I had a lot to say about dubious comparisons of Obama and FDR.
But then I was watching the Young Turks on youtube and I saw a pre-roll ad. The ad was basically making the same argument that DrJ has been making, pushing the narrative that Obama's willingness to hire ex-Wall st. execs for administration jobs and his disinterest in punitive approaches indicates that he's totally in bed with Wall St, and not really an advocate for Joe & Jane America.
Did some digging and found out the ad was created and sponsored by the American Future Fund!
Those dudes are so smart and so profoundly cynical! A pro-wall st lobby group trying to accuse Obama of being pro-wall st! that way he won't be able to get a second term and continue to regulate wall st!
All I'm saying is: be careful of whose talking points you're reciting.
Ugh. Again, no. That's a strawperson argument, and it's beneath you.
Certain critical narratives of Obama are being advanced and funded by cynical organizations with duplicitous intentions. Obvs this doesn't mean all criticism of the guy--including criticism on this particular issue--is invalid. But it does mean people who repeat American Future Fund talking points designed (and undoubtedly focus-group tested) to suppress turnout and drive up negatives are certainly acting in the interests of American Future Fund.
"...be careful of whose talking points you're reciting."
Speaking of persons made of straw, AFF has nothing to do with the work of David Cay Johnston and the comparisons he offered and I cited in response to the Obama campaign's allusions to Roosevelt.
Take a look at Johnston's Wikip and you will see that he has been on the right side of social justice reporting for decades.
I'm sorry @Dawg but your arguments routinely employ devices like, "You've been mislead....", "...be careful whose talking points you're reciting..." as though criticism of this administration is a result of poor critical reading and/or bamboozlement at the hands of nefarious puppet-masters.
I want to see a better Obama in office. I want to see an Obama that responds to the 70% of the public that said they supported Occupy Wall Street in the Fall. I want to see an Obama that cares more about his informed progressives than his centrist-independents and his Wall Street funders. To accomplish this, I believe progressives need to speak out, mobilize, argue their case, and challenge him to correct his errors. That behavior is rational, based on the best information, and good for society.
I'm not sure what allusions to Roosevelt you're referring to (first hundred days? 2009?), but you're still conflating smart criticism and dumb criticism. I still think smart criticism is smart and dumb criticism is dumb.
As I've said before, some criticism of this administration is well-founded. And some of it is based in magical thinking, thirst for vengeance, personal animus toward Obama, misinformation, misremembering what O's platform in '08 actually was, paranoid conspiracy theories, and wall-st-funded efforts to suppress turnout. I object to the second category.
I haven't even engaged Johnston because I haven't caught up with all the bogus stuff you've been dropping.
In my brief mention of FDR, I was responding to those charts, which are interesting but not a great tool for evaluating O's job performance, since they're premised upon a comparison of FDR and Obama that I find dubious at best.
I object to your sarcasm in saying it's ok for "my candidate" to compare himself to FDR because I'm not aware of Obama comparing himself to FDR. Mostly I find him contrasting himself. The limited basis for comparison would be 1) in the context of comparing the size of the agenda he had for his first 100 days back in 2009 (which IIRC he called as ambitious as anyone since FDR, an assessment that I'd call objectively true as Obama's agenda was hella ambitious but less so than FDR), and 2) in the context of placing the economic crisis in historical context (worst since FDR's era--again, objectively true).
If you want me to go into greater depth--for example, listing all the elements of the New Deal that were subsequently ruled unconstitutional and the large-scale political realignments that have limited Obama's toolkit for dealing with the present crises, I can do that.
But it's hard to justify going into that amount of granular detail if you're just going to drop the usual cynical Greenwald/Hamsher "Obamabot" line. This rhetorical strategy (e.g. "O, I see. Critics of your candidate are dupes") paints attempts to defend or even understand the administration's actions as blind attempts to silence legitimate criticism, and demands that we accept the presumption that Obama is acting in bad faith.
It's that "Obamabot" nonsense that I object to, not principally because it's rude and extremely cynical (though it often is), but because it's intellectually lazy and coarsens the political discourse, and doesn't help achieve progressive change.
In contrast, smarter criticism of the Obama administration that acknowledges external realities and focuses on movement building without vilifying our allies has often helped prompt positive action from the administration. Like this.
