A failed Obama presidency

harsh but pretty much right on...

President Obama Richly Deserves to Be Dumped

By now it should be obvious that the system, and the Democratic Party, run Obama, not the other way around. Under this arrangement, the president carries out his duties as pre-eminent party functionary—fundraising being at the top of his list of responsibilities—and defers on legislation, leaving it to corrupt Democratic barons such as Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), devoted friend of the insurance, pharmaceutical, and banking crowd, and sworn enemy of reform.

[...]

Obama’s hypocrisy in Osawatomie, Kansas, set a new standard in deception. Among other things, his speech blamed “regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this [the unfettered sales of bundled mortgages], but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all. It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system.”

What’s truly breathtaking is the president’s gall, his stunning contempt for political history and contemporary reality. Besides neglecting to mention Democratic complicity in the debacle of 2008, he failed to point out that derivatives trading remains largely unregulated while the Securities and Exchange Commission awaits “public comment on a detailed implementation plan” for future regulation. In other words, until the banking and brokerage lobbies have had their say with John Boehner, Max Baucus, and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. Meanwhile, the administration steadfastly opposes a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal law that reduced outlandish speculation by separating commercial and investment banks. In 1999, it was Summers and Geithner, led by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (much admired by Obama), who persuaded Congress to repeal this crucial impediment to Wall Street recklessness.

and, to my mind, the most damning indictment of all...

Barbara Ehrenreich, just after billionaire Michael Bloomberg and mayors of other cities cleared public spaces of Occupy Wall Street protesters [said]: “Where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘Go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult?” Well, yes, particularly if your principal occupation is shaking down bankers and brokers for campaign donations on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

just another nudge in the direction of rocky anderson (see previous post)...

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We're suckers for the lesser evil and choose to forget just how much Bill Clinton is responsible for our current mess

robert scheer delivers a teach-in at occupy la...



scheer doesn't shy away from putting a good share of the blame where it belongs, right at the feet of bill clinton...

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Summers, Paulson, Rubin, Geithner, Bernanke, Liddy, and Blankfein are schizoid

chris hedges, writing on truthdig via alternet...

Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.

[...]

"The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism." [Theodor Adorno, "Education After Auschwitz"]

Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.

[...]

The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.

"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."

interesting... i've had a lifelong aversion to corporate types of the sort that adorno describes, for most of the same reasons he outlines... i've found most of them to be the sort of people that i simply wouldn't consider having as friends...

in addition, i've noticed that there's an entire sub-category of such individuals i would characterize as " 'manipulative character' wannabes"... these are the people who set out to be the summers, paulson, rubin, geithner types but couldn't quite cut it... you can seem them walking the corridors of organizations everywhere, semi-brain dead, but still pledging fealty to the system that rejected them...

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Goldman Sachs and its alumni - the people who own us

despite the on-going train wreck in the world credit markets, goldman sachs continues to scoop up massive amounts of cash... just look at this...

[F]or Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, this is turning out to be a very good year. He will surely earn more than the $54.3 million he made last year. If he gets a 20 percent raise — in line with the growth of Goldman’s compensation pool — he will take home at least $65 million. Some expect his pay, which is directly tied to the firm’s performance, to climb as high as $75 million.

[...]

Goldman’s stock has significantly outperformed its peers. At the end of last week it was up about 13 percent for the year, compared with a drop of almost 14 percent for the XBD, the broker-dealer index that includes the leading Wall Street banks. Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Citigroup are down almost 40 percent this year.

besides blankfein, somebody whose name is unfamiliar to me, but who could still earn a possible SEVENTY FIVE MILLION FRIGGIN' GODDAM DOLLARS THIS YEAR, who the hell ARE the people this world-class money vacuum cleaner has spawned...? well, just look at THIS list...

Last week, John A. Thain, a former Goldman co-president, accepted the top position at Merrill Lynch, while a fellow Goldman alumnus, Duncan L. Niederauer, took Mr. Thain’s job running the New York Stock Exchange. Another fellow veteran trader, Daniel Och, took his $30 billion hedge fund public.

still unfamiliar names to me... but, wait... there's MORE...

Robert E. Rubin, a former Goldman head, is the new chairman of Citigroup. In Washington, another former chief, Henry M. Paulson Jr., is the Treasury secretary, having been recruited by Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff and yet another former Goldman executive.

The heads of the Canadian and Italian central banks are Goldman alumni. The World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, is another. Jon S. Corzine, once a co-chairman, is the governor of New Jersey. And in academia, Robert S. Kaplan, a former vice chairman, has just been picked as the interim head of Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment.

ah... NOW, we're gettin' down to it... are ya gettin' the picture here...? THESE, my friends, are the folks who OWN us, lock, stock, and barrel... they are also the ones who are calling the shots, these and their buddies at the council on foreign relations, the center for strategic and international studies, the center for a new american security, and, of course, let we forget, those at the carnegie endowment, the ford and guggenheim foundations that mettle helped us learn more about earlier today... keep 'em in mind, cuz what they say and do ends up being the way things will eventually come down...

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One wealthy tool of the elites steps down and another one steps in

meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

The board of Citigroup today accepted the resignation of its embattled chairman and chief executive, Charles O. Prince III, and appointed Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, as its interim chairman, according to a person briefed on the situation.

of course, it would never occur to them that COSMETIC changes are not going to fix a systemic problem... 'course, as long as the biggies continue to rake in their daily mountains of cash no matter who else is being bled dry, they don't think they've GOT a problem... and so it goes...

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