Sen. Obama First African-American President

[defio70]

Where to put Obama's picture?
http://economicrot.blogspot.com/2010/02 ... cture.html

[defio70]

Barack Obama surfed into office on a wave of financial panic. A year later, he's ended up dry but the rest of us are still looking for a life preserver.
So, what happened?
Instead of making financial reform and the economy his first priority, the president chose to follow through on a domestic agenda built for better times. He went to work on health care, high-speed rail, green technology and Iraq. He put financial reform in the hands of people who contributed to the problem...

How health care sent financial reform to a death panel
Commentary: Obama doesn't have the passion for cleaning up Wall Street
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-ob ... 2010-03-02

[dlry]

What a disappointment........


Timmy Must Be Fired, Or Obama Must Be Impeached

So we have the company intentionally avoiding public disclosure of "a
material event." Securities laws are supposed to prevent this sort of
thing - if they're enforced.

Did FRBNY know of this? It sure looks that way:

The FRBNY was aware that Lehman viewed the PDCF not only as a
liquidity backstop for financing quality assets, but also as a means
to finance its illiquid assets.

But wait a second - that's not what the PDCF was intended to be. So
here's a clear statement that FRBNY knew that Lehman (and perhaps
others) were in fact gaming the system and yet they did nothing about
it.

Who ran FRBNY at the time? None other than Tim Geithner.

http://tinyurl.com/y8d535g

[Entendance]

What upsets me the most about the whole healthcare reform fight is this: in a year in which there were far bigger priorities, the Obama administration choose to make healthcare their signature issue. It’s actually infuriating. The biggest banking crisis in 80 years, the worst recession since the end of World War II. Eight million thrown out of work. Yes, healthcare is an issue, but it wasn’t the biggest issue.
So instead of really tackling those issues, he just had his Treasury Secretary conduct a white-wash of a stress test and threw money at the banks. He hastily concocted an $800 billion stimulus package, for whatever good that was. Congress pressured FASB to suspend mark-to-market accounting, the Fed open the liquidity floodgates, and everybody assumed the problems were solved, leaving Obama and the Democrats to chase their white whale, universal healthcare.
And that gave the Republicans their white whale, too, socialism. So everybody’s all geared up to fight this big, bothersome, distracting fight that’s an obsession for both sides, while the real issues, the broken regulatory system, the byzantine tax system, the massive debts at the personal, state and federal level, the deterioration of the middle class, get little more than jawboning.
Political capture. Remember that one.
Meanwhile, the problems aren’t being solved, and have moved up the food chain, from the individual level, to the corporate, and now to the state level...
http://tinyurl.com/yf38o4k

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[dow_3000]

lol... Who would expect this President to do anything other than to kowtow to the political left. Still plenty of supporters waiting to be paid back for getting this out of nowhere Senator from the most corrupt city in America elected to the Oval Office. We have to keep in mind that the modern US President is a politician first. Leadership is way down on their list of qualifications. Maybe it is just another sign of the times. A president is elected by promising the moon (or at least appearing to promise) to the largest base of supporters he can find. Voters elect the person who they think will most likely benefit them personally the most. To hell with the Country.

President Obama blames the current state of the economy on former Administrations (and rightfully so) and feels little obligation to make the tough political moves to effect realistic repairs to the system. He would rather bring on board his team a group of Goldman Sachs alumni that helped put him in office. I see no signs of this changing. One thing that nearly all the people coming from GS have in common is that they are very good at doing whatever is best for themselves. To hell with their clients and partners. To hell with the Greater Good. They can watch out for themselves.

The number one concern of President Obama's supporters in the Democratic Party is to get him re-elected. They can not do this is they are unable to rally enough support to get some kind of healthcare reform passed. They can not risk a Republican victory on this issue. VP Biden got so worked up during the Bill's signing that he use the "f" word to describe how big of deal it was to the President. O.K., they've rammed it through... Now they can start working on the important stuff, right? In a way that is right, but what you and I think is important is unlikely to be nearly as important to Team Obama. His team wants 4 more years, another term in office. Look for him to spread his political repayments to gays, women groups, legalizing pot, immigration... generally anything and everything that will generate enough support by the voters to keep him in the White House.

