Obama’s biggest mistake
President Barack Obama
President Obama continues to make the same mistake over and over again. From bankers, to members of Congress and even the American people, Obama keeps hoping everyone will just get along and find common ground.
While Obama keeps waiting for everyone do to the right thing, unemployment continues to go up, small businesses are struggling or failing, people are dying from lack of health care, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and bailed out investment bankers are rolling in taxpayer dough.
It’s time for Obama to stop his audacity of hope campaign – what we need is action, leadership and some asses kicked (I’m looking at you Goldman Sachs and AIG).
Perhaps critics of candidate Obama were right when they said he lacked experience. He’s been in the White House for nine months and he’s accomplished nothing.
Health care reform continues to flounder in Congress.
The war in Iraq is still sucking the US Treasury dry and snatching the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
In Afghanistan, Obama is thinking about sending more troops, but he appears to be hemming and hawing over that decision.
When the banking industry, which created the current financial mess we’re in thanks to laissez-faire regulation, was on the ropes Obama didn’t take that opportunity to force regulation down their throats, but rather he handed them billions and billions of taxpayer money and hoped that they’d play nice and be cool with regulatory changes later. Wrong.
Before Congress started debating health care reform, the president should have laid out his requirements for a bill he would sign. Obama should have started out with single-payer and made the case for it. There’s a good argument to be made for single-payer, but Obama didn’t even try. Instead, he left it all up to Congress to run wild with and boy did they. Now we’re looking at heavily compromised bills that will likely result in a lot of people paying too much money for health insurance that doesn’t cover anything. Thanks, but no thanks.
And what has he done to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Nothing. We can’t win either of these wars because there is no definition of victory. No one has ever conquered Afghanistan, and neither will the US. And what’s the exit strategy in Iraq? Hope?
Obama’s hope machine has run out of gas. Hope is great, we all need a little bit of it from time to time, but it’s no excuse for inaction. This is politics. It’s partisan.
The time for leadership is now, because let’s face it, pretending that partisan politics is something that can, or should, be avoided is no recipe for success. Obama needs to stop his wishful thinking. Conservatives and liberals will not march on Washington, DC hand-in-hand singing Kumbaya – it’s not going to happen. Wake up or step aside in 2012 to make room for a real leader.
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs make big profits with no competition
Goldman Sachs
Most people, including myself, have no idea what financial institutions do. Whatever it is they do do, it sounds like a sweet gig, especially now that any competition that may have existed before the crash of 2008, is now gone. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are running wild with taxpayer money, no regulation and no competition.
The New York Times reported today:
Titans like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are making fortunes in hot areas like trading stocks and bonds, rather than in the ho-hum business of lending people money. They also are profiting by taking risks that weaker rivals are unable or unwilling to shoulder — a benefit of less competition after the failure of some investment firms last year.
After the bailout, it’s obvious that for Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, no matter what they do, the government will not allow them to fail. It’s the old joke, tails I win, heads you lose.
It might be time to stop pretending that we live in a country that believes wholeheartedly in free market economics – the people might believe in it but the corporations running the country clearly don’t (e.g. health insurance companies, energy companies and banks). There’s nothing free about certain banks pillaging the US Treasury of hundreds of billions upon hundreds of billions of dollars while others are left to go bankrupt.
And as for the workers, real unemployment is 17 percent and going up. I guess the recession is over. Right?
Obama and G-20 members pat themselves on the back for preventing another Great Depression
G-20 Protesters in Pittsburgh Sept. 24, 2009
The Hill reported today that President Obama and the other G-20 members said that the bank bailouts successfully averted another Great Depression; all that’s left is just a bit of regulatory tweaking and we’ll be right as rain. I’m sure they’re right – all government needed to do to fix the economic crisis was to throw billions and billions of dollars at the banks who screwed everything up in the first place.
We’ve become a nation run by banks, insurance companies, Big Pharma, Big Oil and the military industrial complex there to make sure they all get what they need from other countries either through the “free” market or force if necessary. Politicians follow the money, not the votes. How many Americans actually think the banks should have been bailed out?
G-20 leaders say recovery worked, agree to new reforms
Subprime Meltdown: From U.S. Liquidity Crisis To Global Recession
G-20 protesters in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24, 2009
TARP Inspector says banks “Far more dangerous”
TARP Inspector Neil Barofsky
Top inspector for the Troubled Asset Relief Program says that banks are “far more dangerous” now than before the economic collapse and subsequent bailout. So a year after last year’s run-on-the-Treasury by too-big-too-fail banks, the Troubled Asset Relief Program has done a lot to help banks get bigger and nothing to help protect the economy or taxpayers said TARP Inspector Neil Barofsky.
Obama says Wall Street “choosing to ignore” lessons learned
What? Wall Street is choosing to do what it does best, makes piles of cash anyone they can? And now Obama is bemoaning them for “choosing to ignore” lessons they should have learned when bank after bank failed and was then bailed out by the taxpayers. Why do they even have the option of choosing to ignore those lessons? And weren’t the lessons learned supposed be brought to bear on the regulatory agencies Obama now controls? Or we could just sit back and hope the Wall Street thugs do the right thing.
I’m starting to think Obama is going to go down in history as the president who passed the buck rather than taking action to solve problems. He left health care reform to Congress and now he’s letting the bankers decide whether or not they feel like playing nice.
More change we can believe in.
The Cult of the Federal Reserve stifles debate and helped screw up the economy
The Huffington Post published an investigative story on how the Federal Reserve controls what economists think, write and missed the obvious housing bubble burst.
This is a good start, but I can’t help but think there’s a lot more to this story than what the Huffington Post was able to get. The problem, even for a popular online publication like this, is they lack access to power players.
Even as financial stocks have rallied nearly 60 percent since the end of March, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued another grim report card Thursday on the health of the nation’s banks.
The agency reported that the banking industry lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter amid a surge in bad loans made to home builders, commercial real estate developers, and small and midsize businesses.
