Look, I know as well as the next person that the American public, much like the Cookie Monster, likes boobs more than position papers on banking, and I like Matt Taibbi (I really do), but his latest article is a piece of shit and he’d probably admit as much in a candid moment.
His overall point is one I agree with, which is that it’s simply not the fault of the American media that Donald Trump is doing so well that he’s currently within a few odd hiccups of history of controlling enough uranium to extinguish all sentient life on Earth.
The fault for this does lie largely with the American people.
But, people, whether they’re American or not, are an imperfect and easily broken lot. Demonstrate good leadership, make their lives easier, keep your promises, don’t piss away their money on stupid shit, appeal to their better angels, and you’ll get a happy and somewhat virtuous electorate.
Our current president has done his best. We’ve been fortunate to have him. People are beginning to grasp just how fortunate we’ve been, and just how much worse things can be without that kind of decency and common sense in charge.
But he’s been stymied, let’s face it, and he inherited a smoking husk of country and an opposition that huffs glue every waking moment of the day.
Maybe you should try to turn around a ship of state built by the Dulles Brothers, sustained by a generation of Kissinger acolytes, and policed by folks who’ll garrote you for having a beer summit.
We never did figure out how to be half as good as we tell ourselves we are, but, shit, we really did have a goddamned awesome country here for a while. We knew to throw out a president who breaks into your psychiatrist’s office, not one who horses around with an intern. We could figure out how to pass a 14th Amendment or a Voting Rights Act, not convince half the country that we need neither of those things because of ACORN.
What broke this country couldn’t possibly be its people because the people don’t lead. They are led.
What broke this country is that the people were led poorly.
You can try to put it all at the feet of some all-consuming neoliberalism, and anything that helped hollow out our towns and middle class has to take a lot of the blame. But being pissed off about globalization and corporatism can take a lot of forms, and Trumpism isn’t the only logical one.
Plus, there’s a difference between telling someone that we’ll retrain you to get a job to replace the one that went to India or Mexico, and telling them that you’ll make us safer from 9/11-style attacks by occupying Iraq. Or, you know, that things will be all sweets and candy if we just get rid of that thug, Gaddafi.
Lies, broken promises, and egregious mistakes have a lot to do with how we got here, and, yeah, the media played its part in that. But they get led, too.
Ultimately, it’s the kind of lies you have to tell to get away with this shit that is really the problem here. You’ve got to tell people that banksters fucked up the world by giving poor people a mortgage rather than by setting up a system that depended on them giving out no-doc mortgages. You have to tell people that it’s the Mexicans’ fault that their kids are still living at home at twenty-six, instead of our gutting our public education budgets with voodoo economic theories and no-tax pledges.
If you want to let people down like this and not get your political ass handed to you, you have to introduce The Fear.
You can spread the blame around here with a 7″ mortar hoe, so I’m not saying this is all the fault of the right, by any means. But, ultimately, Trumpism is about race. It’s about opposition to a pluralistic, ecumenical, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan America. It’s about blaming religious and ethnic and racial minorities for our problems and empowering reactionary assholes.
So, why is north of 40% of the country going for this shit?
It’s not because people know more about the Kardashians than Mike Pence’s plan for your miscarriage, or because they’d rather read Trump’s latest insults than Clinton’s plan for revitalizing coal country. And it’s not because the New York Times made some mistake or took too many shots at Hillary Clinton or didn’t hit Trump hard enough.
It’s because they’ve been suffering under bad leadership for so long that the chickens started coming home to roost. That’s what thwarting Obama at every opportunity accomplished. We finally learned that we can’t do shit even with a good president. We learned that our government is every bit as broken as the Republicans told us it was, and they get Trump for their efforts.
Maybe we’ll get Trump, too. I still doubt it, but it could happen.
If we do, it won’t be because of the media or because we somehow deserve it.
It will be because people stopped trusting anyone and finally said, “screw our elites, let’s string them up by their necks.”
“why is north of 40% of the country going for this shit?”
It’s because many of them are in fact on board with Trumpism, sorry to say. It’s because many people in fact oppose a pluralistic, ecumenical, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan America, or at least oppose the speed with which things are changing here. (If you don’t know anyone who opposes same-sex marriage and would like to see it smashed, you’re living in a bubble.)
You can’t say–and you have been saying this, Booman–that Trump is deadly serious, that he’s not a carnival barker, and then say that Trump voters are just generically pissed off at The Man.
Blame the failure of political elites, too; I have no quibble with that. But sorry, We The People should not be let off the hook, Booman.
The fundamental depravity of mankind. A.k.a. original sin.
.
Pretty much. The f.d. of m. doesn’t always win, but it always covers the point spread.
Don’t bet against St. Augustine and the Vegas smart money.
The people are revolting because the leadership failed. The leadership failed because there is no mechanism, absent an effective media, to inform the people when the leadership fails.
