[Peace-discuss] Obama carries water for Wall St.

[C. G. Estabrook]

...Meanwhile, on the economic front, Robert Scheer is shocked -- shocked! -- to 
find Obama kowtowing to the robber barons of Wall Street in the latest "bailout" 
plan. He is shocked that the favorite candidate of Wall Street is now committing 
trillions of dollars of public money to save Wall Street from its own fraud, 
crime, greed and stupidity. Yet as Scheer himself rightly notes:


    "What an insipid anticlimax! Rising to “a challenge more complex than our 
financial system has ever faced,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised 
on Tuesday to give trillions more to the very folks who profited from that 
malignant complexity. For all the brave talk about transparency and 
accountability in the banking bailout, he gave the swindlers who got us into 
this mess yet another blank check to buy up the “toxic assets” they gleefully 
created...

    "The New York Times got it right: “… the plan largely repeats the Bush 
administration’s approach of deferring to many of the same companies and 
executives who had peddled risky loans and investments at the heart of the 
crisis. …” Geithner and White House economic czar Lawrence Summers won out over 
David Axelrod and other Obama advisers more loyal to the wishes of grass-roots 
voters; “… as intended by Mr. Geithner, the plan stops short of intruding too 
significantly into bankers’ affairs even as they come onto the public dole.”

    "The word dole is usually applied heartlessly to welfare mothers sustained 
in their dire poverty by meager government handouts, not to the top bankers now 
ripping off the taxpayers. But as opposed to welfare mothers, who must survive 
stringent monitoring, the bankers will be largely self-monitoring. No wonder 
that welfare rolls, because of onerous eligibility rules, are not rising 
commensurate to the degree of misery out there. There is no such tough love for 
bankers. '

It is difficult to understand how anyone could expect anything else from a 
president who put people like Geithner and Summers in charge of economic policy. 
Yet, incredibly, Scheer writes:


    "Believe it or not, I fully expected this morning to write a cheerleading 
column hailing Geithner’s reversal of course. Surely the man who as head of the 
New York Fed sat idly by while the Wall Street giants he was supposed to be 
monitoring imploded would have learned the error of his ways. Otherwise why 
would Obama have appointed him?"

Obama appointed him because he expected Geithner to continue the bailout 
policies of the Bush Administration, of course. Scheer seems to forget that it 
was Obama himself who was instrumental in getting the first bailout/giveaway 
bill passed, dramatically coming back to Washington to lobby and cajole 
reluctant Democrats into backing the Bush boondoggle.

This is not ancient history. It only happened a few months ago. It was on the 
front page of all the papers; it was even on the tee-vee. I'm sure Robert Scheer 
heard about it. Yet he is shocked that Obama is now going to continue -- and 
exacerbate -- the worst of Bush's fat-cat rescue plan, while, as Scheer notes, 
millions of ordinary people lose their jobs and homes.

Scheer ends on an ominous -- if completely impotent -- note:


    "If like me you still get those chatty e-mails from the Obama campaign, it 
is time to remind them that we voted for the caring community organizer from the 
streets of Chicago and not some hack carrying water for the predators of Wall 
Street."

Like a previous president from Illinois -- who turned a brief period of youthful 
rail-splitting into an enduring PR legend while he himself became a prosperous 
railroad lawyer -- it looks like Obama will feast on his liberal cred as a 
"caring community organizer" for years to come. But whatever he may have been in 
those distant callow days of youth, he ran for president quite openly as a "hack 
carrying water for the predators of Wall Street," as we noted here long ago, 
following up on the diligent reporting of many others. (Such as Pam Martens, 
Mike Whitney and Arthur Silber. For examples, see here, here, and here.)

As with the moves to cover up and continue the Bush-Cheney torture system, 
Obama's multitrillion-dollar giveaway to the rich might be "shocking" in the 
moral sense; but none of it should come as any surprise.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/