He is the man the American voters wanted, and maybe the man we deserve.

[dlry]

I think the prior post missed a few points...not because what he said was wrong but because he thinks the people really got what they deserved and whether choosing either side is really a choice? I read this and can see why people would be upset over healthcare from a cost viewpoint:

Chomsky: Health bill sustains the system’s core ills

The decades-long critic of corporate power alleged that premiums won't stop rising as the package is designed in no small part to funnel money into the pockets of the health care industry. "The bill gives away a lot to insurance companies and big pharmaceutical corporations," he said.

The legislation forbids government from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies or permitting the importation of drugs. Nor does it provide competition to private insurers, an oligopolistic industry that will maintain its impunity from antitrust laws. But despite this, Chomsky, an advocate for a single-payer system, said killing the bill wasn't a better solution.

http://rawstory.com/2010/03/noam-chomsky-health-bill/

and obviously people will say he's nuts...he wants us all to have the same healthcare, etc ....but he's upset over the costs and how the power infrastructure in the healthcare industry remains.

Then I reread a post on another business blog which kind of summarizes why this bill was needed in the first place:

Socialism Sucks, But So Does Crony Capitalism

After thinking more about my comments yesterday regarding socialism generically and healthcare specifically, I wanted to make the following point: I feel exactly the same way about the version of capitalism being practiced in this country -- as I stated regularly when all of the bailouts were taking place.

A Reader Brings Up Another "-Ism" I intended to try to refine that view in today's Rap. However, one of our astute readers sent me an email which made many of the points that I wanted to, in commentary that was done so well, I thought I'd just share it:

"BTW, I loved Animal Farm, and while I certainly don't like this healthcare bill either, I think the quote you used ("Some Animals Are Created More Equal Than Others") is probably more relevant to the Wall Street crowd and the bailouts it has received than the healthcare bill. I see the healthcare reform as just one more example of how slowly but surely populist anger will continue to creep into our lives in the form of entitlements for the masses (not a particularly surprising response to the widening wealth gap spawned by the crony capitalism we've been practicing in this country for the past couple of decades).



"I personally blame the greedy fake capitalists (Greenspan, CEOs and their lobbyists, and the Wall St. marketing machine) that have been running this country into the ground since the mid-90's. . . . . Had the pendulum not been allowed to swing so far out of balance, there wouldn't be such a high degree of anger to tap into and you couldn't sell these sorts of things to a normally conservative public."

He has made many important points. The era of greed was fomented by the incompetence and irresponsibility at the Federal Reserve -- paving the way for the reckless behavior on Wall Street (and nearly the entire banking industry), aided and abetted by the abdication of responsibility on the part of the so-called regulators. Had such egregious behavior not taken place, perhaps the mentality of those who feel ripped off (probably a good portion of the country) would be different.

The Bubble's Vortex Draws in the Cerebral Cortex There's lots of damage done by bubbles that are not purely economic. A lot of the corollary damage turns up via a mindset that goes along with it. Remember how nobody seemed to protest much in the late 1990s when companies were making the numbers, beating them by a penny (wink-wink), even though the earnings were obviously being manipulated to meet those estimates? And, nobody really cared when the options-backdating scandal burst onto the scene, because by that time the real-estate bubble was under way. So, poor monetary policies often wind up causing socioeconomic distortions.

And, on the subject of Wall Street greed, there was an interesting story in today's New York Times headlined "Few Fled Companies Constrained by Pay Limits." Crybaby threats notwithstanding, it turns out that 85% of the key people who said they'd leave if their compensation was drastically cut actually stayed put.

