So why does a guy in that happy situation staff his economic team with Wall Street mercenaries like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers? Does he really believe that these people hold some sort of leverage over him and over the United States government? It’s just astonishing to think so.
The reality is that the American overclass has just been on the most amazing feeding frenzy for three decades now, to the extent that they’ve simply lost any sense of proportion, whatsoever. The sense of predatory entitlement has become what water is to fish. It is so much a part of their world view that they no longer even have consciousness of it, or any alternative to it, any more than a tuna ever wonders what it might be like to walk on two legs and breathe air.
Fine. I mean what a shock it is, eh?, to find that there are people in this world whose social conscience maxed out in kindergarten, where instead of coloring they instead cut business deals to trick the other kiddies out of their graham crackers. It’s just a given that we have that sort of sicko running around. That’s why we have jails, and that was once why we had the SEC.
Far less clear is why those who are supposed to represent the public’s interests need adopt such mentalities – though, of course, many of them are readily and frequently bought off. But, again, it seems to me that Barack Obama had nothing to gain and everything to lose by carrying water for the mansion-on-every-continent set. Obama has an independent base of support – some of it quite emphatic – and a national crisis or six on his plate compelling even those who are skeptical about the guy in the direction of wishing him every success as president, since his will be theirs as well. So why is he turning his back on those hundreds of millions of supporters and instead looking out for the interests of what are the financial equivalent of serial rapists?
Is this a case of ideological osmosis? Of a complete failure of imagination? Have we simply reached the point where anyone who could plausibly be president in this country cannot fathom government existing for any other purpose than to enrich the already fabulously wealthy, any more than our friend the tuna could possibly dream of playing soccer?
Political analysts have long spoken of ‘regulatory capture’, the process by which industries which are meant to be regulated instead capture control of the government agencies which are meant to be regulating them. A more contemporary version of this concept, and one more applicable perhaps to Obama than to his minions, is the arguably far more dangerous idea of ‘cognitive regulatory capture’. Under that scenario, you don’t even need to infiltrate the agency, because you’ve already captured its mind and narrowed the range of what is thinkable therein. Just as in Orwell’s “1984", the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.
Has Barack Obama been the object of cognitive regulatory capture? It’s hard to know. But it is astonishing that time after time he keeps deferring to the interests of not only the economic elites, but of the outrageously criminal economic elites. He puts Tim Geithner in his cabinet, not Bernie Sanders. And when somebody floats the idea of capping salaries at companies on the government dole, or of limiting bonuses, or of the government truly acting like the owner it actually has become of many of these bailed out firms, there’s Geithner and Summers telling him (and, presumably, Robert Rubin telling them), “No, no, you can’t do that”. And, in fact, no, no, Obama doesn’t.
Imagine that radical concept. Limit executives who have crashed their firms, and the global economy as well, from taking multi-million dollar bonuses out of taxpayer-funded bailout money? Sounds vaguely Marxist, doesn’t it? After all, we can’t have government intervention in the private sector. Don’t forget your catechism. (And just ignore the seeming contradiction of government intervention in the form of bailouts. I mean, why bother with having a religion if you’re not going to be hypocritical?)
When Bill Clinton did this stuff it was surprising, only because he was the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to sell out the public’s interests as if he were a full-blown Republican. What makes it surprising in Obama’s case is that he has so little need to do so, given the crisis we’re in and the support and good will that it automatically provides him, not to mention the self-mutilation of the opposition party’s credibility.
And what makes it really surprising is that Obama not only doesn’t need to go down this path, but he is potentially destroying his presidency by doing so. There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.
Crawling into bed with Public Enemy Number One against the leading wedge of a populist revolt is about as stupid an idea as imaginable for the Obama administration. Why doesn’t he offer another monotone denunciation while he’s at it, this one of pedophiles? Perhaps adding a heartfelt expression of how disappointed he is that there just isn’t more that can be done, darn it. Danged legal contracts! Hey, maybe he could also staff up his Justice Department with paroled sexual predators, too, precisely as he has done in the equivalent manner at Treasury.
And while he’s at it, he can complete the job he began by putting so many Republicans in the cabinet. The GOP has been busy committing suicide for years now, but has dramatically sped up the pace of late, trotting out clown-like figures the likes of which neither Barnum nor Bailey could ever have conceived, even on a particularly pungent acid trip. Jindal, Steele, Limbaugh, Palin, Palin’s daughter. Wow. If there is a Hell, you can bet Barry Goldwater is down there right now furiously trying to change his party registration. Best of all, not only are these losers the face of the Republican Party, lately they’ve taken it a step yet further and have been bringing out the long knives to eviscerate each other. It’s hard to imagine a better situation to be in for a Democratic president.
