Monday, May 04, 2009
Having completed his first 100 days in office, President Barack Obama was subjected to the media reviews all presidents have experienced since Franklin D. Roosevelt. And while many have tried to draw comparison between the Depression and the current Great Collapse, Obama is by no means FDR. That’s according to Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, who write that the new president grew up in the world of Chicago politics and seems to have adopted the strategy of the late mayor, Richard J. Daley, of never backing “losers.”
Moyers and Winship argue “that as part of his bending over backwards to support the banks and avoid the losers, [Obama] has blundered mightily in his choice of economic advisers.” They complain that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been revealed to be a man too close with the banking industry whose bailout strategy has heaped huge sums of taxpayer dollars to institutions that behaved recklessly. And as if Geithner alone weren’t bad enough, Obama also brought in Larry Summers as his White House economic adviser, “who in the Clinton administration took a laissez-faire attitude toward the financial industry which would later enrich him.” The president seemingly has “bought into the old fantasy that what’s best for Wall Street is best for America,” insist Moyers and Winship.
They conclude: “With these two as his financial gatekeepers, President Obama’s now in the position of Louis XVI being advised by Marie Antoinette to have another piece of cake until that rumble in the streets has passed on by.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Mortgaging the White House (by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Truthout)
Comments