01-09-2017, 07:58 AM
(01-09-2017, 01:21 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-09-2017, 12:40 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-08-2017, 06:23 PM)Mikebert Wrote:(01-06-2017, 04:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Remember, I did say that he doesn't have to be a good president in order to be a transformational one. Once that order is gone, hey, it's gone, and the 1T would just be picking up the pieces in its wake. Which was one of the outcomes outlined in T4T.
Presidents who come in after triggers are transformational--a 4T is beginning--Hoover was transformational. The hand he was dealt sucked so bad it was virtually unplayable and so he and his party lost. The problem is that unless there is a catastrophe, elites will not perceive that they have a problem and so have no incentive to cooperate in a fix But if there is a catastrophe on your watch then you are fucked, as Hoover was. It's a Catch 22.
To be technical, Hoover became President about six months before the economy tanked, and had only inappropriate solutions for the triggering event for the worst economic meltdown that any living American (and that is now a very old American) can remember. FDR became President after the politicians of the 3T were largely discredited and the economic elites were stripped of much of the economic power that they might have otherwise used to buy political influence as things got a little better.
Yes. Hoover failed to save the money in the failing banks from destruction, and exacerbated the problem by using trickle down techniques - sending money to big corporations and local governments for infrastructure projects in the hopes that it would trickle down to the common man. It didn't.
Quote: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.
#MakeTheDemocratsGreatAgain