I’m still stunned, more than a decade later, that the NYT suppressed the illegal eavesdropping story for 13 months out of fear of swaying the 2004 election against GWB. That’s not a failure of the American people.
Yeah, we care more about the Kardashians than Kissinger: Democrats and Republicans both. But if the media made a spectacle out of the latter, our interests would change–a little. We cared about the hostages in Iran because there was a countdown every night on the news. They can make us care. That’s their job. They’re quite good at making us care about things. They just find it easier and more profitable to encourage our ‘imperfect and easily broken’ impulses by choosing the wrong things. I’m sure there are powerful institutional incentivizes encouraging the media’s elevation of trivia that goes beyond ‘what the people want’ … but resisting those incentives is maybe the definition of ‘leadership.’
So, yeah. I agree. Though I wonder … bad leadership from whom? Obama is blameless, so the Democratic leadership cannot be faulted. The media and the Republicans? Who exactly stymied Obama, and why was the President of the United States so easily and effectively stymied? (Though some here, I’m sure, will say that he wasn’t, that strikes me as fruitless speculation.)
What broke, exactly, and when?
Obama is blameless, so the Democratic leadership cannot be faulted. The media and the Republicans? Who exactly stymied Obama, and why was the President of the United States so easily and effectively stymied?
This is totally wrong. Obama hired Geithner and Rahm Emanuel, so he’s not totally blameless. The Democratic leadership sucks. Do you know who the Democratic candidate for Congress is in the district that I share with Booman? A guy who was a GOPer just 4 short years ago, and who switched parties in 2014 in an aborted run as a Democrat. I could go on and on about the House and Senate but I think you already know about that. And there is is DWS’s disastrous tenure at the DNC.
I wouldn’t have mentioned Libya if I intended to hold Obama blameless. But name anything better we’ve got going right now than our First Family.
True, but his political philosophy is clearly a failure.
I don’t think so at all. Far from it.
Really? No Red and Blue America? Compromise across the isle? That people will respond to appeals to their better angels or common sense?
I’m not saying he has been an ineffective president or even a bad president, certainly better that the other options, but his beliefs about the American people and its politics were clearly wrong.
You’re looking at the President’s projected belief in bipartisanship as merely a legislative strategy. And you underestimate its efficacy in that area as well. We needed a few Republican votes in the Senate to do a number of important things, including the financial stimulus and Dodd-Frank. Responding to a President who asked for bipartisanship held open the very narrow political spaces which Senators Collins, Snowe and Specter decided to walk through. We needed those votes at the time. The political space was not wide enough for a larger stimulus or a better set of Dodd-Frank reforms, but what we got with these and other Laws was desperately needed and vital to our recovery.
I’d ask you to consider the significant electoral benefit the President gained by behaving reasonably, even when his reasonable hand was publicly smacked away by the Republicans. It allowed Obama to win re-election even in the middle of a recovering but still-ailing 2012 economy.
His economic philosophy was and is a failure. Even the damn IMF is saying neoliberalism was a total failure. Nowhere did it ever do anything but ratchet wealth upwards faster and torpedo sustainable growth.
Its social component, that the individual is totally responsible for their own success or failure, is an abjuration of the public responsibility of good government and torpedoes the social contract. Old Testament, indeed, Davis.
His FP is probably as good as one gets from the party establishments in this age of Imperium.
If you think Obama’s economic philosophy can be described as neoliberalism you either don’t understand Obama’s economic record or you’re using the term “neoliberalism” in an extremely idiosyncratic manner.
Did Obama seize the commanding heights of the economy in the name of the workers? Did he call on us to expropriate the expropriators?
Well, then, he’s a neo-liberal.
Do try and keep up…
Not that any American could ever be taught anything by a Frenchman, those commies, but labor power has been maintained over there with an even smaller share of formal paid up union members (~8% vs 11% here):
“…the real source of French union strength today is the statutory powers they enjoy as joint managers, along with business representatives, of the country’s health and social-security system, and as employee representatives in the workplace. Under French law, elected union delegates represent all employees, union members or not, in firms with over 50 staff on both works councils and separate health-and-safety councils. These must be consulted regularly by bosses on a vast range of detailed managerial decisions. This gives trade unions a daily say in the running of companies across the private sector, which accounts for the real strength of their voice.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-15
Combine that with the way they bargain across industries, and you can even welcome the HB1s without worrying you’ll have your wages slashed. Imagine that.
True but the French economy is also pretty bad though I definitely sympathize with that model and that of the Germans.
He was willing to give up on getting more in 2009 in the teeth of the crisis and as a result things have been shit until this very year because it wasn’t good enough. Which I might add, lefties were once again right about as they usually are.
You have become tiresome.
They were people within his own administration who knew what he was proposing big enough.
It’s a funny line, David.
