basquebromance
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- Nov 26, 2015
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Obama’s Failure to Adequately Respond to the 2008 Crisis Still Haunts American Politics
Meltdown, a new podcast from David Sirota and Alex Gibney, makes a compelling case that the failures of 2008 and 2009 — when Barack Obama had a chance to enact the visions of reform that swept him into office — are key to understanding American politics today.
jacobinmag.com
from the article, which i agree with:
For parts of the United States’ liberal intelligentsia, the election of Donald Trump was (and still is) an enigma: a kind of one-off rupture in space and time, unexplainable by the laws that typically govern the universe. One possible explanation of these omissions is that a more honest grappling with the financial crisis and its implications inevitably also involves a reckoning with the record of the Obama administration — a reckoning simply too uncomfortable for some to undertake.
When it comes to the financial crisis of 2008–9, the story told by senior officials in the Barack Obama administration was quite literally that the corporate greed and malfeasance at the root of the collapse couldn’t be prosecuted because no one was actually responsible. “The buck still stops nowhere,” as attorney general Eric Holder put it in 2014: “Responsibility remains so diffuse, top executives so insulated, that any misconduct [can] be considered more a symptom of the institution’s culture than the result of the willful actions of any single individual.” This explanation certainly pleased the country’s leading bankers. But it has also proven mightily convenient for leading Democratic figures themselves, who had appropriately devised the perfect chin-stroking rationale for their own refusal to attack the crisis at its roots or put the interests of average people ahead of Goldman Sachs’s bottom line.
That meltdown, it turns out, isn’t just the economic crisis itself but also the institutional response to it — a response that is deeply interwoven with both the Democratic collapse of 2016 and the continued rise of the extreme right
the meltdown of 2009 is this generation’s pivotal moment. Not the bank failures or the stock market crash in 2008. Those were obviously disasters. But the political disaster that came after. Our government stopped working for its citizens during a moment of profound crisis. We need to unbury this moment, to reexamine it. Because the failure of government then gave us the world we live in now.