"The Road We've Travelled" video grounds its arguments and its gravitas in a comparison between the Great Depression and the present crisis. FDR and Obama are both offered as saviors. Is there a way to watch the opening of that video and not see that a favorable comparison between the two is being made?
Johnston, Krugman, Yves Smith, and numerous analysts have pointed out profound dissimilarities between the economic philosophies and policy interventions of the two administrations in response to their respective crises. Obama's team has protected the interests of the financial elite, contributed to massive inequality, and failed to build a case against the systemic abuses and corruption that drove the crisis. Many people have speculated on why Obama and his team have the non-confrontational social and ideological relationship to financial institutions that they do. Whatever those reasons may be, data like Johnston's demonstrate what the social outcome of those policies has been and how that is dissimilar to outcomes of FDR-era policies.
I just watched it again. Axelrod quotes Christina Romer saying "this will be as deep as anything since the Great Depression." And Tom Hanks says "Not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president." This is less a favorable comparison and more a simple bit of contextualization. It seems like the intended effect is "before the inauguration we realized that the economic crisis was really really bad" not "FDR was great and so is Obama."
I certainly agree that Obama's approach and FDR's approach have been dissimilar. I'm even willing to go as far as to say, I'd have vastly preferred an FDR approach; it would have gotten better outcomes. Why did we get the approach we did?
I'd say it's because:
1. New Deal era policies were not what Obama campaigned on in 2008.
2. New Deal era policies would not be politically achievable today because of unprecedented republican obstructionism and the last 40 years of massive political realignments.
3. New Deal era policies would not be legal today, as so many of them have been ruled unconstitutional.
4. New Deal-esque policy shifts would not be popular due to eroding trust in govt (which is why so many of them had been rolled back since the 60s) and Obama didn't have an easy way to get tons of free political capital like Roosevelt did in '33 by ending prohibition.
5. We simply don't have a progressive movement to build on that's even close to as strong as the one that led up to the New Deal.
The Greenwald crowd would have us imagine it's because:
1. Obama doesn't really care about poor people.
In particular this stuff about how he needs to "build a case" is baffling to me. "Build a case?" What is that supposed to mean? It's a phrase as empty as #KONY12's "raising awareness." Do you actually think that the bully pulpit exists? It doesn't.
'Build a case' means literally using the DOJ and regulatory agencies to investigate and prosecute the fraudulent lending and securities practices of the nation's largest financial institutions. Instead, this administration has avoided serious investigations, avoided assigning penalties for mishandling of securities, and promoted legal settlements that minimize disruption to the management of the largest financial institutions.
Following the S&L crash of the 1980's, an army of US attorneys and regulators were mobilized to see that thousands of criminal financial executives were prosecuted, fined, and served time in prison. This administration has chosen a completely different response to pervasive financial criminality.
Is this all news to you? Do you think this is just trumped up spin from unreliable or adversarial sources? Do you think it doesn't matter?
1. There are ways in which minimal disruption to the financial sector while we're still in the throes of a crisis is actually a good thing. I do find the logic of stabilizing markets first convincing at a time of 8% unemployment.
2. In the 80s/early 90s, the S&L prosecutions were pushed by Congress, which also made funding investigations easy. Bush went along with it because it offered good cover so he could look like something was being done, when in fact deregulation of the banking industry largely continued. Which led to the contemporary crisis. Obviously, the S&L prosecutions did jackshit as a deterrent to fraud & abuse. Otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess. Obama's approach has focused mainly on substantive reforms to prevent future crises. Which is okay by me because:
3. I care way more about fixing the system than I do about punishing the bad guys.
4. I'm also comfortable with some of the private (leaked) rationale for fewer prosecutions, like that SEC memo not wanting to see the government extract big penalties from banks that had received bailout money--basically they didn't want taxpayer $ going to settlements.
I'm not immune to revenge fantasies, so I'd love to see more prosecutions once things settle down. 10 year statute of limitations. But in the context of the much more robust regulatory approach that the administration is taking, I'm basically ok with how it's going. So, no, I don't think that criticizing Obama on this issue is crazy. I do think that concluding that he's mainly interested in protecting "elites" is crazy.