It’s also bullshit. Christine Romer wasn’t sum wild eyed marxist wanna be.
So you trot out this line again.
And its just a misdirection for a serious fucking mistake,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/inside-the-crisis
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/census-bureau-income-wealth-poverty-great-recession-reco
very
Incomes Are Up and Poverty Is Down, but Guess Which Americans Have Gained the Most
“We’ve got a long way to go to get the people at the bottom to where they were.”
EDWIN RIOS
SEP. 16, 2016 1:09 PM
Poverty was down in the United States last year and so was the number of Americans without health insurance. Our median household incomes had their best one-year increase ever, topping $56,500–the highest level since 2007, just before the Great Recession.
…
America’s poorest got a lift: Though 43 million people remained in poverty in 2015, including 14.5 million children, America’s poorest saw their biggest gains since 1968, an indication that job growth is reaching the bottom rung. “When jobs become available, the penetration of work into the poorest of the poor is really deep,” Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the book $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. “You’re not going to get out of poverty if you’re not working full time.” Last year, the US economy gained more than 2.6 million jobs, the second-highest increase since 1999.
Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty dropped by 3.5 million, falling from a bit under 15 percent in 2014 to 13.5 percent in 2015, the largest dip since 1967. More than 8 million families were in poverty last year, down from 9.5 million in 2014. And the number of children under 18 dropped by 1 million. For the first time, the Census Bureau also calculated poverty rates based on people’s actual take-home income–taking into account tax credits and government subsidies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. (The poverty rate is normally calculated based on pre-tax income only.) And while more than 2 million additional Americans were impoverished based on the alternate calculation, 3 million children fell out of poverty…
Obama fucked up on the economy in ’09, but it was a pretty forgivable fuckup. He didn’t evaluate the risk correctly – he saw the political risk from asking for too much stimulus rather then from a recovery that left the party exposed in ’10. And that was wrong – but who knows if he could have gotten a larger request though anyway.
The other fuckup – and this I think is bigger – is the failure to hold Wall Street accountable. I am a former Wall Street lawyer and I think I understand why he didn’t – because everyone involved had 4 attorney’s advising them every step of the way – but the optics remain terrible.
But all of this has been said 500 times.
Obama is miles better than Clinton. But the party needed to move left after him – and didn’t find the right person to make that happen.
I watched the BBC the night of Brexit. The anchor noted all of the economic projections showing Brexit was a disaster.
AND SAID NO ONE BELIEVES ECONOMISTS ANYMORE – WHICH IS WHY BREXIT WON.
And the people were right: Brexit hasn’t been close to the disaster that was predicted.
And I wonder about Trump. Saying if he is elected it will be the end of Democracy – and I suspect many here think the same thing.
Yea right.
Clinton is still going to win.
But the party is tied to an establishment that has failed to deliver. And that is just a fact.
You could have lined the sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue with bankers’ heads on pikes, and the GOP would still control the Senate, and their nominee would still be guaranteed 43% of the general election vote….
But maybe the state legislatures would have been different. According to Vox, the single greatest predictor of state legislative control is the president’s approval rating. In fact, if you have an AWESOME state economy it’s still only worth as much as whether the president is liked. There’s little state parties can do (though I think even that little wasn’t done by the dems).
Saw that Vox paper. Interesting.
Well now you just stealing from Bill Clinton.
Funny lines don’t make excuses.
If you don’t think perp walks of the people who cause this crisis would have mattered then you are fool.
You don’t the indictment of the CEO of BOA wouldn’t have been big fucking news. It would have been page 1 for months. The trial would have been covered everyday.
Basically its a witticism aimed at excusing something that has no excuse.
It’s interesting that you assume that a filing of charges against the CEO of BOA would have resulted in a trial and conviction. No evidence is presented to back up that claim, of course.
claim that s/he assumed that?
Don’t see how the point made depends in any way on such an assumption.
I think it goes without saying that an indictment against the BOA CEO which would likely have been thrown out of court or resulted in an acquittal at trial would have been followed even more closely by the public, and it would have likely cost the Federal government billions of dollars in comparison to what was gained in a civil settlement.
The point was presented that an indictment would have been an action easily approved of by the public. I wanted to display that this wasn’t certain in the near- and long-term.
God there is no end to your defense of the status quo.
Dude, if I had been a defender of the status quo then I would not be an evangelist for Dodd-Frank, which was a significant change from the previous status quo.
More needs to be done. But the very point I’m making is that under pre-2010 laws it would have been difficult to impossible to gain convictions against financial institution CEO’s, and that an attempted prosecution which resulted in dismissal or acquittal would have been very financially costly and very damaging to the public mood.
You can’t even name the laws broken which you can assert would have resulted in certain convictions, so I don’t know what we’re doing here. What the financial institution chiefs did was unimaginably destructive and immoral, but it wasn’t certain or even likely that it would have been found illegal. That’s why we needed to pass better laws, and it’s why we still do.
The firms were fined $110 billion.
That’s a tremendous amount of illegal behavior that was punished, but punished on the corporate (shareholder) level rather than the individual bankster level.
Seems that people are too shielded by our corporate laws so they can act fraudulently with personal legal impunity.
(clearly, imo) to hinge on an assumption that indictment not resulting in conviction is either of no benefit or is net harmful, and perhaps on some conflation of indictment with conviction (e.g., “it wasn’t certain or even likely that it would have been found illegal”; and “The point was presented that an indictment would have been an action easily approved of by the public. I wanted to display that this wasn’t certain in the near- and long-term.” “Certain”? Well, no obviously not. What hypothetical ever is?)
At best, that assumption looks unfounded to me.
First, you have more faith in that assertion (i.e., conviction unlikely) above (and similar you’ve made) than I do; and more than I think warranted. I find it hard to believe a robust effort to make cases of individually criminal culpability was doomed to fail universally. No such effort was ever even attempted, to my knowledge. (OTOH, I’m not a lawyer — though I’d also bet lawyers would differ on this point anyway — so I’ll acknowledge your assumption might be correct. But it certainly doesn’t look self-evident to me. Looks to me like what was missing was the will to prosecute individuals.)
Similarly, your assertions that such prosecutions not resulting in convictions would not have been “easily approved of by the public” and would have been “very damaging to the public mood” both look problematic (as in probably wrong) to me. I even think I recall polling showing individual prosecutions of banksters to be very popular. Outrage over total lack of same even seems to be one of the few slivers of common ground (the only?) within the 99% that unites significant proportions of Berners and many other lefties/centrists, teabaggers, and Trumpistas.
Your latter assertion does of course depend on how you define “damage”. If you consider the ideal public “mood” to be always positive, upbeat, sweetness-and-light, etc., regardless of any and all outrages occurring/being perpetrated against the public; and consider anything that moves the mood away from that state to be “damage” . . . well, then sure, such indictments would arguably have “damaged” the public mood further, beyond the “damage” already caused by the dire consequences of the banksters’ actions. At least as arguably, though, imo the attempt at imposing individual accountability — even a failed attempt wrt conviction — would have improved the public mood (I know it certainly would have improved mine!!!).
The analogy that comes to mind is the indictments of the cops whose actions/inactions killed Freddie Gray, which, notably, failed to produce any convictions. Despite that, they did imo produce very significant public benefits, e.g., spotlighting the department’s apparently routine violation of its own policy that handcuffed/restrained arrestees be strapped in.
(Aside, still seems preposterous to me that that would not constitute, and be successfully prosecutable as, at minimum, criminal negligence. And how anyone was able to paint that disclosure as exculpatory, rather than an additional broader “indictment” [common, not legal sense; unless both] of the overall department and its policies just boggles my mind. Makes it worse, not individually exonerating!)
Why should anyone believe the man who defined “control fraud” and had a 90% conviction rate on the cases he prepared? That prosecuted the leaders, not the clerks.
He thought there was plenty of room to obtain convictions. But what does he know?
And the people were right: Brexit hasn’t been close to the disaster that was predicted.
Because the U.K. hasn’t exited yet, and it remains to be seen of the EU will force them too. They don’t want to give any ammo to Le Pen in France, because if France leaves then the whole EU project falls apart.
I had a similar response: “Brexit hasn’t been close to the disaster that was predicted” . . . yet!
Like saying a pre-Wright-Bros aeronaut’s experiment exiting a cliff-top with his pedal-driven wings still flapping, and no contact with ground yet would have been right thinking “so far, so good”.
And (prematurely!) declaring that anyone predicting his failure got it wrong.
Best you can say about his success/failure in that scenario would be “remains to be seen”.
Gingrich’s GOPAC memo and Ron Suskind’s “Reality-Based Community” anecdote* (whose “senior adviser to Bush” seems universally presumed to have been Rove) as forming together a sort of Rosetta Stone for translating how our political discourse got so very badly broken, who broke it, and for what intended purpose.
Nothing yet has caused me to reconsider that premise.
*What the hell, just looked it up for the link, may as well quote it again:
Our discourse was so frail that Gingrich and Rove could break it? One political party torpedoed the whole project?
I suspect you’re right. But where did they get that kind of power? And why don’t we–with a president 100 times smarter than their president, with science and reality and functional policies–have as much?
is baked into the Constitution’s checks-and-balances, and the power they grant a determined minority in opposition. Enhanced by Senate rules (e.g., “holds”, filibuster).
Even so, it worked sorta kinda mostly as long as both parties saw governing, despite their differences, as their job; i.e., until one party went batshit insane, embraced Reality-Denial, character assassination, and all-obstruction-all-the-time scorched-earth politics, abandoned all scruples against lying and other deceptions, . . .
