Two headlines on today’s CNN website make perfectly clear what’s been wrong with Obama and his team’s economic policies from the start, and why though there’s been some improvement in this realm of late, the basic flaw in these policies has not been fixed. The first headline read: “Obama Won’t Trash Wall Street;” the second headline read: “Wall Street To Abandon Democrats?”
The first story notes that while President Obama will push hard for some reform of financial markets, for reform proposals now going through the congressional sieve, he won’t do a real populist number and come down too hard on the perps primarily responsible for the world’s economic woes— big Wall Street banks. The second head explains why he won’t do this. Namely, that these perps have given lots of money to get Obama and Democrats elected, and may not give them as much in the future if they turn on their financial benefactors.
Popular disgust with Wall Street has forced the President’s hand when it comes to doing something about the bonus beasts of the bourse. But the man and his party’s people in Congress obviously still can’t quite commit to doing everything that’s really necessary to break Wall Street’s enervating hold on the U.S. economy.
What’s being proposed by the Administration and a Democratic Congress is the minimum needed to assuage the worst of popular anger. That’s something, of course, and quite an improvement from the first year of Democratic power in Washington. But as long as money and free speech are synonymous in this country (at least legally), and as long as the deepest pockets to buy TV ads come the country’s biggest rip-off artists, it appears we won’t get all the reform we deserve from the donkey crowd.
Too bad. And rather foolish, too, not only economically but politically. Because to beat analyst expectations in this year’s November’s elections, the beast to feed is hungering populist anger, not bloated deep pocket slickers.
More financial commentary by this author (much of it in verse) at http://www.wallstreetpoet.com