We should be sharing with everyone who is going to leave us, the American people, with an empty cookie jar and no cookies to eat if we don’t raise our voices.
I resent the fact that Obama showed disdain for criticism the public has expressed toward Wall Street investors, bankers, or entrepreneurs. Such criticism is warranted, it’s healthy, and it’s what we need to create the political climate for Obama to not just mend the economy but radically reform the economy. (Get to the root of key problems and ensure they do not happen again).
Addressing & Re-Assessing the Economy
There are many questions to be asked about our economy. For example, Americans should seriously consider if an economy based on growth can be sustainable.
Another question worth raising repeatedly was raised by Keith Olbermann in his interview with David Axelrod after the press conference.
Olbermann: I don’t know when the president developed his personal flow chart on this---the one in which you take grassroots desire for change, you turn that into political power, the voice of the people at the ballot box, and then you transform the political power back into a kind of grassroots action to make change happen. He said this essentially at my high school in 1991. It’s been a concept in there for a long time. How does it apply now to the American public in a time of economic crisis? What is grassroots action during an economic crisis?
Axelrod: You don’t want the debate to be contained within the echo chamber of Washington where the priorities are sometimes skewed and the emphasis is in the wrong place. You want the voices of the American people to be heard because when we travel around what we hear from the American people are the things that we’re talking about…
…We want to make sure that everybody in this town hears from the American people so that what we do reflects their priorities and not the skewed priorities that sometime come out of the Capitol.
Axelrod also said during the interview with Olbermann, “We need enforceable rules of the road for our financial markets,” when asked about rolling back deregulation.
In closing, tonight’s press conference may have been conceived with the intention of dampening the people’s anger toward AIG bonuses, bailouts, and Wall Street in general, but the people must not allow the Obama Administration to calm their anger.
Channel that anger into curiosity and check out what’s going on by looking up some of these big economic concepts and terms being thrown around in the media and by politicians in Washington.
As Matt Taibbi put it recently in his exceptional Rolling Stone article, “The Big Takeover”:
…As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below…
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