Searcher44
Gold Member
I have a very Dark take on the Obama we know now, I'm almost thinking, in the interest of the Left I should self censer
Did he join the Dark Side? I'm not ready to say that quite now. I have to review some things first. Why he didn't make much of an effort to close Quantanamo ? He'll say he tried, couldn't get by Republican Resistance-(RR). Completely stop torture? -(RR) Renditions -(RR) Dark Prisons -(RR). To some degree the excuse has some legitimacy, on the night of the first inauguration a group of Republicans Dons and Godfathers had a summit to decide how to stop what they thought might be an Obama Tsunami smashing through the Status Quo in D.C. Turns out they didn't need to worry. He was much better at selling neo-liberalism to his adoring masses than the Republicans could ever hope to be. A veritable Master of Propaganda. Fooled an old lefty workhorse like me with no problem. Even being a foreign Americanophile watching from the sidelines I shed a few tears Election night. A Black President! Hallelujah! The whisper of a haunting Amazing Grace seemed to play in the electrified environment. The Union Redeemer with the sword of righteousness in his hand. I couldn't believe it, never thought I would live to see such a miracle. A Black President. A conquering Black knight to lead the left from the wilderness. I'm not exaggerating by much what I was feeling.
Of course soon there were events that should have sobered us up like a pail of cold water in the face perhaps. The great economic advisors of his campaign, what happened to them ? Where did Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich go? Tim Giethner Treasury Secretary? And fuck did Tim walk through the Golden Revolving Door when he returned to Wall St. Here's how CommonDreams describes it:
"Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."
In an interview Joseph Stiglitz laid it out a little more,,,,
Stiglitz: "But those of us who looked at the data, people like Bob Shiller who studied the housing market, said no, there'd been a bubble. You've been living in fantasyland, and the price declines that you've seen are not going to be reversed any time soon"."Unfortunately it appears as if the Obama administration paid more attention to those who were the dreamers that the market would come back [than] to the realists who said no there'd been a bubble, and you've done some pretty bad lending, and now you're going to have to face the consequences."
"Now we're four years after the breaking of the bubble, and housing prices are still down 30 percent, 35 percent below what they were at the peak. Some places 50 percent. In some areas housing prices are continuing to fall. So that was a very fundamental misjudgment that had implications for everything that went on after."
"One of the implications was they never put together a program to address the Americans who were losing their homes. They never did very much to stop the foreclosure movement. A small program, $75 billion was set aside, $2 billion was spent to help homeowners. It was clear that it wasn't given the priority. ..."
Question: That led to what?
"That had both economic and political consequences. The political consequences were that a very large fraction of America came to the view that the Obama administration was on the side of the bankers and not on their side. How can you give all that money to the bankers who caused the crisis and not help a lot of ordinary citizens who were the innocent victims of predatory lending, of all these shenanigans? ..."
More from Commondreams;
"Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. [I've been warning about this for a while now] At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval - and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals".
Ok it's getting late, I'll have to do a part 2 on this.
Did he join the Dark Side? I'm not ready to say that quite now. I have to review some things first. Why he didn't make much of an effort to close Quantanamo ? He'll say he tried, couldn't get by Republican Resistance-(RR). Completely stop torture? -(RR) Renditions -(RR) Dark Prisons -(RR). To some degree the excuse has some legitimacy, on the night of the first inauguration a group of Republicans Dons and Godfathers had a summit to decide how to stop what they thought might be an Obama Tsunami smashing through the Status Quo in D.C. Turns out they didn't need to worry. He was much better at selling neo-liberalism to his adoring masses than the Republicans could ever hope to be. A veritable Master of Propaganda. Fooled an old lefty workhorse like me with no problem. Even being a foreign Americanophile watching from the sidelines I shed a few tears Election night. A Black President! Hallelujah! The whisper of a haunting Amazing Grace seemed to play in the electrified environment. The Union Redeemer with the sword of righteousness in his hand. I couldn't believe it, never thought I would live to see such a miracle. A Black President. A conquering Black knight to lead the left from the wilderness. I'm not exaggerating by much what I was feeling.
Of course soon there were events that should have sobered us up like a pail of cold water in the face perhaps. The great economic advisors of his campaign, what happened to them ? Where did Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich go? Tim Giethner Treasury Secretary? And fuck did Tim walk through the Golden Revolving Door when he returned to Wall St. Here's how CommonDreams describes it:
"Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."
In an interview Joseph Stiglitz laid it out a little more,,,,
Stiglitz: "But those of us who looked at the data, people like Bob Shiller who studied the housing market, said no, there'd been a bubble. You've been living in fantasyland, and the price declines that you've seen are not going to be reversed any time soon"."Unfortunately it appears as if the Obama administration paid more attention to those who were the dreamers that the market would come back [than] to the realists who said no there'd been a bubble, and you've done some pretty bad lending, and now you're going to have to face the consequences."
"Now we're four years after the breaking of the bubble, and housing prices are still down 30 percent, 35 percent below what they were at the peak. Some places 50 percent. In some areas housing prices are continuing to fall. So that was a very fundamental misjudgment that had implications for everything that went on after."
"One of the implications was they never put together a program to address the Americans who were losing their homes. They never did very much to stop the foreclosure movement. A small program, $75 billion was set aside, $2 billion was spent to help homeowners. It was clear that it wasn't given the priority. ..."
Question: That led to what?
"That had both economic and political consequences. The political consequences were that a very large fraction of America came to the view that the Obama administration was on the side of the bankers and not on their side. How can you give all that money to the bankers who caused the crisis and not help a lot of ordinary citizens who were the innocent victims of predatory lending, of all these shenanigans? ..."
More from Commondreams;
"Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. [I've been warning about this for a while now] At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval - and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals".
Ok it's getting late, I'll have to do a part 2 on this.
