The ironic thing was that I had been planning to write a positive piece this morning about Obama's remarks on housing in yesterday's Twitter town hall, as I was pleased he was acknowledging the mistakes of his housing policy, and was hopeful that this statement -- along with the outstanding news this morning of new Treasury rules forcing banks to give some mortgage relief to unemployed homeowners -- signaled a tougher stance on Wall Street. And I was hoping that Christine Varney's departure from the antitrust division at the Department of Justice might give an opportunity for someone more aggressive to be appointed there, so my mood was pretty good before I saw this morning's all-hope-dies-here headline on Social Security. Oh, well. This administration has specialized at raising progressive hopes one minute and crushing them the very next.
The question now on Social Security is what exactly is on the table and what isn't. The statement the White House put out this morning is this:
There is no news here. The President has always said that while Social Security is not a major driver of the deficit, we do need to strengthen the program and the President said in the State of the Union Address that he wanted to work with both parties to do so in a balanced way that preserves the promise of the program and doesn't slash benefits.
It is the high rollers on Wall Street and their friends in the media and D.C. establishment who want to put Social Security on the table. The funders of the "we can solve our budget problems by cutting Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid" PR campaign are people like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson. Billionaires and multimillionaires demanding that retired people getting an average of $14,000 a year in Social Security get their benefits cut has always struck me as just a little wrong. Especially when these wealthy and powerful elitists figure out how to shelter their own income so they can avoid paying the same rate as their secretaries. But these hypocritical powerbrokers are exactly the ones for whom the entire Republican Party is fighting so hard. The question now: will Obama join them in screwing the middle class?
When it comes to government policy, there is no way to avoid the question of who wins and who loses. And over the last three years, in this massive economic crisis America has faced, it is the Wall Street big boys, the overgrown banks who own assets equal to 64 percent of our country's GDP, who keep winning. When they blew up the economy and taxpayers bailed them out with no strings attached, Wall Street won. When the biggest banks swallowed up their competitors and got even bigger, Wall Street won. When bonuses and profits returned to record levels a year after they were bailed out, in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s, Wall Street won. When the legislation allowing judges to force them to negotiate on mortgage writedowns failed, Wall Street won. When their carried interest tax loophole failed to get repealed, Wall Street won. When the amendment to force the break-up of the biggest banks lost, Wall Street won. When loopholes were added to derivatives regulations, Wall Street won. When the antitrust division at DOJ refused to lift a finger against the huge mega-banks, Wall Street won. When none of the top executives at these banks that had manipulated the economy went to jail, and few of them even lost their job, Wall Street won.
The biggest question of our times is this: in spite of the naked greed, corruption, and excess exposed in the 2008 panic, will the win streak keep going? Will they succeed in taking Social Security money away from low and middle-income seniors? Or will, just maybe, the Obama administration stand up to Wall Street corruption this time? If Obama knows he needs to change his policy on housing, and starts doing more truly great things like the announcement today in terms of helping unemployed people keep their homes, that would be a major victory for the middle class over the Wall Street titans. If Obama were to replace Christine Varney with a head of antitrust who was more aggressive at breaking up huge companies who have too much market power, like the Too Big to Fail banks, that would be a blockbuster victory for both the economy and our democracy. If Obama finally does the right thing and gives Elizabeth Warren a recess appointment to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that would be an exciting victory for the middle class over the big banks who have been trying to stop her.
These issues are all tied together in the same question: does the middle class win, or does Wall Street win? If Obama chooses Wall Street, gives into the banks on all these issues, and hurts senior citizens with Social Security cuts, he will break apart the Democratic coalition and doom his re-election chances. If he challenges Wall Street and fights for the middle class, he will win the 2012 election in a landslide. No matter what Obama does, though, progressives need to keep fighting for what we believe in: we need to fight with all our strength to preserve Social Security benefits, and we need to take on the Wall Street banks on behalf of homeowners and consumers.
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Victor Williams: End "Trips and Traps": Recess Appoint Elizabeth Warren as CFPB Director
Seniors have thrown themselves and their children to the republican wolves. Thanks Grandma....
What do Seniors expect Obama to do, fight for them?
And I do believe it is possible for the elections to be rigged. It is also hard to believe that so many could vote against themselves.
Their days are numbered.
China is not a long-term threat to the American people, to main street, but it is a threat to Wall Street and to their control.
Wall Street may play tough, but they have no idea what they are up against.
Or then again, maybe they do, thus aggregating as much $$$ as possible so that their fall will be cushioned.
Most of the TBTF Banks are broke so instead of forcing them into bankruptcy or closing them down and nationalizing them. Instead laws and reporting regulations were changed instead of enforcing them.
We are spending 43 cents More than we take in with Taxes. Those are painful draconian cuts or increases in taxation or borrowing or some combination.
No Politician chooses to seriously address the budget and most citizens choose to ignore them. Serious Painful Solutions Always Seem To Be Off The Table.
We have government agencies like the SEC that do not do their job and enforce the law. They simply fine TBTF Miscreants without admittance of guilt with an injunction not to do it again which simply encourages further Malfeasance as a simple cost of doing business.
Consider the recent $238 Million JPM fine for rigging municiple bids (paid by the tax payers) over years. No JPM employees went to jail and JPM was not barred from engaging in further business.
Yes, THAT is exactly it.
Obama's strategy will be something like this "Who you gonna believe, ME, or you're lying eyes?"
The Democrats won't shatter, but there won't be much enthusiasm next year unless the Republicans nominate someone like Bachmann.
However, cynicism will be at an all time high.
Now they want the rest.
Well, they sure are happy with two of the "socialist agenda's" major programs: Medicare and Social Security.
You forget one very important tenant: if faced with losing your job, home, healthcare and all the rest that people work long and hard to achieve, somehow tarring programs with the brush of "socialism" just does not carry that much weight.
Marx got several things wrong, but he was correct on this one: unbridled, unfettered capitalism will destroy itself in its unending orgy of short-sighted greed.
The great myth of capitalism is the self-correcting marketplace.
Capitalism. We don't know what it means since it is used by so many in so many different ways. The one recognized economist who knows how it originates and grows organically is Hernando de Soto. He describes in "The Mystery of Capital." The well researched book bears this name because most people, including so called economists, don't understand what capital is and how it can be set free to enrich the majority.
Wish we'd repeat the good stuff done during the Great Depression - like enacting Glass-Steagall to separate commercial banks from investment casinos. Wish we had effective federal mortgage program that saved homes like under FDR. Wish we'd done electric grid infrastructure improvement as modern version of TVA. Wish we had a president who took the Great Recession seriously.
We knew Wall ST won , the minute Obama appointed his cabinet and dozens of other Goldman Sachs cronies to positions in his administration.