But just because Wall Street in its greed wants to have it both ways -- it takes the gains, we take the losses (aided by Congressional complicity, i.e., lobbyists) -- doesn't mean we can fix that problem by creating other problems. Two wrongs don't make a right, particularly given that we've been pursuing shortsighted monetary, fiscal and economic policies for the last 15 or 20 years.

So maybe this is the wrong step on the wrong path but when we come to the fork in the road, does it really take us to a different location? And I guess you can blame Obama...and now that he's in with their crowd I wouldn't expect him to relate with common citizens anymore...but really,.. who does represent the average guy?

[dlry]

Some good points on the health care bill taken from someone else to share here. It looks like the people get fed to the lions again...ouch. http://tinyurl.com/cl7sgy ..as always the lobbyists are in the stands!



I am not a proponent of socialist health care, but I know it when I see it and this isn't it.

It doesn't guarantee universal health care.
It doesn't have single-payer health care.
It doesn't have a public option.
It will force people to buy products from private corporations that will continue to be exempt from anti-trust laws.

Here is a footnoted fact sheet compiled by a group that desperately wanted a socialist version of health care reform and protested the bill that was passed to the end:

Fact Sheet - The Truth About the Health Care Bill

Truth http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/0 ... care-bill/

The HCR bill is, at its heart, an insurance company bailout bill. If it were a socialist bill, health care company stocks would be tanking, not soaring to their highest levels since the financial crisis began. The insurance companies desperately need a bailout due to not only the same types of bad assets that banks are hiding but also because with unemployment up (and not going down anytime soon) there are a lot less healthy people that they can collect premiums for. But after the bank bailout politicians knew that they wouldn't be able to pass it so they included it in a massive HCR bill. It's not socialism; it's just another example of crony capitalism brought to us by the corrupt politicians in Washington.

[defio70]

You would think that rats are health risk, and certainly they are…
Yet, even a meal from Disney’s recent animated movie-star rat seems safer — from both a medical and financial perspective — than the Obama administration’s latest concoction.

http://tinyurl.com/ycmqqem

[dlry]

William Black: "If The Obama Administration Continues This Way, It's Going To Have A Record Disaster At The Mid-term Elections"

In this must watch Real News Network interview with William Black, the outspoken critic of all that is wrong and broken with the current system spares no words to once again denounce the (purposeful) ineffectiveness of the administration, and rightfully predicts that with Obama's current track record of inactivity in dealing with the corruption and criminality at the nexus of finance and politics, there will be a massive loss for Democrats at the upcoming mid-term elections. In Black's words: "We knew as soon as we saw Summers and Geithner that the finance side of the administration would be a disaster, but we hoped that political side would be preeminent and say a) this is substantively wrong to continue get in bed with finance and b) it's terrible politics. The democratic party will be crushed if it does this. The political side has failed to get involved. This is one of those rare things where doing the right thing is really good politics, so support candidates that will actually do the right thing. And if the Obama administration continues this way, it's going to have a record disaster at the mid-term elections. There's going to be a massive loss of democratic seats."

http://tinyurl.com/y9bn7qq

[defio70]

...Obama was clearly the wrong man for the job. He might have been the kind of reformer for the good times, when you really do not need him, dedicated to getting the various parties to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Unfortunately, a crisis demands leadership, and Obama is all fluff in that department. Leaders lead, they do not hold other people up as the leaders, and take them to task for their failure to do the risky things when their leader hides behind a non-existent consensus. I hate to say this, but both Clinton and W were far superior leaders, unfortunately with deeply flawed visions and moral compasses.
Obama may or may not have a sound moral compass, but if he has one, he apparently can't manage to get it out of his pocket to use it. If he himself leaves for a high paying job on Wall Street, then we will know where his compass was pointing, and who bought it for him.
The Democrats are most likely looking at a November massacre in the election, unless some event occurs to pull the nation together such as an externally focused crisis...

http://tinyurl.com/ylcummb