Pathetic.
That’s the only word that can describe President Obama’s meeting with “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” at the White House today where he called on them to open their wallets and start lending to small businesses to jump start the economy. He also urged them to stop lobbying against regulatory reform.
So let me get this straight: The government comes to the rescue of Wall Street at the cost of trillions of dollars in free taxpayer money to save the finance industry from the Apocalypse they themselves created. The bankers take the money and run back to the casino, jack up interest rates for consumers, and reward themselves with fat bonuses for the amazing job they’ve done wrecking the economy and robbing taxpayers in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s.
And all the president can do is beg, plead, and grovel before these guys.
If this kind of moral suasion is so effective, why not use it on the Taliban? Why not call Mullah Omar to the White House, call on him to lay down his arms, and urge him to please stop blowing up our troops?
Of course this is absurd, but it is also illustrative.
If the president was serious about taking on the fat cats on Wall Street, he wouldn’t be asking them to be on their best behavior and play nice with the rest of kids in the Capitol Hill sandbox. If he was serious about taking them on, he’d fire his Wall Street cronies, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernake and replace them with Paul Volcker, Elizabeth Warren, and Ralph Nader. If he was serious about anything he claims to stand for, he’d go to Capitol Hill himself and lobby Congress to pass a reform bill with teeth just as he has with his industry-friendly health care bill. If his actions were in line with his words, the Dow Jones would suffer and Wall Street would start plotting regime change at home just as they did FDR.
That would be real change we can believe in.
But that’s not what Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street crowd paid for when they bankrolled Obama’s presidential campaign. They invested in a slick-talking lawyer from Illinois with a thin resume who seemed to be everything to everyone and they are certainly getting their money’s worth. Think of it: trillions in bailouts and being branded “too big to fail” by the government in exchange for hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions. That’s the deal of a lifetime.
When you look at it this way, no wonder Obama is so nice to these fat cats. They own him.
Maybe someone should tell Mullah Omar to get out his checkbook.