. . . again, see those Rosetta Stones.
Add in the rise of rightwing media essentially functioning as the Ministry of Propaganda for that Party of Reality-Denial, and the decay of the Useless Corporate Media abdicating their Fourth Estate role (with its importance recognized uniquely among secular institutions by the Founders giving it its own protect clause in the First Amendment) . . . and the toxic recipe is pretty well complete . . . and effective.
Well, it is not like the Dems did not know their enemy would be waiting in 2010.
I think they could have built on their majorities if they had taken the public’s side against the financial elite. Reagan did it. Even BushII went after Enron. Were Dems afraid of Citizens United? I think the banksters themselves were shocked at the ease.
Too easy to blame ACA for that whuppin. And in a census year, to boot. SHeesh.
Reagan did it? Really?
LOL
Reagan’s S&L prosecutor, Wm Black testifies FOR the lying borrowers and wins their acquittal in 2014. (http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-fraudulent-lenders-20140925-column.html)
Indeed. You are correct. The convictions were obtained in the 90s. The cases were being worked up by Black in the 80s for referrals.
Black was litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) from 1984 to 1986, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) in 1987, and Senior VP and the General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco from 1987 to 1989, which regulated some of the largest thrift banks in the U.S
My sil at the local bank was speaking of the fallout back during R’s term. She got out of the industry over what she was being forced to do.
Financial Fraud Conviction Scorecard:
BushII: 1300+, Clinton: 1000+
Clinton’s DOJ prosecuted over 1,800 S&L (savings and loans) executives, senior officials, and directors, and over 1,000 of them were sent to jail. Wm Black had a conviction rate of near 90%.
Between 2002 and 2008, for instance, a Bush administration task force obtained over 1,300 corporate fraud convictions, including those of over 130 corporate vice presidents and over 200 CEOs and corporate presidents.
It would interesting to know what those convictions were for and who actually was convicted. Way beyond the scope of this chat though.
Cuz otherwise, I can’t make sense of this.
Nope. I meant lying borrowers who misstated their assets. Those are the ones being prosecuted for mortgage fraud these days.
“…The initial conservative reaction to the disaster, you will recall, was to blame the crisis on the people at the bottom, on minorities and proletarians lost in an orgy of financial misbehavior. Sure enough, when taking on ordinary people who got loans during the real-estate bubble, the president’s Department of Justice has shown admirable devotion to duty, filing hundreds of mortgage-fraud cases against small-timers.”
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/07/finally_wall_street_gets_put_on_trial_we_can_still_hold_the_0_1_perc
ent_responsible_for_tanking_the_economy/ (Well, that was wishful thinking.)
“In the Sacramento case, the jury essentially found that the truth or falsity of the documentation the borrowers provided was immaterial–the lenders would have made the loans anyway.”
“The name for this kind of scheme is a “control fraud”; it happens when the officers who control a firm use their power over the firm to enrich themselves while driving the firm itself to the boneyard.”
and cutting the heads off Elites. At least it is an Ethos.”
I would never say the French Revolution was QUITE the success of its immediate predecessor the American Revolution. Like pretty much all violent revolutions it ended up eating its own, something the U.S. at least put off for a few decades until 1861.
But what you CAN say about the French Revolution is that it got the damn attention of the Ancien Regime in all its European forms. They may never have actually reconciled themselves to Democracy but learned you can’t just shit on people or even The People forever and without limits.
Though in the last 30 years the forces of Reaction got pretty close to their Counter-Revolution, this time by disguising it in ‘Neo-Liberalism’ and ‘Free Markets’. But in the back of their minds they have to know that given the right inputs The People will begin to look with nostalgia on the good old days at La Place de la Concorde. Lets just say it didn’t end well for Mme. “Let Them Eat Cake”.
Obama’s failure to enforce the law on the bankers and other financial scum was a gross miscalculation of the nation’s temperature. The flaccid joke of assistance to underwater citizens that his School of Chicago coterie came up with added insult to injury (HAMP).
Just like with Ford and Nixon, it sealed the 2010 midterms. The wave stayed home.
Seeing the Three Amigos yukking it up on youtube over the “accidental” income inequality increases they fostered in their terms at Treasury, hosted by our present Treas-in-waiting(?)at a Milikin Institute forum–well, crass doesn’t cover it. Can’t wait for those hearings…
You are fixated on the banking failure point, but in my everyday life, the right wingers I work with and that are in my family never bring it up. I certainly don’t hear it on Limbaugh either. It’s a lefty hobgoblin. That’s what it is.
What I hear from them is that the government gives “the blacks” everything, “illegals” commit crimes and take jobs, and garbage about political correctness and liberals taking guns. They are happiest when laws are passed that piss liberals off, irrespective of the impact on themselves. Half the accolades Walker got in my family when he busted the unions was because he was beating up on liberals.