I mean, the way you describe it, it sounds like you think Obama is just sitting on his hands doing nothing about fraud and corruption and under-regulation in the financial sector. He created the CFPB and the FSOC. He doubled the size of the CFTC, and is looking at big increases in the budgets for both the CFTC and the SEC, if he can get it through congress. If he can't, blame congress.
[Voters have a] tendency to continually reinterpret the past so that any present problems are placed out of their control. The public did it with the Iraq War, claiming that we were somehow duped into thinking Iraq had WMDs when that required a very willing suspension of disbelief. And now we’re doing it again with Obama. [Obama's critics] describe “why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue” as a “conundrum.” But that is exactly what we wanted in 2008. We didn’t want another George W. Bush, another extremist who bulldozed policies through. We liked Obama’s positivity, his ability to elevate the we without demonizing the other. That is what we wanted, and maybe what we needed. Now the consequences of that are becoming apparent, and if we don’t like that, well, then maybe we should re-evaluate what we want out of politics.
Because that’s really the issue here: what voters want out of politics. If Obama gave a rousing speech demonizing the bankers, it wouldn’t have done a damn thing about policy, it would’ve just made liberals feel better. For fuck’s sake, it’s not like the public likes Wall Street; if all we had to do to get financial reform through was to turn public opinion, we would’ve been there three years ago. The problems are, instead, with the political system.
Re: S&L prosecutions. The relatively clean patch from the mid-80's to the late-00's could be argued to have demonstrated a deterrent effect. Anyway, our crash was the result of a different, bigger, more systemic kind of casino.
I mean "revenge fantasies" in a generally positive sense! Like, the ending of Revenge of the Nerds. At the same time, there's a degree to which the conversation seems to be animated by retributive rather than corrective notions of justice. I don't think that generally accomplishes much.
I mean, I'm fully pro-accountability, but conversations about accountability have got to start here. (Or here.)
I've got no beef with Krugman, but I'd read him as a whipsmart idealist rather than as a guy who knows how to get good laws on the books. Which is fine, we need smart idealists! I appreciate that Krugman doesn't cynically impugn the motivations of Obama's team even when his criticisms are forceful. Like from the last week: he was quite harsh on Obama's pivot to the deficit stuff last year. And he was convincing! I agree, that was a stupid move!
Also, the "relatively clean patch" you speak of was precisely when much of the de-regulation happened that allowed the crisis to happen. Partially because the FBI pulled all their people off of financial crimes to work on counterterrorism, something Obama is now fixing.
I thought the whole alleged beef between pizza baristas & coffee baristas was just a tall tale until tonight. I thought I was ok with coffee baristas. I thought some of them were even kind of cute with their coffee cakes and 'everything' bagels. (Not enough for a meal. And by the way, where's the beer?)
Now I realize I am such a pizza barista. Coffee baristas are so f-ed! Why are they like that? So what if you can make a feather in the cappuccino foam? At least I'm not starving!
oh man I have been listening to that Ch. & the Gang a lot lately
it's like aural Cheetos nowhutimean ... or like a soviet Sesame Street album made by some people whose metal hairpiece picked up American radio "Leningrad Cowboys"
I'm going to blog what is a dollar later thank you
Deep piece from Newsweek about why the US Department of Justice under the Obama administration has failed to prosecute the fraud-bankers and resellers that instigated and profited from the current crisis.
This is a tangent, but GOD DAMN it is hard to read an article on the newsweek website. It is like distractions are jumping at me from 14 directions before I have gotten to the bottom of the page!
I'm feeling bad for Mitt Romney right now! Now he has to be even more ragingly homophobic to "activate the base" or whatever
I love how straight-up BO is. He's like "I just thought about it for awhile, talked to some actual gay people, and now it seems dumb to have ever been opposed to it at all."
My ultimate dream for humanity: Just think for two seconds
well yeah, i don't think he thought about it either, actually. But at least he SAID he did. Like at least someone on the earth is advocating thinking for two seconds. Whereas Romney has to be like "I don't think, I make decisions and I never waver from them no matter what new information I learn"
Something to remember is that his stance was never anti-marriage as much as pro civil union--looking at his 2008 debate statements confirms this. There was an argument that civil unions were just been more politically feasible than marriage, and so it was more practical to rally behind that. That was Howard Dean's position in 2004, for example. This position was actually held by a TON of politico queers in the 2000/2004 cycles, so it's not like it made him some kind of enemy of equality.
