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President Obama, who has criticized Bank of America specifically and big banks in general, is scheduled to accept his party's nomination in the institution's home town.
October 13
JAMESTOWN, NC — If President Obama wanted to patch up his relationship with Wall Street, his decision to repeatedly lump bankers in with polluters and offshore drillers was a step in the wrong direction.
Speaking before a group of selected attendees and media at a YMCA gymnasium, Obama singled out Wall Street three times in a speech designed to defend his proposed American Jobs Act against a Republican alternative.
The Republican plan "says we need to go back to the good old days before the financial crisis when Wall Street wrote its own rules," Obama said to a chorus of boos from the audience. "Our plan says we need to make it easier for small business on Main Street to grow and to hire and to push the economy forward."
At one point, Obama sharpened his criticism of a Republican-backed jobs plan, connecting a potential scale back of Wall Street reform to efforts to allow more pollution and offshore drilling. "Now that's a plan—but it's not a jobs plan," he said.
"You can't pretend that creating dirtier air and water for our kids and fewer people on health care and less accountability on Wall Street is a jobs plan," Obama said. "I think more teachers in the classroom is a jobs plan. More construction workers rebuilding our schools is a jobs plan. Tax cuts for small business owners and working families is a jobs plan. That's the choice we face."
Tuesday's speech provided yet another instance where Obama seemingly went out of his way to single out the financial services industry. He has been increasing critical of Wall Street in recent weeks, saying during a press conference earlier this month that, "The American people understand that not everybody's been following the rules, that Wall Street is an example of that."
Obama also singled out Bank of America Corp. after the Charlotte, N.C., company announced plans to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit card use. In an Oct. 4 interview with ABC News, he responded to a question about the fee by saying such a charge is "exactly why we need somebody … whose sole job it is to prevent this kind of stuff from happening."
Obama, already criticized for past comments about "fat cat bankers," soon backtracked from the statement. Later that week, in response to a question about whether the U.S. government has the right to dictate how much profit companies make, he said, "I absolutely do not think that."
On Tuesday, he was back on the offensive, telling attendees that Republican lawmakers are "going to have to explain to working families why their taxes are going up while the richest Americans and the largest corporations keep on getting a sweet deal."