Sometimes I think the left just can’t see that it isn’t always about our issues or empathy.
I know many, many right wingers. Not a single one has ever mentioned the lack of prosecution of bankers as a factor in their rage. Anecdotal, certainly. But interesting to me.
But “pissing off liberals, shitting on the poors and guns, guns, guns” animates 98% of them every time.
I’m not talking about right wingers, folks. I don’t know enough of them to judge; SA is a liberal town.
Indies and loosely associated voters who came out in 2008 for Dems might be a different story? Do you feel OK with it? What do you think motivated Occupy? Do you think it influenced the continued financialization of our general economy to the disadvantage of the Main Street one?
HAMP may have been flaccid, but as someone who knows a ton of Tea Partiers, it was looked at as a giveaway to folks who couldn’t pay their bills. A family member who lost his house actually put himself on a pedestal because he didn’t live off the government like “those” people.
I agree that Obama could have done things differently, but he really had a series of tough, not-so-good choices to make. And he did do a lot, like establish the CFPB. On the left though, there’s no credit for what was achieved, but on the right, we shouldn’t be achieving anything.
was such an Obama failure is that the money for rescuing underwater homeowners was actually appropriated! One of the few things asked for that, for whatever reason, made it past the usual knee-jerk GOP opposition in Congress. (Maybe it passed while Dems had a nominal majority, i.e., pre-2010 takeover?)
Then they didn’t use it! (i.e., disburse those funds to rescue underwater homeowners)
Instead, they strung those homeowners along for awhile with false hopes, until the banksters could get their institutions stabilized against failure.
Then they foreclosed anyway! After those homeowners were deceived into flushing additional thousands down the toilet before losing their homes anyway.
If I’ve got any of that wrong, corrective evidence welcome.
Pretty much.
The background: HAMP cannot be justified by the usual Obama-era logic, that it represented the best possible outcome in a captured Washington with Republican obstruction and supermajority hurdles. Before Obama’s election, Congress specifically authorized the executive branch, through the $700 billion bank bailout known as TARP, to “prevent avoidable foreclosures.” And Congress pointedly left the details up to the next president. Swing senators like Olympia Snowe (Maine), Ben Nelson (Nebraska) and Susan Collins (Maine) played no role in HAMP’s design. It was entirely a product of the administration’s economic team, working with the financial industry, so it represents the purest indication of how they prioritized the health of financial institutions over the lives of homeowners.
http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/14/needless-default/
I hear it all the time – and from people on the right and on the left.
Go back and read the 2010 exit poll – people thought the Democrats were the Party of Wall Street.
Well, sure, the Republicans tried to tie Democrats to Wall Street in their midterm campaigns, and they had some success in doing so. The public was made to be misinformed, partly because many liberals utterly failed to appreciate the accomplishments of the most liberal Congress in our lifetimes.
Almost no Republicans supported Dodd-Frank; it was Democrats who created and pushed through “the most ambitious overhaul of financial regulation in generations” while facing an onslaught of Wall Street lobbyists who nearly defeated the Bill:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/15/AR2010071500464.html
If the public had been well-informed, they would have known when they went to the polls in 2010 that it was the Republicans in Congress who wanted Wall Street to be completely unimpeded in their abuse of consumers and the public. They would have known that McConnell, Boehner and the rest of the GOP caucuses had screamed like stuck pigs about improving financial regulation laws just as the midterm campaigns were about to start.
They would have known that almost all Wall Street money which was spent during the 2010 midterms was spent to elect Republicans and defeat Democrats.
The Republicans were far more tied to Wall Street than the Democrats. The public was successfully fooled into believing the opposite. Liberals provided much of the misinformation to the public.
I agree that the public would have been made more satisfied if there had been more criminal indictments and convictions of financial institution executives. But even you, with your prosecutorial mindset, would have to admit that if more indictments had been moved they would have been tied up in courts for years, well past the 2010 election, and that some to many to most of those trials would have resulted in acquittals. Seeing these monsters walk without criminal or civil penalty would have been terribly dispiriting to the public as well.
Thank you. Said something similar above, but you said it much better.
You know, FDR did not try nor convict a single bankers. There was no regulation back then, essentially.
He did not make them economically whole, either. He did not save their jobs and businesses while seeing near 9 million others loose theirs.
And he was rhetorically FOR the citizens, and his efforts were to save THEIR economy. He did not waffle on about moral hazard for homeowners, fgs.
You think I have a prosecutorial mindset to have a problem with the injustice in its own right of allowing those with power and wealth to commit destructive crimes with impunity.
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. (Woody Guthrie)
Does anyone think banks have cleaned up their act? Why should they?
