This David Sanger piece in the New York Times just pisses me off. God forbid that Obama should fire the CEO of General Motors when the company had gone bankrupt and needed the government to save it. I can’t believe he limited CEO pay for banksters who needed a federal bailout. How could he criticize health insurance companies for jacking rates on people by forty percent? And that’s the set up for this:
But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”
With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach.
This isn’t a debate and it isn’t government overreach. It’s saving the auto and financial industries and making BP, rather than the taxpayers, bail out the Gulf Coast economy. Just because some crazed Republicans want to throw sand in people’s eyes doesn’t make it a debate. And it’s certainly not an “alternative narrative.” It’s an alternative reality. A delusional one.
To Mr. Obama, this is all about rebalancing the books after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, abetted by a faith in markets that, as Mr. Obama put it at Carnegie Mellon University a few weeks ago, “gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” When Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican, opened hearings Thursday about the gulf oil gusher by accusing Mr. Obama of an unconstitutional “shakedown” of BP to create a “slush fund,” he was giving voice to an alternative narrative, a bubbling certainty in corporate suites that Mr. Obama, whenever faced with crisis that involves private-sector players, reveals himself to be viscerally antibusiness.
Joe Barton was giving voice to insanity, which is why his own party threatened to take his ranking membership of the House Energy & Commerce Committee away from him unless he retracted his nonsense.
Mr. Obama clearly sees his presidency as far more than a bully pulpit — he has cast himself as a last line of defense against market excesses that take many different forms. “In the past, corporate America was not only at the table, they owned the table and the chairs around it,” Mr. Obama’s combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in an interview Thursday. “Obama doesn’t start off confrontational, but he will be confrontational if there is resistance to the notion that there are other equities.”
But at the same moment, as his critics on the left have pointed out, Mr. Obama has been warding off calls for far more stringent regulations of the banks, hoping to win at least a modicum of business support — and to defuse the notion that he is at war with American-style capitalism.
At war with American-style capitalism? Really? Does he really need to defuse Michele Bachmann’s fevered imagination? Obama has struck a middle course between what needs to be done and what he can get Congress to go along with. Unless we want to define ‘American-style capitalism’ as epic failure of the banks, the auto industry, the oil and gas industry, and the regulators, then Obama is far more interested in rescuing American-style capitalism than he is in going to war with it.
The Wall Street executives who needed the government to prop them up, but still thought their services were worth millions a year, were cast by Mr. Obama as a shameless privileged class. Toyota was described as seeking profits over safety; Wellpoint, the insurance giant, was castigated for seeking to insulate itself from the new health care legislation by taking actions that the law will soon prohibit.
They were not ‘cast’ that way. That is what they did, and that is who they are. There is no other perspective. Not one that a shred of grounding in reality, anyway.
The question is whether the cumulative effects of these actions create an impression that, over the long run, may make it harder to persuade both American and foreign corporations to cooperate with Mr. Obama’s program to reinvest and reinvigorate the American economy…
…And his fortunes over the next two years depend, in part, on showing that he can both turn off the spigot of oil in the gulf and turn on the spigot of aid — out of the coffers of BP’s shareholders. Along the way, he will have to avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.
Yeah, right. Companies aren’t going to business in America because they might get criticized. Oil companies urge their countries to war to get access to oil fields. They’re not going to give up their wells because the president was mean to them. Obama is going to scare off investors by fixing the financial sector and saving major industries from themselves.
David Sanger is a jerk.