Saving The Economy

This quote comes from another blog, the subject of which had to do with Larry Summers having received millions of dollars from the financial industry just last year. You can read more on that in the New York Times article of yesterday. The blog post also mentioned that most of the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve staff consists of former Wall Street executives, which struck the poster, as it does me, as being a problem.

What I am wondering is, if finance was 40% of America’s economy, and the part that controlled the control of capital, how do we establish order without hiring guys who know their way around in that world?

First, finance was 40% of this nation’s profit; it was 20% of this nation’s economy, and that is a telling fact in itself. But the nonsense about “hiring guys who know their way around” being necessary is sort of like saying that the only guy who can rescue the Titanic is the guy who ran it into the iceberg, or that the only people who can prevent the dam from collapsing are the people who designed it improperly to begin with.

This “we need to hire the experts” is just absurd on a couple of levels.

For one thing, they are not the experts. Barack Obama campaigned on the concept that when someone has driven the bus into the ditch you need to hire a new bus driver. So we elect him as President and he immediately tells us that he needs to take the drivers that drove our economic bus into the ditch and hire them to drive that bus out of the ditch. If they knew how to get it out of the ditch, they would not have driven it into the ditch.

For another, to suggest that out of 300 million people there are only this small handful, all of whom are members of the club which consists of Wall Street executives, who have the intelligence and acumen to steer our nation’s economy out of disaster is utterly preposterous.

For all the good things that Barack Obama is doing, his performance on the economy absolutely baffles me.

He promises that there will be no lobbyists in his administration and then one of the first appointments he makes is a rank lobbyist and Wall Street insider whom he grants an “exception” because he needs him for his unique knowledge of the economy which no one else in the entire universe, including several Nobel Prize holders, possesses.

He comes out with a stimulus bill which is too small overall and which contains stimulus expenditure which will not be paid out for two years and more, doing nothing to create jobs in the current economic crisis. He continues to praise a bill which will “create or save three million jobs in the next two years” when thirteen million people are without jobs already and another million jobs are being lost every six weeks.

While jobs are being shed at almost six times the rate he is patting himself on the back for creating them, he is throwing money into Wall Street like it was a bottomless hole, and hiring Wall Street cronies to further their own ends rather than serving the well being of Main Street.

The stock market loves his actions, and more and more American people are becoming jobless, homeless, and hungry every day while the Dow Jones Average soars because he is spending $300 billion on jobs while spending $3 trillion on Wall Street.

The bankruptcy laws, changed to bar the common man from the relief of the courts of law, remains unchanged while the FASB changes accounting practices to accommodate the desire of Wall Street to practice deception.

He stands by, complicit or inactive, while the Wall Street oligarchy continues to loot this nation and depress the well being of the vast majority of this nation’s people. This is not why I voted for him, and I will not stand silent and “support my President” merely because he labels himself a Democrat when his social policy remains this abhorrent.