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Ignoring The Root Cause

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June 17, 2010

The predominant criticism of the so-called “financial reform” bill is its failure to address the problems caused by the existence of financial institutions considered “too big to fail”.  In an essay entitled, “Creating the Next Crisis” economist Simon Johnson discussed the consequences of this legislative let-down:

On the critical dimension of excessive bank size and what it implies for systemic risk, there was a concerted effort by Senators Ted Kaufman and Sherrod Brown to impose a size cap on the largest banks – very much in accordance with the spirit of the original “Volcker Rule” proposed in January 2010 by Obama himself.  In an almost unbelievable volte face, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious, Obama’s administration itself shot down this approach.  “If enacted, Brown-Kaufman would have broken up the six biggest banks in America,” a senior Treasury official said.  “If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened.  But we weren’t, so it didn’t.”

*   *   *

The US financial sector received an unconditional bailout – and is not now facing any kind of meaningful re-regulation.  We are setting ourselves up, without question, for another boom based on excessive and reckless risk-taking at the heart of the world’s financial system.  This can end only one way:  badly.

One would assume that an important lesson learned from the 2008 financial crisis was the idea that a corporation shouldn’t be permitted to blackmail the country with threats that its own financial collapse would have such a dire impact on society-at-large that the corporation should be bailed out by the taxpayers.  The resulting problem is called “moral hazard” because such businesses are encouraged to act irresponsibly by virtue of the certainty that they will be bailed out if their activities prove self-destructive.

Gonzalo Lira wrote a piece for the Naked Capitalism blog, explaining how the moral hazard resulting from the “too big to fail” doctrine is facilitating a state of corporate anarchy:

In a nutshell, in this era of corporate anarchy, corporations do not have to abide by any rules — none at all.  Legal, moral, ethical, even financial rules are irrelevant.  They have all been rescinded in the pursuit of profit — literally nothing else matters.

As a result, corporations currently exist in a state of almost pure anarchy — but an anarchy directly related to their size:  The larger the corporation, the greater its absolute freedom to do and act as it pleases.  That’s why so many medium-sized corporations are hell-bent on growth over profits:  The biggest of them all, like BP and Goldman Sachs, live in a positively Hobbesian State of Nature, free to do as they please, with nary a consequence.

Good-old British Petroleum – the latest beneficiary of the “too big to fail doctrine”  — can rely on its size to avoid any sanctions it considers unacceptable because too many “small people” might lose their jobs if BP can’t stay fat and happy.  Gonzalo Lira’s analysis went a step further:

Worst of all, BP realizes that, if it finally cannot get a handle on the oil spill disaster, they can simply fob it off on the U.S. Government — in other words, the people of the United States will wind up cleaning BP’s mess.  BP knows that no one will hold it accountable — BP knows that it will get away with it.

*   *   *

This era of corporate anarchy is reaching a crisis point — we can all sense it.  Yet the leadership in the United States and Europe is making no effort to solve the root problem.  Perhaps they don’t see the problem.  Perhaps they are beholden to corporate masters.  Whatever the case, in his speech, President Obama made ridiculous references to “clean energy” while ignoring the cause of the BP oil spill disaster, the cause of the financial crisis, the cause of the spiralling health-care costs — the corporate anarchy that underlines them all.

This era of corporate anarchy is wrecking the world — literally, if you’ve been tuning in to images of the oil billowing out a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr. Lira discussed how a leadership void has been helping corporate anarchy overtake democratic capitalism:

Obama is a corporatist — he’s one of Them.  So there’ll be more bullshit talk about “clean energy” and “energy independence”, while the root cause — corporate anarchy — is left undisturbed.

The failure of President Obama to take advantage of the opportunity to address this “root cause” in his Oval Office address concerning the Deepwater Horizon disaster, inspired Robert Reich to make this comment:

Whether it’s Wall Street or health insurers or oil companies, we are approaching a turning point.  The top executives of powerful corporations are pursuing profits in ways that menace the nation.  We have not seen the likes not since the late nineteenth century when the “robber barons” of finance, oil, and the giant trusts ran roughshod over America.  Now, as then, they are using their wealth and influence to buy off legislators and intimidate the regions that depend on them for jobs.  Now, as then, they are threatening the safety and security of our people.

One of my favorite commentators, Paul Farrell of MarketWatch, recently warned us about the consequences of allowing corporate anarchy to destroy democratic capitalism:

The rise of uncontrolled corporate greed killed the “Invisible Hand,” the “soul” of capitalism that Adam Smith saw in 1776 as a divine force serving “the common good.”  Today the system has no moral compass.  Wall Street’s insatiable greed has destroyed capitalism from within, turning America’s economy into a soulless zombie.

The “Invisible Hand” Adam Smith saw as essential to capitalism in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” died in endless battles fought by 261,000 lobbyists each wanting a bigger piece of the $1.7 trillion federal budget pie plus favorable laws protecting, vesting and increasing the power and wealth of their special interest clients.  Future historians will call this ideological battle replacing democracy the new “American Capitalists Anarchy.”

*   *   *

As a New York Times reviewer put it:  Nations like “China and Russia are using what he calls ‘state capitalism’ to advance the interests of their companies at the expense of their American rivals.”  Global pandemic?

Unfortunately while America wastes trillions to bail out inefficient too-stupid-to-fail banks, our competition is bankrolling healthy state-controlled corporations to destroy us  . . .

If we ever reach the point when the watered-down “financial reform” bill finally becomes law, the taxpayers should insist that their government move on to address the “root cause” of corporate anarchy by taking up campaign finance reform.  That should be one hell of a fight!



