— Insert Candidate Name Here —

is Obama and the Democrats had spent the past year and a half not falling all over themselves catering to the Republicans in the vain hope of right wing votes that they’ll never get, and had instead spent the past year and a half doing everything possible to push through progressive policies (whether by legislation or by executive branch actions) that would have the independents and liberals who tipped the balanced to the Democrats in 2008 turning out in droves and guaranteeing the Democrats  would retain their congressional majority in November.

Real unemployment is now somewhere in the high twenties if not higher, and…

With 11 million homeowners underwater on their mortgages and 3 million more already foreclosed, we have to assume, given the average household size, that some 40 million Americans are feeling mighty strapped. The numbers grow to an overwhelming majority when you take into account the distress of all homeowners, who have watched the value of the family nest egg dwindle even if they substantially paid down or paid off their mortgage debt. And this very widespread feeling of being suddenly much poorer is a nationwide scourge that has dramatically cut the appetite for consumption that drives the economy.

[snip]

The anger of wannabe consumers who no longer feel they have the wherewithal to feed that most important of American passions is what is fueling the widespread rage against elected officials. The Democrats, being the party in power, are the most popular target, but they are in deep denial when they blame their pending electoral plight on the demagoguery of their Republican opponents.

Of course the Republicans and their deep-pocket sponsors are being outrageous hypocrites when they blame others for the horrid consequences of their decades of lobbying for radical financial deregulation. Ever since the “Reagan Revolution,” their mantra has been “get government off the back of big business,” and once that was accomplished and Wall Street crumbled under the weight of its own greed, they supported George W. Bush in bailing out the knaves.

But the fault is clearly bipartisan. It was Bill Clinton who signed off on the radical deregulation legislation, and it is Obama who continued Bush’s practice of bailing out the bankers while ignoring the anguish their toxic mortgage packages caused the rest of us. That is why the Fed has gifted the banks with interest-free money to finance their new acquisitions while making them whole again by purchasing more than $2 trillion in toxic mortgage-backed securities and other dubious assets. Not surprisingly, the bankers pocketed that enormous gift from the taxpayers but did precious little in return by way of lending and investment that would bring down unemployment.

Which brings us to the current disastrous moment. The president who inherited a deep recession that began 13 months before he took office is now viewed as a big “socialist” spender because he followed in Bush’s footsteps, blackmailed by the notion that the entire system would go kaput if the bankers were not accommodated. The amount of money now available for him to spend without freaking everyone out about an increase in the debt is paltry.

And at the risk of sounding like a broken record I’ll say it again…

Rather than bailing out wall street hover the subprime mortgage mess they created for themselves and everyone else, the administration and the fed could instead have paid off every mortgage in the country, subprime or not, for less money (only about 12 trillion) than the 18-20 trillion they gave wall street as a reward for pillaging the economy. This could even have been done with tax credits thus avoiding any outlay of money from the fed.

It would have restored the value behind the CDO mortgage backed securities that wall street got themselves into so much trouble with, and thus saved wall street while tremendously boosting the consumer driven economy as the money would have gone directly to the mortgage holding banks while at the same time effectively doubling the amount of bailout money by lifting a enormous debt weight from all those homeowners who would then have had an equivalent amount of disposable funds to spend any way they chose.

The US consumer economy would be rockin’ by now – maybe even enough to pull the rest of the world out of the hole.

…….

Now, had this been done Obama and the Democrats would likely have lost all future donations from wall street and they’d be whining so loud we  couldn’t hear ourselves think – those donations of course were apparently more important to Obama than bailing out homeowners and working people instead of the party’s corporate owners than the votes independents and liberals would have given the Democrats this November.

Corporate donations are buying the midterm elections? Should anything different be expected? The democratic congress and the democratic president have already capitulated to them. Obama and the Democrats have been on their side since day one.