01-09-2017, 05:02 PM
(01-09-2017, 04:29 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-09-2017, 07:58 AM)Odin Wrote:(01-09-2017, 01:21 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-09-2017, 12:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Obama is the President truly caught in a Catch-22: he had to back the financial industry to prevent an economic meltdown already at the same stage of destructiveness as in the late winter of 1931 from making him the "new Hoover" -- but in rescuing those elites he also rescued their potential to buy political influence until by now those elites have enough power to i9mpose a pure plutocracy, a nightmarish order in which about 2% of Americans will be able to get away with enforcing any suffering necessary for the enrichment and pampering of those elites. Maybe we will have been better off to have had a full slide into the economic distress of the 1930s that smashed the narcissism of elites and gutted their economic power, in which case Barack Obama would be entering his second term as President as transformative as FDR instead of someone seemingly intent on stabbing the common man in the back on behalf of people who have no constraints upon their greed and cruelty.
Obama wasn't in a Catch-22 at all. The money in the banks, this time around, was already protected from destruction through the FDIC. Nor was he forced to use the trickle down techniques that he ended up using. Nor would he have been blamed for any negative effects - let's not forget that the unemployment rate continued to rise for two years under his watch, but he still gained reelection by blaming Bush.
Obama was simply stupid enough to listen to the bankers' advice - including that of his own Treasury appointee - on the issue. Of course they wanted the banks bailed out, instead of the more sensible course of letting the bad, failing, banks fail and only bailing out the depositors.
Obama bears full responsibility for "stabbing the common man in the back", as you so aptly put it. And that's why Trump is likely to be an improvement.
If my memory serves me right BUSH was still president when TARP was passed, and it needed to pass because the alternative would have been worse than the Great Depression. When people were saying "The world is going to end if this doesn't happen" they were being fucking serious. The populist idiots on the left and the right who think the bailout was merely some selfish act rather than an emergency measure to prevent absolute disaster are economically illiterate.
Obama only got political fallout because the GOP was able to use the Tea Party to wash their hands of Bush's role in the 2008 Crash.
Valid point about when TARP was passed. Bush certainly gets a full share of blame as well on the issue; perhaps Obama should only get blame for twisting the knife after Bush stabbed it in.
So what "people" were saying the world was going to end? Ultimately, it was bankers and their financial cronies, like Bush's and Obama's Goldman Sachs appointees to Treasury, right? You think they care about the common man's view of the world?
What the financial elites thought was "my world is going to end unless there's a bailout." But they knew that wouldn't be convincing to others, so they claimed "the world" was going to end instead of just their world. And then Bush and a sufficient share of Congress swallowed their claim whole, without looking into it, without looking into alternatives, bailing out the financial elites at the cost of everyone else and of distorting the banking market for years if not decades. And Obama doubled down on bailouts.
Not quite so. It wasn't only the financial elites themselves who said the world could end; nearly every observer in every field said that, and they were right. We were heading off a huge cliff, and only emergency action saved us.
And although I might disagree with the bailouts, because restructuring and downsizing would have been better (as Bernie Sanders recommended), it could not be done because the prevailing neo-liberalism that you believe in stopped it. That would have been "too much interference with the (allegedly) free market." And the other salient point is that Obama's bailouts were better, because provisions were added that made them more accountable for their bailout funds, and because it was followed by financial reforms which may prevent another crash-- except that the neo-liberal Republicans want to repeal it, which would make another 2008 crash all but certain.