Blaming Obama

Robert Reich takes down the critics who are blaming the current Wall Street meltdown on Obama. I'm sure our readers already know that part, but here's an interesting vignette you may not know about.

Worse: When it turns out that people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who took home $68 million in 1997, was the only Wall Streeter in a meeting last September at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial AIG bailout with Tim Geithner, then New York Fed chair, among others, at the very time Goldman was AIG's largest trading partner, a distinct scent of self-dealing begins to emanate. When it turns out that Citigroup got a bailout deal last October far more generous than that given to any other distressed bank, when a top Citi executive was advising the Treasury and Fed, the scent increases. Goldman's past CEO was treasury secretary at that time, by the way, and another former Goldman CEO was a top Citi official and also a former treasury secretary. I am not suggesting anything so crude as corruption. But could it be, given these tangled webs, that -- innocently, unintentionally, perhaps even subconsciously -- the entire bailout effort was premised on saving these companies rather than protecting the public? Or that the distinction between the two was lost, and still is?

Well I'm perfectly willing to call it outright criminal corruption and the one thing I blame Obama for at this point is his insistence on continuing to put the same sort of insiders in charge of cleaning up this mess. Geithner, Bernacke and the rest of power players are apparently too emotionally invested in their relationships in the financial sector to make the sensible decisions that would solve the problem at the expense of their friends. In the end the majority of Americans are never going to be satisfied with socialized losses while the private profiteers get to keep their ill-gotten gains.

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