Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday admitted that the interests of the middle class can “end up being ignored” by a “new international elite” who often exploit “lower-cost immigrant labor” without regard to the implications faced by local workers.
Delivering the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa on Tuesday, the former U.S. President’s long and rambling speech included a touch of populism, and truth, as he reasoned through the consequences faced when people “equally comfortable in New York, London, Shanghai, Nairobi, Buenos Aires, or Johannesburg” make even well-meaning decisions that have negative societal ramifications, including “great economic insecurity” for the middle class.
The “new international elite” and “the professional class that supports them,” to Obama, are “still mostly white and male,” but “a decent percentage consider themselves liberal in their politics” and “modern and cosmopolitan in their outlook, unburdened by parochialism or nationalism or overt racial prejudice or strong religious sentiment.”
“Some of them count Nelson Mandela among their heroes. Some even supported Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States,” said the former U.S. President. “Some even consider me an honorary member of the club” who gets “invited to these fancy things, you know.” (RELATED: Tucker Carlson: America’s Elites Want ‘Immigration Without Limit’)
“In their business dealings, many titans of industry and finance are increasingly detached from any single locale or nation state and they live lives more and more insulated from the struggles of ordinary people in their countries of origin, and their decisions to shut down a manufacturing plant, or to try to minimize their tax bill by shifting profits to a tax haven with the help of high-priced accountants or lawyers, or their decision to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor or their decision to pay a bribe are often done without malice and reflects a rational response to the demands of their balance sheet, shareholders and competitive pressures.”
And yet, these decisions are not without cost, Obama noted.
“But too often, these decisions are made without reference to human solidarity, or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities,” he said, adding that they “don’t get to see the pain in the faces of laid-off workers” and are clueless to the “resentment of an older tradesman when he complains that a newcomer doesn’t speak his language on the job site he once worked.”
They are less subject to the discomfort and displacement that some of their countrymen may feel as globization scrambles not only existing economy arrangements but traditional social and religious norms.”
“While globalization and technology have opened up new opportunities,” said Obama, it has “upended” employment sectors across the world and scrambled “economic and traditional social and religious norms.”
Before Obama became a member of the “new international elite,” Breitbart noted, Obama agreed with many of the sentiments of the middle class hurt by their decisions.
“When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration,” Obama wrote in 2006, two years before he became president.
WATCH: (the segment begins around the 26 minute mark)
