Washington:
US President Barack Obama slammed the Republican lawmakers for their approach on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the country's economy as well.
Addressing a town hall meeting in Midwestern Wisconsin, Obama charged the leaders of the opposition, Republican Party, of being out of touch.
"Lately we have had to wrangle around what used to be pretty non-controversial things like providing loans for small businesses, extending unemployment insurance when eight million people lost their jobs during the recession," he said.
"But lately, there's a minority of senators from the other party who have had a different idea. They are using power to stop this relief from going to the American people. And they won't even let these measures come up for a vote. They block it through all kinds of procedural maneuvering in the Senate," the President added.
Obama said that the opposition leaders followed the basic theory that if he fails, then they would win and "they figured if we just keep on saying no to everything and nothing gets done, then somehow people will forget who got us into this mess in the first place and we'll get more votes in November. And, that will make people pretty cynical about politics."
On The other party's opposition, Obama said that, it was also rooted in some sincere beliefs about how they think the economy works."They think that our economy will do better if we just let the banks or the oil companies or the insurance industry make their own rules. They still believe that, even after the Wall Street crash, even after the BP oil well blew, that we should just keep a hands-off attitude. They think we should keep doing what we did for most of the last decade leading up to the recession."
"So their prescription for every challenge is pretty much the same - basically cut taxes for the wealthy, cut rules for corporations, and cut working folks loose to fend for themselves. Basically, their attitude is, you're on your own, "Obama said.
The US President seemed perturbed by the recent development on the Wall Street. He said "On Wall Street, the financial industry and its lobbyists spent years chipping away at rules and safeguards that could have prevented the meltdown that was caused by Lehmann Brothers and AIG. But we didn't have those rules in place, that framework of regulation in place. So instead, we saw a disaster that nearly led to the collapse of the entire economy."
"In the Gulf, we don't yet know what caused the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. But what we do know is that for decades, the oil industry has been able to essentially write its own rules and safety regulations. Industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. And oil and gas companies were allowed to basically fill out their own safety inspection forms," Obama alleged.
"In Washington, nearly a decade of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires led to little more than sluggish growth, a shrinking middle class, and your paychecks flat-lined. Wages and incomes did not go up."Even when the economy was growing, it wasn't growing for you. For all the party's moralizing about fiscal discipline, because it is true that part of what we inherited is a real significant problem in terms of spending at the federal level, the economic policies they put in place turned a USD 237 billion surplus into a USD 1.3 trillion deficit, "Obama said.
Referring to the Wall Street Reform Bill, Obama said that the leader of Republicans in the House compared financial crisis to an ant and I'm quoting here "using a nuclear weapon to target an ant."
"This is the same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly 8 million jobs. The same crisis that cost people their homes, their life savings." Obama said. There are Republican lawmakers who are against raising the limit on what companies like BP have to pay if they cause an environmental disaster.
"A few of them said they were against the USD 20 billion fund that we set up to make sure that workers and businesses in the Gulf whose livelihoods have been harmed by the oil spill would get compensation," he said.
"The top Republican on the energy committee apologized to BP. Did you all read about that? He apologized to BP that we had made them set up this fund. Called it "a tragedy" that we had made them pay for the destructions that they had caused. Now, I got to say, they pulled it back after he meant it, but then they kind of walked it back," Obama concluded.