“CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN” FROM STATUS QuOBAMA?
Will the “deeply conservative” Obama break from deepening authoritarian capitalism in regard to the current economic crisis? The signals he has sent so far are less than encouraging. Late last summer, candidate Obama joined John McCain in supporting the original George W. Bush-Hank Paulson bailout plan, replete with its dictatorial demand (explicitly laid out in a hastily constructed three-page bill) that Congress supply the banks with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars without any public oversight, hearings and investigation ever. When public outrage forced Congress to reject rejected Bush and Paulson’s (and Obama and McCain’s) Czarist proposal, Obama gave his “progressive” imprimatur to a subsequently passed version that cloaked the authoritarian bailout deal in oversight measures loaded with loopholes leaving big banking capital free to do pretty much whatever it wished with its new taxpayer injections.
This move apparently came without remorse. As veteran liberal-progressive Washington- and Obama-watcher David Sirota recently noted, Obama’s “first exercise of presidential power was, right before he came into office, he threatened to veto any bill that Congress passed rejecting or limiting more bailout funds from going to Wall Street.”
Obama’s economic appointments do not bode well. His top economic advisor, former chief World Bank economist and Harvard University president Lawrence Summers and his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both veteran implementers of the basic “neoliberal” tenet: state protection and subsidy for the Few and market discipline for the Many. Working in the Clinton administration under Treasury Secretary (and Goldman Sachs CEO) Robert Rubin (Geithner’s mentor), Summers helped develop and advance the very financial -de-regulation that was a major contributor to the current crisis. Geithner shares with Summers a history of responding to economic crisis by bailing out large financial institutions with no serious questions asked, something that helps explain the popularity of his appointment on Wall
Obama’s Inaugural Address absurdly claimed that the economic crisis was partly the consequence of the “collective failure” of the American people “to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” This ignored the fact that, as Krugman notes, “this is first and foremost a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry. And if we failed to rein in that industry, it was wasn’t because Americans ‘collectively’ refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a good idea.”