I think he's playing up the "evolving" thing because he's trying to model how he wants everyone on the other side to "evolve" which is kinda dorky, but savvy.
[...] "By a more general decree of the president, a civilian Afghan male of fighting age who is killed by a drone aimed at a terrorist is now himself also counted as a terrorist. The reason is that the identity of terrorists is well known by all natives, and the innocent avoid their company. This juggling, as several commentators have remarked, takes us back to the days of the Vietnam body counts, whose method Sartre described with summary accuracy: ‘A dead Vietnamese is a Viet Cong.’
And yet there is no alternative to Obama." [...]
"A Bad President" David Bromwich London Review of Books. July 5, 2012.
For me, a resident of the great state of Washington, the thing is helping humble Jay Inslee beat evil genius Rob McKenna for the Governorship. It's going to be really hard.
MIT professor Noam Chomsky would vote for President Barack Obama if he lived in a swing state, but only to keep Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan out of the White House.
Chomsky explained last week on the Matthew Filipowicz Show that activists should not spend much time on the “carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza” with a few exceptions.
“Between the two choices that are presented, there is I think some significant differences,” he said. “If I were a person in a swing state, I’d vote against Romney-Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice. I happen to be in a non-swing state, so I can either not vote or — as a probably will — vote for [Green Party candidate] Jill Stein.”
did anyone else make it through that UTTERLY EPIC Romney profile in the most recent New Yorker? I did!
Business Worship + Weird Mormon Culture = Mitt Romney. Fascinating stuff. The stuff explaining his business worship was almost literally unreadable to me, would love to know what a Mike Merrill makes of such stuff
I am surprised at how people have exotified his cultural background so much in this presidential race.... when you compare LDS to "typical" American values, it's quite mainstream and forward-thinking. Mormon religion and culture can be called out for being plenty discriminatory and Empirical, but hey... as Americans we are all guilty as charged.
The Mormon stuff in this article was more about how Mormonism prizes leadership and proselytizing/community-outreach, like they all go on their missions and then serve as the leaders of these pods where they help each other polyurethane their houses and stop masturbating and such (article did not mention: solely male Mormons are groomed in this way), which indeed does seem super mainstream "good ol' common horse sense american values" to me, and which in general I did not find that upsetting. Also the article dug really deep into how peculiarly pragmatic the Mormon religion is, like how the most common career path for them is business school, because the religion prizes education but also practicality, so obviously you don't get a humanities degree or whatever, you go to bank school and found Bain Capital. I had never really thought about Practicality As Virtue in and of itself, but it does really make sense as a rationale for Romney, and indeed for many of the actual Mormon humans I know personally.
I do not find the Mormon stuff any creepier than I find any religious stuff, except the article did point out that if elected he would be the most actively religious president in the history of America BY FAR, which obviously I am very much against/disturbed by. But I'd feel the same way if he were just regular christian. I find Mormons to be almost universally less horrific and hateful than your average evangelical/tea party type. If it's a choice between a southern baptist and a mormon I'll take the mormon any day of the week and twice on sunday. Their practicality seems to preclude a lot of hysteria and phobic ranting/actions, which can only be a good thing. Also even though I believe all religion is bullshit, I do appreciate the concept of an open canon--the idea of questions coming up, and then being able to answer them in the Now, rather than only having this one musty-ass old text that's all the answers you'll ever receive. Again, very practical. From its roots on up, it's a very practical religion.
The business stuff was way more disturbing and alienating and fucking mystical than the religion stuff, in my opinion. The way Mitt Romney actually believes that his business career has had a moral trajectory that he is literally unable to explain to voters because we come from a fundamentally different value system, conceptually. The idea of creating jobs or fixing health care having NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with "making people's lives better," and 100% everything to do with saving money, I find deeply alienating and I think most people do if they are honest. And Romney can't understand that, because he so wholly and uncritically ascribes to the Practical Biz Mentality cultivated in him as a side product of Mormonism and as an explicit intentional product of Biz School. To him, making money indicates moral goodness; making money is a moral goal in and of itself. If you save jobs along the way, fine, but if you don't, also totally fine. It's an incredibly abstract, anti-humanistic worldview that, as I said, I actually found hard to read--literally, meaning I had difficulty parsing the content of those sections of the article. It was like reading something about an alien culture that doesn't have a concept of "eating food" or something. Just impossible to put myself in the mindset of someone who could believe these things. Not to mention obviously the fact that it, to me, runs very blatantly counter to everything Jesus said we are supposed to do, but whatever, at this point who's counting.
