05.29.10
Feinting left…
RG mail
May 28, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by Danny Schechter
We now know that it was the Obama Administration led by the President
himself who used techniques well understood and denounced decades earlier by
none other than Mao TseTung.
Mao had no use for those who talked left to move right.
In several high profile speeches, Obama lashed out at Wall Street for its
greed and mendacity, proposing financial reforms that appeared to be hard
hitting if only because of the way the lobbyists for the financial services
industry squealed about them.
But even as he was feinting left, he and his main economic operative, Tim
Geithner, were moving right to kill off amendments that the bankers hated
like Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a deep audit of the Federal
Reserve Bank and the Brown-Kaufman Amendment that would have broken up the
six biggest banks in America.”
As John Heilman explained in New York Magazine, “Geithner’s team spent much
of its time during the debate over the Senate bill helping Senate Banking
Committee chair Chris Dodd kill off or modify amendments being offered by
more-progressive Democrats.”
He used an old trick: embracing reform publicly while modifying its toughest
provisions privately.
No wonder bank stocks went up when the bill passed.
James Kwak praised the Obamacrats skill at political manipulation on
BaselineScenario.com, “The administration is happy with the financial reform
bill roughly as it turned out, and it got there by taking up an anti-Wall
Street tone (e.g., the Volcker Rule), riding a wave of populist anger to the
point where the bill was sure of passing, and then quietly pruning back its
most far-reaching components. If anything, that’s a testament to the
political skill of the White House and, yes, Tim Geithner as well.
But guess what, the banksters didn’t really get the flim-flam that was going
on. Reports Heilman:
“Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama
as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One
night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry,
I heard the president described as ‘hostile to business,’ ‘anti-wealth,’ and
‘anti-capitalism’; as a ‘redistributionist,’ a ‘vilifier,’ and a ‘thug.’ A
few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO
who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told
that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends
of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a ‘Chicago mob guy.’ Do
all your brethren feel this way? I asked. ‘Oh, not everybody-just most of
them,’ he replied. ‘Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say
Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.’”
Do any of these “smartest guys in the room” remember that in his last
incarnation, Cleaver became a raving right-wing lunatic? In fact, Kwak
believes that that lunacy is pervasive on Wall Street, and at the highest
levels.
“Forget the whole issue of whether they should be grateful to Obama for
first saving their banks from collapse and then toning down the reform bill
so it (a) doesn’t break up their banks, (b) doesn’t meaningfully prevent
them from engaging in proprietary trading, (c) says nothing of substance
about compensation, (d) doesn’t set any hard capital requirements, (e) . . .
The fact that they can see the policies this administration is pursuing and
somehow think they are “anti-wealth” or “anti-capitalist” is as close to
proof as you will find that they are deeply stupid, blinded by their
self-interest, or both.”
Stupid or not, there was one Obama policy they liked: The decision not to
punish any of them by prosecuting their crimes. Not only will they go scot
free but the structural changes so badly needed to prevent a re-occurrence
of this crash. Thus there will be new rules, not real reforms or a
transformation.
In the world of finance, there is almost a universal insistence that only
mistakes were made, mistakes that do not rise to the level of crime. This
past week, AUG, the giant insurer, now owned by the government, was told it
would not be prosecuted criminally,
At the same time, the Administration is still feinting left– appointing a
new financial crimes task force and considering criminal action against
Goldman Sachs. Authorities in Britain have gone further setting up a tough
new agency that makes combating pervasive financial crime a priority.
What a scandal inside this scandal. The Financial Services industry spent a
fortune buying political influence for deregulating and decriminalizing
their industry before housing bubbled so they could later claim their
chicanery and scams were legal.
Then, the investment banks and hedge funds worked with the real estate and
insurance industries to commit a massive fraud against the American people
while “extracting trillions for themselves. They then had the chutzpah to
criticize homeowners as irresponsible.
Sadly, many of our journalists bought this hype and look the other way by
only focusing on laws that protect investors. We need a full investigation
and the use of our RICO anti-conspiracy laws.
Were crimes committed? You know they were.
The FBI found an “epidemic of mortgage fraud.” (These mortgages were later
bundled by Wall Street and sold worldwide with misrepresented values
provided by crooked ratings agencies.) These subcrime mortgages were insured
to protect the investors who knew they were unaffordable. Wall Street
profited while 14 million families lost their homes.
The American people are clamoring for justice but our voices are still being
ignored. The President says he is on our side.
Is he?
Mediachannel
investigates the origins of the economic crisis in his new book
Plunder: Investigating
Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime
Scandal
Books via Amazon).