Robert Scheer Concisely Disposed of President Obama’s Absurd Claim that He Is a Financial Sector Reformer — Comments on the Nomination of Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary

© 2013 Peter Free

 

11 January 2013

 

 

Citation — to the Robert Scheer column

 

Robert Scheer, The Inconvenient Truth About Jack Lew, Truthdig (11 January 2013)

 

 

Plutocracy rolls

 

Public apathy regarding the President’s “do nothing” record — for example, in not holding Too Big to Fail financial institutions responsible for the arguably criminal excesses that led to the current “economic contraction” — has been disappointing.

 

It is as if the 99 Percent has rolled over for these strong armed pickpockets to do whatever they want to us, with Government’s active encouragement.

 

Below, Robert Scheer explains how the President’s nomination of Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary manifests the same plutocratic bent that the President’s appointment of financial insider Tim Geithner did in 2009:

 

 

I suppose that he can’t be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary.

 

Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.

 

Rubin went to work at Citigroup, the world’s largest financial conglomerate whose legality was enabled by legislation he advanced while in government. He made off with a salary of $15 million a year during his decade at that bank, which specialized in toxic mortgage derivatives and had to be bailed out by taxpayers to avoid bankruptcy.

 

[T]he taxpayer bailout did not interfere with Lew raking in more than $2 million in salary and bonuses in 2008, despite his unit’s glaring failures.

 

Nor did he seem to learn much from the experience as to the need for restoring the sensible government regulation of the financial industry that President Franklin Roosevelt had instituted to prevent another Great Depression and the Clinton administration had destroyed.

 

© 2013 Robert Scheer, The Inconvenient Truth About Jack Lew, Truthdig (11 January 2013) (paragraph split)

 

Yup, Mr. President, that’s the way forward — let the foxes run the hen house.

 

 

Why does the President act this way?

 

I have explained before that I suspect that the President’s oppressed minority origin made him vulnerable to wanting to become one of the In Group.  Once president, it was easier to bend the way the Establishment Plutocracy wanted, rather than do the more difficult work of actually supporting ordinary American people of all races.

 

His propensity for Wealth toadying continues to display itself.  Not only in Attorney General Holder’s virtually non-existent record on financial sector prosecutions, but in the President’s willingness to screw the middle and working classes with the arguably bad bargain that he made in the Fiscal Cliff Deal.  By accepting a combination of:

 

(a) exempted higher incomes (to $400,000/$450,000)

 

and

 

(b) re-imposing two percentage points of the payroll (FICA) tax on wage/salary incomes—

 

the President effectively benefited the financial group that he is in.  Not the rest of us.

 

 

Am I too hard on President Obama?

 

Yes and no.

 

From a psychological point of view — being usually what our genes and personal histories make us — I probably am.

 

I doubt that the President has any more control over how he acts under pressure than I (or anyone else) does.

 

On the other hand, as I have said before:

 

My criticism has been based on what the country needs, as opposed to what the President’s character can apparently deliver.

 

But why criticize someone who cannot help but be the way they are?  Why scold a person whose very qualities got him to the extraordinarily successful position he or she occupies?

 

My answer has been that the nation’s survival needs take precedence over the President’s comfort — and mine in wanting to avoid being thought of as a bigot.

 

In the President’s case, unlike the average person who is in temporarily difficult circumstances, he has had four years to see the effect of his mistaken policies on the nation’s 99 Percent and (for that matter) its literally bleeding Military One Percent.  Yet, not a peep in wiser directions from him.

 

Given this time and evidence, we can conclude that the President’s policies are chosen, not predetermined.  Which leads me to think that I am being fair enough.

 

 

The moral? — No transformative character “miracles” coming, just more of the sadly plutocratic same

 

We get what we pay for and lose what we don’t.  Literally.