ProPublica‘s Jesse Eisenger was harsh in his review of Timothy Geithner’s book about his role in the financial crisis. But he also lays the blame on president Obama because after all he was the one calling the shots and hiring the key people.
These were Mr. Geithner’s failures, but they were more deeply Mr. Obama’s. The flaws we thought we were seeing during Mr. Geithner’s tenure turn out to have replicated themselves in other Obama departments. And they have persisted after Mr. Geithner left. Why, it’s almost as if the Treasury secretary wasn’t the one making decisions and setting the tone after all.
President Obama’s appointees, Eric H. Holder Jr. at the Department of Justice and Mary L. Schapiro at the Securities and Exchange Commission, oversaw the inadequate enforcement response to the crisis. Mr. Obama reappointed Ben S. Bernanke, who focused on monetary policy and didn’t push for more aggressive regulatory and financial reform. Mr. Geithner didn’t run those shops.
But then he later says that he thinks that appointing Timothy Geithner to be the Treasury Secretary was one of the worst mistakes that president Obama made.
“I consider the Obama appointment of Geithner to be the single worst political mistake Obama made, simply for that reason,” Eisinger says. “They could’ve done everything that they wanted to do with the bailout but not tied themselves politically to it if they had simply had different personnel.”
But was it a ‘mistake’? I don’t think so. Right from the beginning, even before he took office, Obama was signaling that he was a friend of the financial sector. So why assume that he wanted to crack down on them and somehow blew it by mistakenly choosing the wrong people to carry out his policies? It is far more likely that he put these people into these positions because then he would get the result he wanted. After all, he has never expressed any regret about the outcome.
In fact, Eisenger’s review is full of evidence of how when confronted with choices about what to do, he almost invariably chose to do that which favored the banks. It is mystifying to me why Eisenger sees these as ‘mistakes’ on Obama’s part instead of policy.
I find this tendency infuriating. It’s of a piece with the books that describe in detail, over several chapters, systems that are fundamentally broken and corrupt, and then conclude by recommending reforms that their evidence clearly shows will never happen or be effective.
Jon Stewart had a fascinating (if infuriating) extended interview with Geithner which is well worth watching. I think a lot of it boiled down to the Obama administration feeling unable to fight Congress, though as Stewart pointed out repeatedly, they had a lot of power and they chose to use it to save the banks but not the people whose homes and jobs were lost.
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/extended-interviews/z9b8f1/timothy-geithner-extended-interview
“Capitalism, neither in theory nor practice, advances through reason and prosperity. It relies on executive fiats, media manipulation and arbitrary police state intrusions. It increasingly relies on death squads dubbed “Special Forces” and a ‘reserve army’ of para-military fanatics.”
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2014/05/27/capitalists-technocrats-fanatics-the-ascent-of-a-new-power-bloc/
happy future. The system is not broken, it just advances as planned.
“The new power bloc is the merger of big business, the wealthy professional classes, upwardly mobile, elite trained technocrats and cadres of ethno-religious fanatics who mobilize the masses.
Capitalism and imperialism advances by uprooting millions, destroying local communities and economies, undermining local trade and production, exploiting labor and repressing social solidarity. Everywhere it erodes community and class solidarity.”
Re kraut @ #3
Gee, sounds like the state capitalist system of the former Soviet Union.
And do we want that type of world for everybody now?
Capitalism was thought of by Marx at necessary to the development of human society from feudalism, Marx had no beef with capitalism as a means to release the human potential -- up to the point where capitalism has developed to the point where its interest are the interest of the state.
At that point of what Marx called the highest development of capitalism (an oligarchy instead the multitude of individual capitalists) to maintain and to further develop democracy a revolution becomes necessary.
Marx however never foresaw the alternative of Fascism, where a corporate state is created where the capitalist actually run the state in their interest only.
And that is a development that began actively with Mussolini and Hitler and the lessons learned are happily implemented -- more sophisticated -- to shape our future.