Whose side is Obama on?

[kentuck]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/24/AR2009112404014.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

<snip>
There is much to be thankful for this holiday, including the fact that we live in a country that has been remarkably good-natured, generous and pragmatic in the face of a nasty economic crisis. The rates of unemployment and under-employment have already hit a combined 17 percent. Household wealth has been significantly diminished. Reluctantly, we agreed to take on more public debt to finance a massive bailout of a financial sector that badly let us down. We stepped up our household savings and embraced the new frugality.

What really sticks in our craw, however, is that while most of the country is hunkered down, Wall Street continues to feast on a bounty of trading profits. You'd expect that a new liberal Democratic president would find a way to give voice to this populist outrage and constructively channel this public anger. But too often, the response from the administration has been to try to convince us that there's little we can do, or should do, to ensure that the economic harvest is more equitably distributed. Now, the White House and congressional leaders find themselves scrambling to get ahead of a growing political backlash that threatens to upend their carefully calibrated agenda, not to mention their political fortunes.

Fairly or unfairly, the official who has come to personify this let-them-eat-stuffing attitude is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who can't seem to decide whose side of the buffet table he's really on. It was Geithner who, at the height of the financial crisis last year, was able to best articulate the unpleasant truth that we could save the financial system or we could punish the banks but we couldn't do both at the same time. But now that the system has been saved, he seems to have lost his appetite for retribution.


<snip>
Obama could start by instructing the Justice Department to launch an antitrust inquiry to determine why Wall Street continues to earn the extravagant profits from which the bonuses are derived.

The president could press Congress to close the tax loophole that allows managers of hedge funds and private-equity funds to pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. He could ask the country's largest pension plans, mutual funds and endowments to come up with voluntary pay standards for their own managers and traders, but also for any banks or money managers they do business with.

And Obama could ask the Group of 20 to put the transaction tax back on the agenda, and vow to use the $50 billion a year in revenue that it would generate here to finance the much-needed transportation infrastructure improvements that the president himself has proposed.

.......more

[midnight]

1. Great suggestions.

[Bonn1997]

2. There are very, very few politicians on the side of ordinary people. Obama is simply less far from

our side than Republicans. It sucks but I don't see any paths to the real change we want.

[HamdenRice]

3. "good-natured, generous and pragmatic in the face of a nasty economic crisis"???

Uh, here, not so much.

:rofl: