The scene in the White House these days must be a sort of Opera Bouffe, in which an earnest and rather grave young man moves from one roomful of lesser officials to another in which all agree to pretend that they have prevented the nation from falling into something they call “the abyss.” At the end of Act I, a young deputy FDIC commissioner in the Little Mary Sunshine mold gets down on one knee, belts out a show-stopper about the glories of a bright and shining “tomorrow,” and the audience goes out for intermission to discover that the city has been burning down around the theater all night.
A comment to his post says
You’re letting these rascals off a bit easy. This isn’t just some group of naive idealists pining for dreams lost. The president has purposely surrounded himself with the same Goldman Sachs retreads from the Clinton administration that set this mess in motion by refusing to regulate the derivative markets. The Rubins, Geithners and Summers owe their allegiance to Wall Street, not Main Street.
Obama’s actions against the bankers who have been plundering the country have been curiously muted, either by design, cowardice, or from a desire to deal with them later. Well, like Hunter Thompson said, if you lie down with the pigs they’ll call you a swine every time.
Banker pay curbs are a devious scheme to deceive the taxpayer
And what of the Obama Administration itself? It demonstrates a similar kind of cognitive dissonance evinced by the Federal Reserve. Having left open the gates of the asylum, the President and his main economic advisers profess shock, (“shock!”) that the sociopaths who run our investment banks are back to their old tricks.
Instead of pretend faux populist ploys, the banks need to be broken up and iron-clad safeguards installed and then rigorously enforced. When the government brings backs Glass-Steagall (or institutes something like it), then you’ll know they’re serious. Not before.
When we aid banks in this way, it is like using our blood to feed vampires instead of giving that blood to people who could genuinely use a transfusion.