[Peace-discuss] Fw: MSNBC CLIP: Obama's Bailout Double Standard & The Revival Of Reaganism

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Sirota" <ds at davidsirota.com>
To: <unionyes at ameritech.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 4:55 PM
Subject: MSNBC CLIP: Obama's Bailout Double Standard & The Revival Of 
Reaganism


> Obama's Bailout Double Standard And The Revival Of Reaganism
>
> By David Sirota
>
> Campaign for America's Future, 3/30/09
>
> I appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show last night to discuss the
> seeming double standard between the Obama administration's treatment
> of car companies and Wall Street firms. You can watch the clip
> here:There is clearly a double standard at work:
>
> http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009031431/obamas-bailout-double-standard-and-revival-reaganism
>
> Just a few days ago, Wall Street executives were hosted at the White
> House for a cheery photo op and reassurance that they will be getting
> hundreds of billions more in no-strings-attached bailout cash. Then
> this week, Obama demanded the firing of GM's CEO, and said he may
> withhold the mere $30 billion or so that the automakers are
> requesting.
>
> I'm not saying that automakers don't deserve to be pushed around, nor
> am I saying even that GM's CEO shouldn't have been fired. What I am
> saying, however, is that there are two different standards at work
> here.
>
> Why? Shockingly, the Politico quotes "a Democratic official close to
> the White House" as saying the president has "more confidence in the
> leadership on the banking side - that there are people in place who
> understand what went wrong and the steps necessary to deal with this
> disaster." How anyone could have confidence in banking executives at
> a time like this is, as I said, shocking. But, then, this is a White
> House chock full of longtime Wall Street allies - a White House that
> appointed corporate raider Steve Rattner to head the auto bailout, a
> White House who the Wall Street Journal today reports is aiming to
> use the bailout to force autoworkers to accept cuts to their health
> care benefits.
>
> What's fascinating about all this is the surprising revival of
> tactics first pioneered by Ronald Reagan.
>
> Last year, you may recall that Obama took some flack for seeming to
> idealize The Gipper. However you felt about those comments, I think
> we're seeing that they previewed an effort to emulate Reagan's
> tactics - in particular, when it comes to bailouts.
>
> Reagan famously backed a massive increase in the defense budget and
> corporate welfare while pretending to be a budget hawk by bemoaning
> the supposed wastefulness of programs like welfare - programs whose
> expenditures were tiny in comparison to those on the Pentagon and
> corporate welfare.
>
> Likewise, we've seen Obama support giving away hundreds of billions
> of dollars - no strings attached - to Wall Street banks while
> simultaneously presenting himself as getting tough on Corporate
> America with his promise to hold the auto industry accountable for
> its failures. Of course, the automakers are asking for a tiny
> fraction of what Wall Street has already gotten.
>
> It's the same paradigm. Hand out huge sums of cash to powerful
> political constituencies (for Reagan, defense contractors; for Obama,
> Wall Street), withhold a relatively small amount of cash from
> disempowered political constituencies (for Reagan, welfare
> recipients; for Obama, struggling automakers) - then cite the latter
> action as proof of "toughness," and hope nobody remembers the former
> largesse.
>
> Again, I'm not saying the auto industry doesn't deserve to be pushed
> around - but I am saying that in embracing this brazen double
> standard, the Obama administration (at least when it comes to the
> issue of bailouts) is resurrecting the fundamentally dishonest tenets
> of Reaganism, and that's not a good sign.
>
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