Which makes Obama’s idiocy all the more astonishing. Probably no one on the planet could rescue the GOP right now, except for Barack Obama. So why on earth is he doing so? Why is he throwing a rope to a drowning disease? And then handing it a cudgel? Why is he breaking into the vault at the CDC in order to cut loose the smallpox virus once more? What could he be thinking? Or is the bag of hammers thinking at all?
Republicans, in their usual fashion, have been highly successful at marketing disastrously pernicious ideas. So, lately, they’ve been out there associating Obama’s massively expensive economic rescue plan with wasteful government spending. In fact, it isn’t that at all. In fact, it is the only hope remaining for reviving this horridly destructive economy that the greedy Wall Street sharks and their political minions created. There will be no monetary policy solution. Interest rates are close to zero, and there’s nowhere left to drop. Demand from China is not going to rescue this economy. Consumer spending? Yeah, right. Rising property values as ATMs for homeowners? How very 2007. This is likely the whole enchilada. If wholesale Keynesianist countercyclical government spending doesn’t rescue the economy, it’s really hard to see what Plan B could possibly be.
But, of course, Republicans have never met a national interest they weren’t anxious to steamroll on the way toward achieving their own narrow self-interests, and this situation is no different. If you’re in the GOP and all you care about is winning elections (and, if you are in the GOP, that is all you care about), your only bad scenario looking ahead is for Obama to successfully rescue the economy. So you try to block him at every turn, and you lie about his program, calling a desperate last-ditch rescue effort straight out of the Macro Economics 101 textbook a porkbarrel exercise in wasteful government spending.
The public doesn’t necessarily want to hear that right now, and certainly doesn’t put a lot of trust in the source. But then there’s old Brilliant Barack, staffing his economic team not only with Wall Street hacks, but tax-cheating, TARP-blowing, Wall Street hacks at that. And then these flunkies tell us there’s just no way that public money can be stopped from being used as a reward for the scam artists who got us into this mess originally. And guess what? All of sudden, miraculously, the worst offenders in the Republican Party start to sound credible.
The reality is that the American overclass has just been on the most amazing feeding frenzy for three decades now, to the extent that they’ve simply lost any sense of proportion, whatsoever. The sense of predatory entitlement has become what water is to fish. It is so much a part of their world view that they no longer even have consciousness of it, or any alternative to it, any more than a tuna ever wonders what it might be like to walk on two legs and breathe air.
Fine. I mean what a shock it is, eh?, to find that there are people in this world whose social conscience maxed out in kindergarten, where instead of coloring they instead cut business deals to trick the other kiddies out of their graham crackers. It’s just a given that we have that sort of sicko running around. That’s why we have jails, and that was once why we had the SEC.
Far less clear is why those who are supposed to represent the public’s interests need adopt such mentalities – though, of course, many of them are readily and frequently bought off. But, again, it seems to me that Barack Obama had nothing to gain and everything to lose by carrying water for the mansion-on-every-continent set. Obama has an independent base of support – some of it quite emphatic – and a national crisis or six on his plate compelling even those who are skeptical about the guy in the direction of wishing him every success as president, since his will be theirs as well. So why is he turning his back on those hundreds of millions of supporters and instead looking out for the interests of what are the financial equivalent of serial rapists?
Political analysts have long spoken of ‘regulatory capture’, the process by which industries which are meant to be regulated instead capture control of the government agencies which are meant to be regulating them. A more contemporary version of this concept, and one more applicable perhaps to Obama than to his minions, is the arguably far more dangerous idea of ‘cognitive regulatory capture’. Under that scenario, you don’t even need to infiltrate the agency, because you’ve already captured its mind and narrowed the range of what is thinkable therein. Just as in Orwell’s “1984", the most powerful effect you can have on people is not by physically limiting their behavior, per se, but instead by getting them to limit themselves in terms of the concepts they are even capable of entertaining.
Has Barack Obama been the object of cognitive regulatory capture? It’s hard to know. But it is astonishing that time after time he keeps deferring to the interests of not only the economic elites, but of the outrageously criminal economic elites. He puts Tim Geithner in his cabinet, not Bernie Sanders. And when somebody floats the idea of capping salaries at companies on the government dole, or of limiting bonuses, or of the government truly acting like the owner it actually has become of many of these bailed out firms, there’s Geithner and Summers telling him (and, presumably, Robert Rubin telling them), “No, no, you can’t do that”. And, in fact, no, no, Obama doesn’t.
