When Obama was elected, there were plenty of folks who rightly anticipated that he'd address some if not all of these questions, his election win attributable in no small part to this expectation. Yet as indicated, in the mold of Bush 2, Clinton and Bush 1 before him, Obama has turned out to be nothing more than just another White House 'bank b*tch', to employ the popular vernacular. The evidence for this is irrefutable, some of it cited earlier with the abject failure and/or unwillingness of the US Justice Department under the incumbent to prosecute and jail some of these individuals, both for crimes committed before and since the GFC.
In his 2011 book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, Ron Suskind relates a story that amply illustrates Obama's response to addressing the issues arising from the crisis. The freshly minted president called a meeting of the top Wall Street players at the White House, to which they came fully expecting the POTUS to 'chop them up' big-time. Yet the president had already positioned himself as their guardian and virtual champion. Instead of standing up for the folks who'd been adversely affected most by the crisis -- without whom he'd never have made it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. -- Obama sided with those who'd precipitated the collapse.
Here's how Suskind retells Obama's pitch to the money moguls at this pivotal meeting:
"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks," Obama said. "You guys have an acute public relations problem that's turning into a political problem. And I want to help. I'm not here to go after you. I'm protecting you. I'm going to shield you from congressional and public anger."
Astonishingly, according to Suskind, one of the bankers told the author [that],
"The sense of everyone after the meeting was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything and we would have rolled over. But he didn't -- he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob."
Paul Street, in a recent piece in Counterpunch, underscores Obama's true allegiances by reference to his zeal in pushing -- in a rare and unholy alliance between the White House and Congressional Republicans -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. Such deals have proven themselves time and again not to be in the best interests of ordinary Americans. After noting that labor unions, environmental groups, food safety activists, civil libertarians, civil rights groups, and a good number of Congressional Democrats know that [it is] "all manipulative business propaganda, and [that] the [TPP] isn't really about trade or improved standards", he says:
"The real thrust and significance of the TPP is about strengthening corporations' ability to protect and extend their intellectual property rights....and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) standards, something certain to discourage the enactment and enforce of such standards."
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