Through statements like these, you project a personal belief that financial institutions are under the same laws and regulations that they were before 2010, that there have been no improvements, and that Clinton is not demanding further improvements in the law in her platform. These beliefs of yours are factually incorrect.
T our point, Fladem.
“A tide of cynicism swept out Democrats in the last midterm elections, with voters more skeptical than ever that government can solve problems, or take the people’s side over the financiers. Two-thirds of voters in exit polls found the economy to be rigged for the wealthy.
“The consequence of these decisions was the disillusionment of his base in believing that political action is going to work,” says Damon Silvers. “They weakened the Obama presidency in ways he could never recover from.”
(http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/14/needless-default/)
Maybe folks don’t talk about it much because it has become internalized.
This, in spades….
Cf here.
And yet median household income only reached pre-recession levels this year. Even if they don’t say anything consciously that squeeze they’re feeling, that resentment against darkies getting stuff they don’t, is a direct result of 8 years of being behind.
I totally agree. If you ask a working class right winger why they wont vote democratic, with no cameras on them, 95% of the time they will say democrats just want to give free stuff to niggers. If you don’t understand that, you don’t live around working class right wingers.
I think it’s called recognizing the importance of one’s big donors.
The story goes that Zhou Enlai was asked if the French Revolution was, on the whole, a positive development. He replied, “Surely it is too soon to tell.”
Rolling Stone published a complete piece of shit article there. The problem is not that Hillary’s vulnerabilities are reported. It’s the Dollar’s are not. At least not with a similar intensity. He’s being graded on a curve for the most important job in the world. A reasonable media would point that out. Edward R. Murrow would have done so. Walter Cronkite too. Today no one had that level of credibility on his own so the information would have to come from multiple sources. But far too many brush off Truman’s mendacity and ignorant as if it were merely old news abd therefore irrelevant. Sure, a better educated populace wouldn’t need a functional press. But so fuckin’ what?
Auto correct typos; sorry
democracy would need (require!) a functional press. That was the Founders’ wisdom informing that First Amendment.
Sadly, we lack such (and our “democracy” shows it).
Democracy requires a free press because the political class cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of the voting public. Why should we trust the media to act in the best interests of the voting public? Isn’t the press just as likely to be corrupt as the political class? Isn’t that exactly our problem today?
You’ll need to set some definitions for “corrupt.”
In some sense, people are all alike. In some ways, representative democracy accounts and corrects for that. Part of that is a free press and transparency laws.
But, in other ways, the public trust can only truly be violated by people with power, whether they’ve been vested by the public with that power, or not.
Let’s go with a broad definition… “having or showing a willingness to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.”
The media is a business. It does not necessarily need to be honest. It needs to pay its bills. They pretend to have this lofty calling to inform the public and keep the political class honest, but they rarely do these things. They entertain, they provoke, they do all sorts of things that serve to generate revenue without actually informing the public in a meaningful way. It is dishonest for the media to pretend to be acting in the public interest. People say that the media is not doing their job in this election campaign. Why do you suppose that is?
The media has dishonestly set themselves up as an arbiter of truth. They do no such thing. That is a lie intended to justify a certain business model. So it is with the bureaucracy and the political class. They have sold themselves to the highest bidder. Why do you suppose people say that after an election we must keep the pressure on the political class with lobbying and pressure? Because we know they are not going to do what we want unless we punish them for acting contrary to our interests. We must continually reward them or else they will do the bidding off some other interest.
The fact is that there is no policy consensus in this country. Under these circumstances, what should the political / governing class do?
And I’ll just add that a free press is free to lie. Freedom of the press just means the goverment can’t stop printed media from pushing lies or any damn thing it wants… Any damn thing that makes money.
Martin, are AG’s comments on his diary re. the NYC bombing now considered acceptable rhetoric here?
Indeed.
The Congress (including Democrats) have not taken their responsibilities seriously. Some federal judges have been extreme pieces of work and our precedents have suffered for their decisions.
But yes, mostly it is the accumulation of the foreign policy and national security garbage baked in 70 years ago that has even perverted our domestic policies–if nothing else through neglect.
That said, a media that repeatedly called birtherism an outright lie perpetrated by the right wing in order to delegitimize a sitting President was the story that did not get told by those assumed to be grinding no axes. The Drudges and their ilk are held to a different standard. Or used to be.
It just seems to be Democrats who are the first to be held to higher standards when the media decides to change its moral standards. And Republicans whose behavior is allowed to lapse when standards are loosening. At least for the past 30 years.
It is Clintons who have emails hacked and Trump who doesn’t release what was de rigeur for all candidates and that imbalance persists here almost a month out from Election Day. Now if the refs are not going to be even-handed but depend on the actors to assert their prerogatives, Democrats and the Clinton campaign need to get busy and grow some claws. And learn how to actually hit the jugular metaphorically in debates. Is that even possible for Trump to have the experience of being whupped “by a girl”?