Imagine that radical concept. Limit executives who have crashed their firms, and the global economy as well, from taking multi-million dollar bonuses out of taxpayer-funded bailout money? Sounds vaguely Marxist, doesn’t it? After all, we can’t have government intervention in the private sector. Don’t forget your catechism. (And just ignore the seeming contradiction of government intervention in the form of bailouts. I mean, why bother with having a religion if you’re not going to be hypocritical?)
When Bill Clinton did this stuff it was surprising, only because he was the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to sell out the public’s interests as if he were a full-blown Republican. What makes it surprising in Obama’s case is that he has so little need to do so, given the crisis we’re in and the support and good will that it automatically provides him, not to mention the self-mutilation of the opposition party’s credibility.
And what makes it really surprising is that Obama not only doesn’t need to go down this path, but he is potentially destroying his presidency by doing so. There is a growing public anger out there, anger that is long overdue. People are finally beginning to wake up, however foggily, to who is the real enemy of America’s interests and who is the real predator with its fingers rifling their pocketbooks. If this populist rage is properly directed, we could get some sort of healthy outcome, like a reprise of the New Deal social safety net and a badly needed robust regulatory apparatus. If it is not, it might instead be miraculously used to breathe political life back into the very corpses of those who brought this storm down on all of us.
Crawling into bed with Public Enemy Number One against the leading wedge of a populist revolt is about as stupid an idea as imaginable for the Obama administration. Why doesn’t he offer another monotone denunciation while he’s at it, this one of pedophiles? Perhaps adding a heartfelt expression of how disappointed he is that there just isn’t more that can be done, darn it. Danged legal contracts! Hey, maybe he could also staff up his Justice Department with paroled sexual predators, too, precisely as he has done in the equivalent manner at Treasury.
And while he’s at it, he can complete the job he began by putting so many Republicans in the cabinet. The GOP has been busy committing suicide for years now, but has dramatically sped up the pace of late, trotting out clown-like figures the likes of which neither Barnum nor Bailey could ever have conceived, even on a particularly pungent acid trip. Jindal, Steele, Limbaugh, Palin, Palin’s daughter. Wow. If there is a Hell, you can bet Barry Goldwater is down there right now furiously trying to change his party registration. Best of all, not only are these losers the face of the Republican Party, lately they’ve taken it a step yet further and have been bringing out the long knives to eviscerate each other. It’s hard to imagine a better situation to be in for a Democratic president.
Which makes Obama’s idiocy all the more astonishing. Probably no one on the planet could rescue the GOP right now, except for Barack Obama. So why on earth is he doing so? Why is he throwing a rope to a drowning disease? And then handing it a cudgel? Why is he breaking into the vault at the CDC in order to cut loose the smallpox virus once more? What could he be thinking? Or is the bag of hammers thinking at all?
Republicans, in their usual fashion, have been highly successful at marketing disastrously pernicious ideas. So, lately, they’ve been out there associating Obama’s massively expensive economic rescue plan with wasteful government spending. In fact, it isn’t that at all. In fact, it is the only hope remaining for reviving this horridly destructive economy that the greedy Wall Street sharks and their political minions created. There will be no monetary policy solution. Interest rates are close to zero, and there’s nowhere left to drop. Demand from China is not going to rescue this economy. Consumer spending? Yeah, right. Rising property values as ATMs for homeowners? How very 2007. This is likely the whole enchilada. If wholesale Keynesianist countercyclical government spending doesn’t rescue the economy, it’s really hard to see what Plan B could possibly be.
But, of course, Republicans have never met a national interest they weren’t anxious to steamroll on the way toward achieving their own narrow self-interests, and this situation is no different. If you’re in the GOP and all you care about is winning elections (and, if you are in the GOP, that is all you care about), your only bad scenario looking ahead is for Obama to successfully rescue the economy. So you try to block him at every turn, and you lie about his program, calling a desperate last-ditch rescue effort straight out of the Macro Economics 101 textbook a porkbarrel exercise in wasteful government spending.
The public doesn’t necessarily want to hear that right now, and certainly doesn’t put a lot of trust in the source. But then there’s old Brilliant Barack, staffing his economic team not only with Wall Street hacks, but tax-cheating, TARP-blowing, Wall Street hacks at that. And then these flunkies tell us there’s just no way that public money can be stopped from being used as a reward for the scam artists who got us into this mess originally. And guess what? All of sudden, miraculously, the worst offenders in the Republican Party start to sound credible.
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