Basically I find it WAY easier to imagine believing in some bullshit religion than I do in the biz stuff, which if you know me at all you know that is REALLY saying something.
Also the article covered the usual interesting stuff about how Romney for whatever reason simply doesn't have "the magic" that a politician has to have. He doesn't connect with people and no one seems to understand why.
Also the usual daddy issues / thoughtless jingoistic national-centric rhetoric that I really believe people ought to be horsewhipped in the street for mindlessly spouting. "Our enemies who don't support our interests" ought to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands, etc. etc. "Our interests," wtf. Nobody else is allowed to have interests but the U.S.A., etc. By this point, we are used to such rhetoric, as disheartening as it is.
After reading the article I do believe that, unlike a George W Bush for example, Mitt Romney does SINCERELY believe in his religion and SINCERELY believes that he knows what is best for people. I really don't know if this makes him more or less terrifying, honestly. He's obviously a million times more intelligent than GWB, but that's not saying much. He definitely has a sincerity that GWB lacks, and compared to GWB he is refreshingly non-ideological. He's a businessman, first and foremost and almost to the exclusion of all other identities. If something makes or saves a dollar, he will do it, whether that is murdering all poor people or giving all poor people free health care. If a financial study tells him it will save money he will do it. That can be either a good thing or a bad thing, I guess, depending on your perspective.
Also I'm not sure how spending eleventy billion dollars on a military gibes with all this money-saving rhetoric but somehow they find a way, our republicans, they're so brave
Anyway, interesting article. Did not get into the utterly horrific gender elements of Mormonism but I guess that's somewhat beside the point--nobody wants a republican to be feminist or to have an interesting/smart wife, so I guess we can't hold Mormonism to a different standard there.
Comments
Awesome Economics Professor emeritus Richard Wolff explains Greek default and political long game from New Deal through the present crisis.
I recommend! It's fun!
http://majority.fm/2012/03/14/richard-wolff-on-the-failure-of-capitalism/#more-5589
The good stuff starts about 6:00 minutes in.
But then I was watching the Young Turks on youtube and I saw a pre-roll ad. The ad was basically making the same argument that DrJ has been making, pushing the narrative that Obama's willingness to hire ex-Wall st. execs for administration jobs and his disinterest in punitive approaches indicates that he's totally in bed with Wall St, and not really an advocate for Joe & Jane America.
Did some digging and found out the ad was created and sponsored by the American Future Fund!
Those dudes are so smart and so profoundly cynical! A pro-wall st lobby group trying to accuse Obama of being pro-wall st! that way he won't be able to get a second term and continue to regulate wall st!
All I'm saying is: be careful of whose talking points you're reciting.
And when your candidate compares his leadership to Roosevelt, that's ok.
Certain critical narratives of Obama are being advanced and funded by cynical organizations with duplicitous intentions. Obvs this doesn't mean all criticism of the guy--including criticism on this particular issue--is invalid. But it does mean people who repeat American Future Fund talking points designed (and undoubtedly focus-group tested) to suppress turnout and drive up negatives are certainly acting in the interests of American Future Fund.
Speaking of persons made of straw, AFF has nothing to do with the work of David Cay Johnston and the comparisons he offered and I cited in response to the Obama campaign's allusions to Roosevelt.
Take a look at Johnston's Wikip and you will see that he has been on the right side of social justice reporting for decades.
I'm sorry @Dawg but your arguments routinely employ devices like, "You've been mislead....", "...be careful whose talking points you're reciting..." as though criticism of this administration is a result of poor critical reading and/or bamboozlement at the hands of nefarious puppet-masters.
I want to see a better Obama in office. I want to see an Obama that responds to the 70% of the public that said they supported Occupy Wall Street in the Fall. I want to see an Obama that cares more about his informed progressives than his centrist-independents and his Wall Street funders. To accomplish this, I believe progressives need to speak out, mobilize, argue their case, and challenge him to correct his errors. That behavior is rational, based on the best information, and good for society.
