These Are Our Heroes

"Obama Signs Sweeping Wall Street Overhaul into Law"

And to that, Robert Reich, Public Enemy, me, and others say, simply, "Don't believe the hype." Jeff Madrick, you wanted to weigh in?

The financial reregulation package just passed by Congress is far from a comprehensive reform of American finance. Despite the enormous threat to the world’s financial markets created by the failure of Lehman Brothers and the stunning excesses of insurance giant AIG and banking conglomerate Citigroup, the reforms are in truth modest. Neither the Obama administration nor Congress opted to cut banks down to size, and the bill is only placing mild limits on risky banking activities. The giant financial institutions, meanwhile, are as big—even bigger—than ever and bankers’ compensation is once again at stunning levels.

But the problem with the legislation is not merely its small scale. It is the way it is supposed to be implemented: to avoid controversy and get the bill passed, congressional reformers foisted the responsibility for setting most of the specific, sticky rules on federal regulators at the Fed, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and elsewhere, who are to make them over the next year or two. These are, for the most part, the same regulators who failed to stop the speculative excesses and ensuing credit crisis of 2008. While they now have a few more tools at their disposal, their already substantial tool box was barely touched in the years leading up to the housing and credit crash and severe recession. Will it be different next time?

Avoid controversy. Always the Obama way. And, of course, always the wrong way. Obama never presented himself as the most liberal candidate in 2008, and he never positioned himself as a firebrand who would rise to the level of zealous advocacy needed to counterattack the lunatic conservatives who make Glenn Beck popular. However, he did campaign as a change agent, promising that, if nothing else, common sense and good governance would return to Washington. Rather than allowing special interests to control the nation, and rather than standing down when confronted by inertia and systemic difficulty, Obama was going to challenge the orthodoxy in the name of progress.

That was all a lie, perhaps unintended at the time. Rather than waging a justified and popular assault on Washington's standard misdirection and corruption, Obama has elevated bipartisanship and placid politics to substantive goals, thereby marginalizing true policy leadership. For Obama, avoiding a fight and perpetuating the masquerade that cooperation among fifty-eight Democrats and two Republicans is a salve for all that ails America is worth the ineffective, mediocre legislation that results from such ideological indifference. Obama has emerged as a president who stands for nothing, a man whose priorities are lost in the vagueness of ceremonial compromise. That he is such an articulate, insightful scholar only amplifies the disappointment. Beyond liberalism and conservatism, Obama has surrendered his clarion advocacy and commitment to rational leadership.

Back to you, Madrick:

What I find most disappointing is that the Obama team did not present its case for regulation based on a diagnosis of what caused the crisis in the first place. His advisers seemed to adopt the widespread notion that everyone had a part in it—a convenient way to blame no one.

Just another copout from an administration that has made them a hallmark. These political appeasers don't even have the commitment and gumption to fight for their own ideas. And they operate from deep within the cesspool, happily swimming with the other feckless "leaders" whose instincts are solely about self-preservation and honoring the status quo. Matt Taibbi smacked them in the face for it, as he should have.

This note comes courtesy of my friend David Sirota out in Colorado. This is a classic example of how the Senate works. If the public understood better how rigged this game is, and how few issues are actually left to an honest vote in the legislature, I'm pretty sure the pitchfork factor would be twice even what it is now.

The entire post is one big kufi slap.

I used to believe that the country would be different with Obama, and that someone like Obama wouldn't even have been necessary had Al Gore won in 2000. Gore may have been a better president than Bush, but he probably isn't a better guy. Sexual politics and electoral politics may not mix well, but both help us measure the American ruling class. And during weeks like this one, it's hard to maintain enough interest to parse through which group of selfish, brazen, dishonest lowlifes is better than the other.



P.S. So that we're clear, the title of the post borrows from the Nas song solely because I want to acknowledge that the leadership in America fails its constituency despite the former's own celebrations to the contrary. This is not meant to be a commentary on race--Obama's or as a general topic--in any way.