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So, surprise surprise, many of Obama's top donors are the very investment banks he supports bailing out this week with a $700 billion blank check from the taxpayers.
You youngin's who support Mr. Obama with your impressionable hearts and souls are perhaps too young to remember the similar campaign of Bill Clinton during the less drastic economic crisis of 1992 ... and how between the time of being elected and being inaugurated, closed door meetings with famed economist Robert Rubin caused, according to Rubin, a complete conversion in Mr. Clinton. This is bourne out by how he governed as president, gutting welfare and repealing the 1934 Glass Steigal act which was the post-depression firewall between risky investment banks (that have now tanked) and consumer banks holding the life savings of ordinary citizens ... which essentially prevented risky investments such as the ones which have again decimated the financial sector from affecting consumer savings.
Clinton repealed that act, under vast pressure from his masters, the investment banks and Wall Street.
Who's to say these large donors are not Obama's masters as well? Where will the countervailing pressure come from to hold Obama's feet to the populist fire he preaches so freely with his mouth?
Democrats in Congress want some minor conditions on the $700 billion blank check, such as caps on CEO compensation and protection for millions of homeowners facing foreclosure. But the Bush Administration (surprise surprise) wants a simple blank check and unlimited powers given to the Treasury Secretary to bail out failing banks by buying the bad mortgage debt packages with taxpayer funds as he sees fit, i.e., as banks demand. Banks are already salivating and urging Treasury to purchase other bad debts beyond the mortgage packages with our money.
Meanwhile, reputable economists have predicted this disaster for years. So this is not some unforseen disaster to Congress and the Administration like a hurricane or nuclear attack. These are their policies coming home to roost ... and suddenly we have the most activist goverment since the New Deal with powers and funds government long insisted it didn't have.
Where were these powers and moneys when it came to reforming health care, saving social security, restoring our national infrastructure??
All the young Obama supporters are too young to remember when government actually did anything, when government made things instead of unmaking them. In their entire lifetimes, all they've seen is cutbacks and can't do's. Oh-ho, suddenly there's plenty of money, and plenty of willpower to take radical and meddling action in altering the free-market economy trumped uber alis by our government for decades.
Meanwhile, in the midst of the looming and unfolding crisis, the two presidential campaigns have become nearly meaningless. And sure, Obama looks to be the better candidate on the economy than McCain by a long shot. But he's almost as dangerous. It already looks like he's under the thumb of his Wall Street donors, and what kind of president will good-mouthed Obama really be?
Ah memories of Clinton's promise ... and ultimate failings. Why the Republicans didn't just love him as president, I will never know. He governed precisely as a big-business Republican would have.
Meanwhile, FDR's New Deal after the depression was not a cake-walk for that administration. It was a series of radical and progressive acts, opposed by Wall Street at every turn. And the results were actually compromises Wall Street accepted ... because, at the time, the alternative was actual revolution in the streets.
That kind of serious, radical, prevalent grass-roots pressure from below is what it will again take for the next president to feel a countermanding pressure from Main Street below to match the intense pressure from Wall Street above.
I don't think the American people are up for it.
See you in the bread lines.
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