As I've said before, some criticism of this administration is well-founded. And some of it is based in magical thinking, thirst for vengeance, personal animus toward Obama, misinformation, misremembering what O's platform in '08 actually was, paranoid conspiracy theories, and wall-st-funded efforts to suppress turnout. I object to the second category.
I haven't even engaged Johnston because I haven't caught up with all the bogus stuff you've been dropping.
(PS: I'll take the pizza side of that argument!)
I read your FDR comment as if it at least partly responded to this. Sorry for any confusion if I misread you.
I meant to be sarcastic but not rude. I extend my apologies if you felt that I crossed that line.
DrJ
I object to your sarcasm in saying it's ok for "my candidate" to compare himself to FDR because I'm not aware of Obama comparing himself to FDR. Mostly I find him contrasting himself. The limited basis for comparison would be 1) in the context of comparing the size of the agenda he had for his first 100 days back in 2009 (which IIRC he called as ambitious as anyone since FDR, an assessment that I'd call objectively true as Obama's agenda was hella ambitious but less so than FDR), and 2) in the context of placing the economic crisis in historical context (worst since FDR's era--again, objectively true).
If you want me to go into greater depth--for example, listing all the elements of the New Deal that were subsequently ruled unconstitutional and the large-scale political realignments that have limited Obama's toolkit for dealing with the present crises, I can do that.
But it's hard to justify going into that amount of granular detail if you're just going to drop the usual cynical Greenwald/Hamsher "Obamabot" line. This rhetorical strategy (e.g. "O, I see. Critics of your candidate are dupes") paints attempts to defend or even understand the administration's actions as blind attempts to silence legitimate criticism, and demands that we accept the presumption that Obama is acting in bad faith.
It's that "Obamabot" nonsense that I object to, not principally because it's rude and extremely cynical (though it often is), but because it's intellectually lazy and coarsens the political discourse, and doesn't help achieve progressive change.
In contrast, smarter criticism of the Obama administration that acknowledges external realities and focuses on movement building without vilifying our allies has often helped prompt positive action from the administration. Like this.
Johnston, Krugman, Yves Smith, and numerous analysts have pointed out profound dissimilarities between the economic philosophies and policy interventions of the two administrations in response to their respective crises. Obama's team has protected the interests of the financial elite, contributed to massive inequality, and failed to build a case against the systemic abuses and corruption that drove the crisis. Many people have speculated on why Obama and his team have the non-confrontational social and ideological relationship to financial institutions that they do. Whatever those reasons may be, data like Johnston's demonstrate what the social outcome of those policies has been and how that is dissimilar to outcomes of FDR-era policies.
I certainly agree that Obama's approach and FDR's approach have been dissimilar. I'm even willing to go as far as to say, I'd have vastly preferred an FDR approach; it would have gotten better outcomes. Why did we get the approach we did?
I'd say it's because:
1. New Deal era policies were not what Obama campaigned on in 2008.
2. New Deal era policies would not be politically achievable today because of unprecedented republican obstructionism and the last 40 years of massive political realignments.
3. New Deal era policies would not be legal today, as so many of them have been ruled unconstitutional.
4. New Deal-esque policy shifts would not be popular due to eroding trust in govt (which is why so many of them had been rolled back since the 60s) and Obama didn't have an easy way to get tons of free political capital like Roosevelt did in '33 by ending prohibition.
5. We simply don't have a progressive movement to build on that's even close to as strong as the one that led up to the New Deal.
The Greenwald crowd would have us imagine it's because:
1. Obama doesn't really care about poor people.
In particular this stuff about how he needs to "build a case" is baffling to me. "Build a case?" What is that supposed to mean? It's a phrase as empty as #KONY12's "raising awareness." Do you actually think that the bully pulpit exists? It doesn't.
Following the S&L crash of the 1980's, an army of US attorneys and regulators were mobilized to see that thousands of criminal financial executives were prosecuted, fined, and served time in prison. This administration has chosen a completely different response to pervasive financial criminality.
Is this all news to you? Do you think this is just trumped up spin from unreliable or adversarial sources? Do you think it doesn't matter?
I don't get it.
2. In the 80s/early 90s, the S&L prosecutions were pushed by Congress, which also made funding investigations easy. Bush went along with it because it offered good cover so he could look like something was being done, when in fact deregulation of the banking industry largely continued. Which led to the contemporary crisis. Obviously, the S&L prosecutions did jackshit as a deterrent to fraud & abuse. Otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess. Obama's approach has focused mainly on substantive reforms to prevent future crises. Which is okay by me because:
3. I care way more about fixing the system than I do about punishing the bad guys.
4. I'm also comfortable with some of the private (leaked) rationale for fewer prosecutions, like that SEC memo not wanting to see the government extract big penalties from banks that had received bailout money--basically they didn't want taxpayer $ going to settlements.
I'm not immune to revenge fantasies, so I'd love to see more prosecutions once things settle down. 10 year statute of limitations. But in the context of the much more robust regulatory approach that the administration is taking, I'm basically ok with how it's going. So, no, I don't think that criticizing Obama on this issue is crazy. I do think that concluding that he's mainly interested in protecting "elites" is crazy.
I mean, the way you describe it, it sounds like you think Obama is just sitting on his hands doing nothing about fraud and corruption and under-regulation in the financial sector. He created the CFPB and the FSOC. He doubled the size of the CFTC, and is looking at big increases in the budgets for both the CFTC and the SEC, if he can get it through congress. If he can't, blame congress.
A system in which bad guys are not held to account is not a system that can be fixed.
How about you and I read Krugman together for a week? Or is he too wacko for you?
I mean, I'm fully pro-accountability, but conversations about accountability have got to start here. (Or here.)
I've got no beef with Krugman, but I'd read him as a whipsmart idealist rather than as a guy who knows how to get good laws on the books. Which is fine, we need smart idealists! I appreciate that Krugman doesn't cynically impugn the motivations of Obama's team even when his criticisms are forceful. Like from the last week: he was quite harsh on Obama's pivot to the deficit stuff last year. And he was convincing! I agree, that was a stupid move!
Also, the "relatively clean patch" you speak of was precisely when much of the de-regulation happened that allowed the crisis to happen. Partially because the FBI pulled all their people off of financial crimes to work on counterterrorism, something Obama is now fixing.
Now I realize I am such a pizza barista. Coffee baristas are so f-ed! Why are they like that? So what if you can make a feather in the cappuccino foam? At least I'm not starving!
They must all die die die!
it's like aural Cheetos
nowhutimean
... or like a soviet Sesame Street album made by some people whose metal hairpiece picked up American radio
"Leningrad Cowboys"
I'm going to blog what is a dollar later
thank you
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/why-can-t-obama-bring-wall-street-to-justice.html
GET SOME ADVICE!
GOT A QUESTION FOR YOURS TRULY OR ANDREW DICKSON? DROP THEM AN EMAIL! ADVICE@URBANHONKING.COM
I'll add it to the about page as well...
We have a president who has taken sides! I repeat, the president has taken a stand!!!!!
Details!
It's about marriage
Pretty cool
I'm feeling bad for Mitt Romney right now! Now he has to be even more ragingly homophobic to "activate the base" or whatever
I love how straight-up BO is. He's like "I just thought about it for awhile, talked to some actual gay people, and now it seems dumb to have ever been opposed to it at all."
My ultimate dream for humanity: Just think for two seconds
I think he's playing up the "evolving" thing because he's trying to model how he wants everyone on the other side to "evolve" which is kinda dorky, but savvy.
[...] "By a more general decree of the president, a civilian Afghan male of fighting age who is killed by a drone aimed at a terrorist is now himself also counted as a terrorist. The reason is that the identity of terrorists is well known by all natives, and the innocent avoid their company. This juggling, as several commentators have remarked, takes us back to the days of the Vietnam body counts, whose method Sartre described with summary accuracy: ‘A dead Vietnamese is a Viet Cong.’
And yet there is no alternative to Obama." [...]
"A Bad President" David Bromwich London Review of Books. July 5, 2012.
For me, a resident of the great state of Washington, the thing is helping humble Jay Inslee beat evil genius Rob McKenna for the Governorship. It's going to be really hard.
Chomsky explained last week on the Matthew Filipowicz Show that activists should not spend much time on the “carefully orchestrated electoral extravaganza” with a few exceptions.
