Obama isn't a socialist. What he's done is to further combine business and government - as opposed to taking over businesses.
Elutherian pointed out that what's happening is that all profits remain private, but all losses are covered by us via our taxes.
If anyone's wondering how this could happen, keep in mind that for over 30 years, almost every single White House appointee (and there have been thousands of them) to government positions have been from Wall Street. Especially the key cabinet positions. Like the US Treasury.
Keep in mind that the voters have been asking for this for a long time. In the past they called it privatization. That's when a corporation is able to lobby (or bribe and blackmail) officials into granting control of government functions to them, thereby gaurunteeing a steady income source that is funded through our taxes.
What we have now is an evolution of privatization. It's called the merger. Over the last several years, the Wall Street appointees who have been placed in key positions have transformed processes that were designed to serve the needs of taxpayers into processes that are designed to meet the needs of business. It's been sold to the people as a means to create efficiency, and the voters have applauded it and demanded it.
As things have progressed we can now look back and see that this foundation is being used to make an easy transition into integration of Wall Street and government. Government has not become cheaper and easier. It's become larger, more expensive, and more complex, contrary to the selling points that were used to lure us into supporting the efforts. Economists in mainstream media will applaud the increasing Dow but they don't mention that this is the result of trillions of dollars in taxpayer costs that were taken directly from our pockets (and therefore from Main Street) and placed into those corporations that aligned with the integration process.
What we ultimately have now is a system where Wall Street bankers have been given the keys to the castle for several decades as apointees who run poor government. They've collapsed our economy via poor policies in partnership with their finance companies. They then turn to the media and declare that private finance has failed and cannot stand alone - we must help them. Part of the solution is to grant partial control of these Wall Street companies to government officials like Geithner, or Paulson before him. Who came directly from the organizations in question.
Any assumption that the economy is improving or that things are getting better because the Dow is increasing is naive. There is very little connection with Dow performance and real employment figures and income levels for the average American.