Populist rehetoric for the election campaign
Via The Dailey Beast is a link to Lehman Brother’s e-mails and documents and an unanswered question for investors and the public
With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent–a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, “a guy who had a Swiss bank account.”
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Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.
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“There hasn’t been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI,” says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government’s response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. “You need heads on the pike,” he says. “The first President Bush’s orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
Obama is a plutocrat, too. The real battleground is Congress. Congress controls the purse strings, and we need them to do things like fund infrastructure and give hundreds of billions in grants to the states, so that teachers, police, and firemen can go back to work. Neither Obama nor Romney is going to fight Congress much.
Or lead much. of course the only people who can hold Congress feet to the fire are the voters and the only voters who have shown any intent to do so are the Tea Baggers and the rip off of the economy y the financial types is not their issue. Of course if people blindly vote for Obama as the lesser of two evils, then what is the incentive to do anything else?
“Of course if people blindly vote for Obama as the lesser of two evils, then what is the incentive to do anything else?”
I don’t understand this logic. Or, more accurately, I don’t understand why people who say that type of thing don’t recognize this fact: That every time a conservative wins an election, or at least a high-profile election, against someone less conservative, everyone interprets it as a rejection by the majority of the loser’s—the more progressive candidate’s—views. It breeds Dem politicians’ “triangulation” and the like—the very opposite of incentivizing Dem politicians to be more progressive.
Your argument is sophism at its most clearly ridiculous and dangerous. It does sound so very clever and sophisticated, I know. But it’s palpable nonsense.
Newsweek has a piece on the failure of the Obama administration to find financial fraud in the financial crisis (insider trading cases don’t really count in that score).
No bailout for states. It would take 48 states just save California and New York. They dug the whole let them build the ladder to get out.
The people Obama srronds himself with, and Obama himself role in Freddie and Fannie give away.
Name calling begins in 4…..3……2…….
Ken, the bailouts should be on a per capita basis. California and New York do not have half the population of the U.S.
But California and New York did not dig this hole. (Although Wall Street is in New York City.) California and New York have been subsidizing other states on a continual basis for a long, long time.
Beverly
I was about to agree with you… but when you start calling what terry said “palpable nonsense” you show you are unwilling or unable to think about what he said. that is dangerous for your side.
it suggests to me that you are willing to be screwed as long as you are screwed by someone calling himself a Democrat.
maybe the point of terry’s comment was “people who BLINDLY vote..”