Tomorrow Obama will announce that he is nominating Jack Lew for the post of Treasury Secretary. Lew is currently White House Chief of Staff and before that, he was Director of OMB. Lew was Clinton's OMB director from 1998 to 2001, a period that saw the Federal Government run budget surpluses, which resulted in a major collapse of private sector savings, a collapse in the stock market and a recession. (It's a sectoral balances thing.) Lew is an avowed deficit hawk and has been very vocal about reducing the government's deficit and supporting the president's push for a "Grand Bargain." This means that Lew will almost certainly be pushing for more austerity.
So once again Obama spits in the face of the millions of people who voted for him thinking he was was going to stand up for their interests. Austerity will create more unempolyment and sustain the current trend of funneling more and more of our national income and wealth to the top 1%.
