Like many left-wing commentators, Robert Reich hasn't yet learned that an Obama promise is One Thing, an Obama action is Something Else. Like, lots of one and none of the other. A list of the promises Obama has made and then ignored or quotes from rousing speeches he's made which he has simply turned around and either ignored or actually violated would be tedious. Pretty much everything he said during the campaign and after his election has been the opposite of what he's done when the time came. Yet Reich seems to have accepted without question that because of Scvott brown, Obama will now be forced to go after the banks and that therefore his recent populist-style speeches are a genuine sign of what we can expect.
Sure they are.
President Obama is now, finally, getting tough on Wall Street. Today he’s giving his support to two measures critically important for making sure the Street doesn’t relapse into another financial crisis: (1) separating the functions of investment banking from commercial banking (basically, resurrecting the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act) so investment banks can’t gamble with insured commerial deposits, and (2) giving regulatory authorities power to limit the size of big banks so they don’t become "too big to fail," as antitrust laws do with every other capitalist entity. A few days ago the White House demanded that the biggest banks repay the $120 billion or so still owed the government from the bailout.
All good, all correct, all important. The President deserves at least two cheers. Why not three? It took him over a year to finally get here. The House has already completed its work on financial reform and may be reluctant to start over. The Senate is in disarray since Chris Dodd, chair of the Banking Committee, announced recently he wouldn’t seek reelection, and is poised to compromise with Wall Street on a number of big issues. Neither chamber has shown any interest whatsoever in resurrecting Glass-Steagall or limiting the size and risk of big banks. In other words, much of the game is over.
Of course it's over, Richie. That's the point. Obama can afford to make pretty speeches attacking the dawgs he's been feeding for a solid year for fear they might bite him because there's not a snowball's chance in hell that the ConservaDem (Old GOP)-New GOP Senate would ever let any of them become law. This is just more of the kabuki, a show for the stoopid masses. He gets points (supposedly) for fighting the good fight while doing it in such a way that he's guaranteed to lose. "Not my fault. I tried to bnrinmg them to heel but the Congress wouldn't go along. That damned filibuster rule! WE ONLY HAVE 59 VOTES!
Me, I'll believe it when I see it and maybe not then, given the willingness of the Old GOP Senate to try every trick in the book to make us believe it's doing something it's not doing. The healthcare "reform" bill was a hard lesson but an important one. We know now how stoopid they think we are and that they're just as willing to lie, cheat, misdirect and misinform as Republicans.
Obama, to make it clear, will do NOTHING to hurt the banks or any other corporate entity that gives the ConservaDems the money to hold onto power in the Democrat party despite the fact that they're a minority (though they may not be for long given the numbermof conservaDems Rahm's recruiting) and nobody in the country, left or right, trusts them or supports them. The banks own him like they own the Senate.
Talk, as they used to say, is cheap. Under Obama, it has also become meaningless. Reich isn't stupid. He ought to know better but he has apparently allowed Brown's Mass upset to talk him out of it.
A cynic might conclude that Obama’s born-again populism is for the cameras. Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts revealed the strength of I’m-mad-as-hell populism in the electorate right now. Add in the $150 billion of bonuses the Street is about to bestow on itself and the outrage meter could blow. With sky-high unemployment and surly voters, Democrats have to show they’re on the side of the people, not the powerful, as Al Gore put it in the last days of the 2000 election (too late to help himself).
No, they don't. The anger has been building for months and what was the response from the leadership when Brown won? That the Democrat party lost because they're too far to the Left. Reich, like Jane Hamsher and dozens of others doesn't get it yet, doesn't want to accept that every move the Democrat party makes these days is pro-corporate, pro-establishment, and anti-people and that's the way they want it. Dig?
Comments