Obama demands deep cutbacks to pay for Wall Street bailout
By Bill Van Auken
23 September 2008
As the Bush administration and Congress continued negotiations Monday on a trillion-dollar bailout package for Wall Street, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama delivered a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin in which he promised to carry out sweeping cuts in government spending and impose strict fiscal discipline on the US government.
“If we hope to meet the challenges of our time, we must make difficult choices,” Obama declared. “As president, I will go through the entire federal budget, page by page, line by line, and I will eliminate the programs that don’t work and aren’t needed.”
As with all of his speeches, Obama’s remarks were pitched simultaneously to two audiences. In an appeal for popular support, he laced his speech with demagogy about “addressing not just the crisis on Wall Street, but the crisis on Main Street” along with condemnations of greedy CEOs and unethical lobbyists.
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