“Between the two choices that are presented, there is I think some significant differences,” he said. “If I were a person in a swing state, I’d vote against Romney-Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice. I happen to be in a non-swing state, so I can either not vote or — as a probably will — vote for [Green Party candidate] Jill Stein.”
Raw Story (http://s.tt/1oSRB)
Oregon is actually pretty close at the moment. Romney is within 10% according to FiveThirtyEight. What's up OR-riders?
Washington, your enlightened society to the north, is +15% for Barry. So it's GREENlight for Stein!
By the way, Noam's Mass. is +20% for Barry.
Business Worship + Weird Mormon Culture = Mitt Romney. Fascinating stuff. The stuff explaining his business worship was almost literally unreadable to me, would love to know what a Mike Merrill makes of such stuff
I do not find the Mormon stuff any creepier than I find any religious stuff, except the article did point out that if elected he would be the most actively religious president in the history of America BY FAR, which obviously I am very much against/disturbed by. But I'd feel the same way if he were just regular christian. I find Mormons to be almost universally less horrific and hateful than your average evangelical/tea party type. If it's a choice between a southern baptist and a mormon I'll take the mormon any day of the week and twice on sunday. Their practicality seems to preclude a lot of hysteria and phobic ranting/actions, which can only be a good thing. Also even though I believe all religion is bullshit, I do appreciate the concept of an open canon--the idea of questions coming up, and then being able to answer them in the Now, rather than only having this one musty-ass old text that's all the answers you'll ever receive. Again, very practical. From its roots on up, it's a very practical religion.
The business stuff was way more disturbing and alienating and fucking mystical than the religion stuff, in my opinion. The way Mitt Romney actually believes that his business career has had a moral trajectory that he is literally unable to explain to voters because we come from a fundamentally different value system, conceptually. The idea of creating jobs or fixing health care having NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with "making people's lives better," and 100% everything to do with saving money, I find deeply alienating and I think most people do if they are honest. And Romney can't understand that, because he so wholly and uncritically ascribes to the Practical Biz Mentality cultivated in him as a side product of Mormonism and as an explicit intentional product of Biz School. To him, making money indicates moral goodness; making money is a moral goal in and of itself. If you save jobs along the way, fine, but if you don't, also totally fine. It's an incredibly abstract, anti-humanistic worldview that, as I said, I actually found hard to read--literally, meaning I had difficulty parsing the content of those sections of the article. It was like reading something about an alien culture that doesn't have a concept of "eating food" or something. Just impossible to put myself in the mindset of someone who could believe these things. Not to mention obviously the fact that it, to me, runs very blatantly counter to everything Jesus said we are supposed to do, but whatever, at this point who's counting.
Basically I find it WAY easier to imagine believing in some bullshit religion than I do in the biz stuff, which if you know me at all you know that is REALLY saying something.
Also the article covered the usual interesting stuff about how Romney for whatever reason simply doesn't have "the magic" that a politician has to have. He doesn't connect with people and no one seems to understand why.
Also the usual daddy issues / thoughtless jingoistic national-centric rhetoric that I really believe people ought to be horsewhipped in the street for mindlessly spouting. "Our enemies who don't support our interests" ought to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands, etc. etc. "Our interests," wtf. Nobody else is allowed to have interests but the U.S.A., etc. By this point, we are used to such rhetoric, as disheartening as it is.
After reading the article I do believe that, unlike a George W Bush for example, Mitt Romney does SINCERELY believe in his religion and SINCERELY believes that he knows what is best for people. I really don't know if this makes him more or less terrifying, honestly. He's obviously a million times more intelligent than GWB, but that's not saying much. He definitely has a sincerity that GWB lacks, and compared to GWB he is refreshingly non-ideological. He's a businessman, first and foremost and almost to the exclusion of all other identities. If something makes or saves a dollar, he will do it, whether that is murdering all poor people or giving all poor people free health care. If a financial study tells him it will save money he will do it. That can be either a good thing or a bad thing, I guess, depending on your perspective.
Also I'm not sure how spending eleventy billion dollars on a military gibes with all this money-saving rhetoric but somehow they find a way, our republicans, they're so brave
Anyway, interesting article. Did not get into the utterly horrific gender elements of Mormonism but I guess that's somewhat beside the point--nobody wants a republican to be feminist or to have an interesting/smart wife, so I guess we can't hold Mormonism to a different standard there.