October 2009 archive

President Obama fails to go after those responsible for the financial meltdown

By James Lieber,

October 27, 2009,

Miami New Times News

When Barack Obama donned the crusader’s mantle during the 2008 presidential campaign, his web-savvy team created KeatingEconomics.com. The main video showed Charles Keating – the wealthy, politically connected poster child of the ’80s savings-and-loan scandal – in handcuffs.

The video portrayed John McCain as Keating’s stooge and likened the S&L crash to the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. Today’s corporate villains were flashed on the screen, among them AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. The opening narrator was Bill Black, a Ph.D. criminologist and lead attorney at the government’s Office of Thrift Supervision. Black helped steer the brilliant federal effort that cleaned up the S&L industry, won more than 1,000 felony convictions, and recovered millions of ill-gotten dollars.

Those watching the compelling attack ad had every reason to believe Obama’s approach would be just as hard-edged, and that felon-busting G-men would rout the crooks and recover our money.

This was not to be.

As it stands now, there’s only one federal prosecution related to the credit crash and bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush administration in June 2008.

[snip]

The nation’s new top prosecutor, Attorney General Eric Holder, has a history of preferring that deviant corporations be held to no more than a “voluntary cooperation” system in which they privately investigate themselves. Under the “Holder Memo,” written in 1999 when he was deputy AG in the Clinton administration, bad-boy executives and their corporations who turn over evidence to the government qualify for lenient sentences and fines; sometimes they simply walk. The consequences of their crimes often amount to only the cost of doing business.

Original article, by Dudley Edwards, via In Defence of Marxism:

An interesting historical piece, pointing out that Revolutions sustained by the poor and working class can still end up just chainging one boss for the next.

It’s quite interesting and well worth the read.

President Obama and his staff (Rahm Emanuel) are actively undermining Senator Harry Reid’s efforts to get a Public Option through the Senate, with the opt-out provision, and instead favor the Insurance Company blessed “trigger” charade that has been championed by Republican Senator Olympia Snow.

A sitting U. S. President has enormous power to influence wavering Senators on close bills, and keep unity within the Party on important goals. But Obama is not only sitting by passively and refusing to get behind Harry Reid’s effort, he is actually now scoffing at it, and projecting that Reid’s effort can’t work (i.e. sabotaging the momentum) while refusing to lend any proactive help to make it succeed.

NBC News reported that Obama administration officials called Reid’s decision to go ahead with an opt-out public option “dangerous.”

The administration basically told Reid, “You’re the vote counter. But don’t come crying to us when you need that last vote,” Chuck Todd said on MSNBC.

Obama privately discouraged Senate Democrats from pursuing the opt-out plan. “Everybody knows we’re close enough that these guys could be rolled. They just don’t want to do it” a senior Democratic source told the Huffington Post, saying that Obama is worried about the political fate of Blue Dogs and conservative Senate Democrats. “These last couple folks, they could get them if Obama leaned on them.”

Link:

I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.

That’s Matthew Hoh, an Iraq combat veteran who spent most of this year as this country’s senior civilian in chaotic Zabul Province. He just quit the State Department, despite pleas and offers from his superiors, in the full realization that he is putting himself in the hot seat.

Most of the Afghanistan discussion here and in the broader left-liberal blogosphere focuses these days on the administration’s “policy review” and the known unknowns of Cabinet and Pentagon debates. Unfortunately, the “sides” in these debates seem to ignore the people of this country who in increasing numbers tell pollsters they want the war over with, most ricky-tick (to say nothing of the wishes of the people of Afghanistan).

There are those of us who have been arguing, some with restraint and patience, some hollering like our hair is on fire, that the job of progressives is not to speculate on those debates, nor to defer to officials who are said to know more than we, nor yet to mute our criticism of the President lest his enemies take comfort from our words.

Now Matthew Hoh, fresh from the battlefield, says he quit because he knows what must happen if this quagmire is not to claim more thousands of lives, more billions of dollars:

I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, “Listen, I don’t think this is right.”

As we say in the Iraq Moratorium: It’s Got To Stop. We’ve Got To Stop It.



Crossposted from DKos.