Robert Scheer: There’s Just No Pleasing Some Robber Barons

[marmar]

from truthdig:




There’s Just No Pleasing Some Robber Barons

Posted on Jul 14, 2010
By Robert Scheer


The flight from reason that now marks American public discourse came home for me last Friday when I found myself on public radio debating whether Barack Obama is anti-business. The “news hook” for KCRW’s “Left, Right & Center” show, which I have co-hosted for 15 years, was an absurd spate of charges from Obama’s former big-business allies that he had become their enemy. If only it were so.

One of those who has been complaining is billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman, who now finds in a White House he once supported “hostility” to the business culture he credits with the country’s greatness. I assume he is not talking about the belated efforts to hold BP accountable for the cost of the oil spill that our pro-drilling president once thought not possible.

And then there was Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric and once friendly to Obama but now alarmed by new regulations. He was one of the many CEOs cited by Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post as evidence of “Obama’s CEO problem.” General Electric is a company that got into deep trouble when it stopped worrying about making better light bulbs and came to devote much of its business through GE capital to fancy financial products. With GE having been saved by the taxpayers, one wonders what the conglomerate has to complain about. Or Wall Street donors now stiffing the Democrats and claiming Obama is hostile to them.

All this comes at the very time that Wall Street lobbyists stand poised to win a sweeping victory preventing a reversal of the radical deregulation that made the banking debacle possible. The “Volcker rule,” restoration of the New Deal-era barrier between investment and consumer banking that Obama had pledged to support, is gutted. As a disappointed Paul Volcker told Louis Uchitelle in an interview for The New York Times, he would rate the reforms just a B and not even a B-plus. Leading Wall Street economist Henry Kaufman told the Times: “The legislation is a Rube Goldberg contraption, and there are long timelines before the Volcker rule is fully implemented.” ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/theres_just_no_pleasing_some_robber_barons_20100714/

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[Donnachaidh]

2. I wish I could k&r this a thousand times

It's galling to think that these *elites* are so quick to stomp on the very customers (the middle class) that made THEM elites. :grr:

[fasttense]

3. Those Robber Barons are just never happy.

There is always one more mess they can create, one more dime they can con out of the gubermint, one more American citizen they can send to the unemployment lines.

It reminds me of how much Billionaire Pete Peterson has spent to take away our Social Security.

These guys are never happy, never have enough, never cut the average person an even break.

[Mopar151]

4. Exactly

It's not enough that they are rich - the rest of us must be poor.

[tonybeme]

5. See you there

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