It is a hope of those against Trump that he does something so bad that the scales finally fall from the eyes of the personality cult and they realize that Trump is not anti-establishment but tending a veal pen for working class whites. And his voters are about to get fleeced again.
And then there is the Congressional argument. This is a time to put the total power back in the hands of Democrats. Blue Dogs sabotaged that the last time around.
It is the actions more than the positions or the words that have the people bamboozled. And the misleadership went with a major amount of misdirection.
Can’t speak for Taibbi, but it’s better than 99% of the political dreck that gets written. As Billmon said recently, Taibbi makes it look so easy to write.
Don’t know if there’s even one peep at the Pond that has ever seriously entertained the idea of voting for Trump; so who is the audience for the daily latest Trump outrage FP posts?
Fun fact. The Latin for ‘easy’ — at least in the neuter nominative – is ‘facile’.
Apparently neither you nor I is convinced that Matt Taibbi is a brilliant political analyst. The man does have some interesting insights, and I do appreciate that he gets involved with his subjects in a way that a reporter for, say, the New York Times would not. But he’s writing for Rolling Stone, and perhaps either feels obliged to…or is expected to by the editors…adopt a Hunter Thompson impressionistic style of writing. Some people love that stuff, others of us don’t.
And exactly where are all these rating and revenue that supposedly justifies the neatly 2 years of election media coverage? Show me the money and I might consider the excessive coverage at least to be a good business model.
The media started obsessing on the election in November 2014 and it hasn’t ended yet. Is it worth it?
Would have to add up the advertising buys in this election cycle to begin to answer that question. Near half a billion dollars was spent on TV adverts by the end of April. (Not sure that includes all the outside PAC money spent.) Through 6/30/16 that number was $650 billion on TV adverts Begs that question as to what Jeb spent $110 million on (total raised, less COH, less TV adverts). Or what any of the PACs and SuperPacs on spending their money on.
You wrfite:
But Booman…why are “people”…enough people to possibly make a real difference in the whole charade…saying that?
Why?
Because “the’elites” have conclusively proven themselves worthy of nothing less.
That’s why!!!
Bet on it.
DemRats, RatPubs…the whole rotten DC crew.
Like dat!!!
Only the people are never…or rarely ever, at best…offered another choice who is not equally or more so a thieving liar than were his or her predecessor(s).
So it goes.
Down like a motherfucker!!!
AG
I just said fucking why.
Jesus.
And I answered why.
You don’t see it?
Keep looking.
It’s out there…,
AG
timely and well said!!
Its probably best to completely replace elites after 2 generations.
When was this golden age of good leadership and a virtuous electorate of which you speak? Apparently before the Dulles brothers, but can you be a little more specific about when we achieved this bit of paradise on earth in our nation’s history?
And not because he grossly escalated the Vietnam War. And Nixon was reelected after escalating the war, much like Bush II was after initiating his disastrous wars. Human beings have always fallen for snake oil and there has always been an overabundance of snake oil salesmen. Sure, there’s Obama, but we also allow folks like McConnell, Boehner, Bush, etc.–and now Trump potentially–to lead us.
If nothing else, you’d think that at least one person at Rolling Stone knows that the title of the song is “Fuck Tha Police” – not “Fuck The Police”.
“Fuck The Police” is music criticism.
I’m not convinced, myself, mind you. But they did unleash Sting upon the world, so it’s a makeable case.
The American people as a whole do share a lot of the blame. And we’ve changed in a lot of ways. Some for the better – the younger generation as a whole is much more empathetic and tolerant of people of all types and backgrounds than previous generations.
But some for the worse. There is now a deeply entrenched alt-Right mindset, that affects not only those self-identified as alt-right but spills over into a wingnut community that, depending on the issue and situation, is from 25-40% of the US population. And while we rightly recognize that a lot of these group are aged Archie Bunker types, there is still a big minority of the young in this group, as evidenced by issues like Gamergate.
Finally, though, watching the reaction to Trump etc this year I’ve become concerned about something I see across the ideological spectrum, and that is a growing tolerance and even celebration of people treating other people badly. Bullying. Think about it. What were the TV programs that people on the left used to celebrate as great entertainment? Maybe M*A*S*H, Cheers, Hill Street Blues, etc. Now it’s Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Mad Men. I realize that you can cherry pick examples like these to illustrate any point you want, but if you look at it honestly we have become more entertained by people hurting other people. Even M*A*S*H, for example, became more popular when Burns was replaced and Houlihan was transitioned from a butt of jokes to a sympathetic character. Today it might be the reverse.
It is in this context that a lot of people would might be horrified by his policies can find humor and entertainment in how he verbally shits on others. He’s Don Rickles and Joan Rivers – only they were niche players and he has a mass audience. And they also can get joy out of seeing Clinton beaten down.