Obama's Biggest Mistake: Selling Out to the Bankers - James K. Galbraith

[BrklynLiberal]

http://www.alternet.org/story/148770/obama%27s_biggest_mistake%3A_selling_out_to_the_bankers

The original sin of Obama's presidency was to trust bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers, whose primary goal was to protect their own past decisions and futures.

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure -- to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy.

As Krugman rightly stipulates, Monday-morning quarterbacks should say exactly what different play they would have called. Paul’s answer is that the stimulus package should have been bigger. No disagreement: I was one voice calling for a much larger program back when. Yet this answer is not sufficient.

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.


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[Bitwit1234]

1. This is a perfect example of Obama's so called failures

He has from the very beginning surrounded himself with the wrong people starting with Emmanual. And the problem with our lack of getting our message out. The problem of us not fighting back is....WE DIDN'T DO ANY OF THOSE THINGS TO THE EXTENT THE REPUBLICANS DID. We let this happen. It is our fault. We couldn't fight fox on the news the media wouldn't let us. But we should have organized. We could have. And at the town meetings we should have been like the republicans throw the damn disrupter's out. Mail out flyer's. Send letters. We need an organization that knows how to get things done. Howard Dean made a good start. WE LET THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION replace him with the wimp Kaine. Did you see Kaine out in front of the cameras like Steele. Steele was getting stupid messages out but he was getting in front of the public. I don't think I saw Kaine one time give a press conference. We need a fighter, we need people who won't back down. We need someone to head our organizations who is NOT, I REPEAT NOT running for office. That way they won't be beholden to the big money slush fund. Why can't we organize like the tea bags did. Of course the had the backing, in some cases, of the billionaires. But there were a lot of the organizations that didn't. They started and support themselves. And I am sure we could have done it also. It just takes commitment and guts and I am beginning to that that we all just don't have it. I wish we could find a fighting leader.

[JDPriestly]

2. I printed my own flyers in 2008. I simply don't have the money to do that now.

I suggest that everyone watch the movie, Inside Job. It shows you the extent of the corruption in D.C. Until we clean out the corruption, the rats will still be in charge of everything.

There is no sense in campaigning for a politician only to have him sell out as soon as he is office to the bankers or some other favored industry that funds his campaigns.

Bernanke, Summers and Geithner were three of the major causes of our economic melt-down. Obama claims he hired them because they understood the mess. That's nonsense. If he wanted to employe their talents, he could have called on them for information without giving them positions of power. The power should have gone to the honest economists like Galbraith, Robert Reich and Paul Krugman.

Obama's unforgivable mistake was to hire Bernanke, Summers and Geithner and just converse with Galbraith, Reich and Krugman on rare occasions.

And now, Obama still has a lousy economic team. Bernanke and Geithner should be asked to resign. The Senate should get on the stick and start approving Obama's appointments of liberals.

The Senate needs to get rid of the filibuster rule in January. Let the majority rule. If Democrats don't get rid of the filibuster rule this January, the Republicans will take over the whole Congress and get rid of it when they do.

[Better Believe It]

3. Is this who is actually running things in Washington?

[Dappleganger]

4. Damn straight! nt

[leeroysphitz]

5. James K. Galbraith under the bus in 3...2...1... n/t

[dgibby]

6. It appears to me that there's a recurrent theme in all of Obama's policies.

He delegates too much to the wrong people, then takes a "hands off, wait and see" approach.

Delegation is fine if done right, but done incorrectly leads to disaster.

For instance:

If the Captain of the ship delegates control of the helm to someone not qualified and the ship wrecks, it's the Captain that goes down with said ship.

If the engineer on the train delegates control to the conductor, and the train jumps the tracks, ......

If the pilot of the passenger jet lets one of the passengers take the controls, and the plane crashes,....

There's a real science to the art of delegation. If he's going to have a successful presidency and get re-elected, he'd better learn this asap. So far, his track record in this area has been sadly lacking.

[QC]

7. James K. Galbraith never really loved him!

:cry: