is that he is a bad negotiator in the face of intransigent Republicans. "The president remains clueless about how to use leverage in a negotiation," Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee told the New York Times.

In reality, the Obama administration represents the consolidation of a rightward turn in the Democratic Party that began in the 1980s and was furthered by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. From the surrender to Ronald Reagan's tax policies to Clinton's program of free trade and deregulation, the Democrats are making a bid to replace the Republicans as the main party of Corporate America.

With the Republican Party firmly in the grip of the hardline conservatives and committed to increasingly unpopular social policies, business knows it can turn the Democrats--and count on them to, well, take care of business. As historian Van Gosse put it, "The mass party of the center, birthed 20 years ago by Bill Clinton...has been brought to fruition by Barack Obama's savvy Chicago apparatchiks."

That point was underlined by conservative Bruce Bartlett, an economist who served in the White House under George Bush Sr.: "[T]he nation no longer has a party of the left, but one of the center-right that is akin to what were liberal Republicans in the past--there is no longer any such thing as a liberal Republican--and a party of the far right."

Bartlett underscored his point with a quote from Obama himself, made in a post-election interview with the Spanish-language TV network Univision: "The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican."

Remember that the next time you hear someone criticize Socialist Worker for being "ultra-left" when we point out how few differences exist between Democrats and Republicans.

http://socialistworker.org/2013/01/04/ob...are-of-business