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ObamaWatch

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June 14, 2010

Last week, I highlighted some criticism of Barack Obama’s presidency, which came from such unlikely sources as Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times, as well as Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  The man whom I described as the “Disappointer-in-Chief” during his third month in office, has continued to draw harsh criticism from unlikely sources.  At this point, the subject pondered by many commentators concerns whether any of this dissatisfaction will stick long enough to have an impact on the mid-term elections and beyond.

If the President read Tim Dickenson’s recent essay for Rolling Stone, “The Spill, The Scandal and the President”, it must have been painful.  Mr. Dickenson didn’t pull any punches while explaining Mr. Obama’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them.  Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption.  He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years.  He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.

At the Naked Capitalism website, Yves Smith summed up a good number of the Obama Administration’s shortcomings in the first paragraph of her June 11 piece about the BP mess:

As readers may know, I’ve been consistently disappointed by the Obama Administration:  its faux progressive packaging versus its corporatist posture, its half-hearted, halting reforms which are noisily trumpeted as the real thing, its deep seated belief that public antipathy to its initiatives means it needs to work harder on selling its message, when it really needs a new strategy.

But the escalating disaster of the Gulf oil spill, and the unique constellation it presents, namely, a big, rich, isolated, foreign perp, which is largely if not solely responsible for the mess, in close proximity to contested mid-term elections, might actually rouse Obama to do something uncharacteristic, namely get tough.

This is by no means a likely outcome, but we are seeing some novel behaviors.  First is that Obama finally may have succeeded in getting someone important afraid of him.  This is a critically important lesson; Machiavelli told his prince it was much more important to be feared than loved.  Mere anger is often negotiation posturing or a manifestation of CEO Derangement Syndrome; fear is much harder to fake.  And BP is finally starting to get rattled.

In case you are wondering whether the President is still popular in Hollywood, The Hill recently turned to a couple of southern California bloggers to provide some insight as to whether Mr. Obama has begun to lose his sparkle in Tinsel Town.  John Nolte of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog expressed the belief that the President’s supporters in Hollywood have been keeping the faith:

If anything, Hollywood is worried about and for Obama.  Worried about the upcoming mid-terms, his re-election chances, his sliding poll numbers, and his gilded ship sailing off course and landing in Carter-ita-ville instead of Mt. Rushmore.

From the more left-leaning perspective, Deborah White of The Liberal OC blog gave us the impression that the President’s Hollywood supporters are becoming increasingly disappointed, although not yet disgruntled:

As of now, President Obama has not lost the support of most Hollywood liberals.  But Democrats in Hollywood are also no longer lavishing praise on Obama as they did in hopeful droves before his triumphant election.

Hollywood liberals no longer view Barack Obama as someone they blindly “want to follow… somewhere, anywhere” as pal George Clooney famously told Charlie Rose in early 2008.

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd has continued with her unrestrained criticism of the President.  Her June 11 column must have irritated more than a few people on Pennsylvania Avenue:

The press traveling with Obama on the campaign never had a lovey-dovey relationship with him.  He treated us with aloof correctness, and occasional spurts of irritation.  Like many Democrats, he thinks the press is supposed to be on his side.

The patrician George Bush senior was always gracious with reporters while conveying the sense that what we do for a living was rude.

The former constitutional lawyer now in the White House understands that the press has a role in the democracy.  But he is an elitist, too, as well as thin-skinned and controlling.  So he ends up regarding scribes as intrusive, conveying a distaste for what he sees as the fundamental unseriousness of a press driven by blog-around-the-clock deadlines.

During the Presidential election campaign, Mr. Obama was often described as a “Rorschach test” — people saw in him whatever they imagined.  Now that the President has been able to disappoint his supporters, the criticism is gradually becoming increasingly harsh.  As frustration over the BP crisis, unemployment and the economy continues to build — the criticism voiced by those who voted for him is likely to become more caustic.




Living Up To A Title

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June 7, 2010

It was back on April 9, 2009 – before President Obama had completed his third month in office – when I first referred to him as the “Disappointer-in-Chief”.  I concluded that piece with this gloomy prediction:

If President Obama does not change course and deviate from the Geithner-Summers plan before it’s too late, his legacy will be a ten-year recession rather than a two-year recession without the PPIP.  Worse yet, the toughest criticism and the most pressure against his administration are coming from people he has considered his supporters.  At least he has the people at Fox News to provide some laughable “decoy” reports to keep his hard-core adversaries otherwise occupied.

Just two weeks earlier —  on March 23, 2009 – I had been discussing the widespread apprehension over Obama’s planned bailout of the largest banks (the so-called “Financial Stability Plan” which later morphed into the PPIP).  At that point, Frank Rich of The New York Times made a premature use of the term “Obama’s Katrina moment”.

With the arrival of Obama’s real “Katrina moment” — by way of the Deepwater Horizon blowout –  we are again hearing a chorus of criticism directed against the Obama administration, not unlike what we heard during those first few months.  Now that our new President has established a track record of bad decisions, let’s take a look at some reactions from people the Fox News will insist are loyal Obama supporters.  First we had Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, who delivered a one-two punch to the man she has called “Barry” (when mad at him) on May 29 and June 1:

In the campaign, Obama’s fight flagged to the point that his donors openly upbraided him.  In the Oval, he waited too long to express outrage and offer leadership on A.I.G., the banks, the bonuses, the job loss and mortgage fears, the Christmas underwear bomber, the death panel scare tactics, the ugly name-calling of Tea Party protesters.

Too often it feels as though Barry is watching from a balcony, reluctant to enter the fray until the clamor of the crowd forces him to come down.  The pattern is perverse.  The man whose presidency is rooted in his ability to inspire withholds that inspiration when it is most needed.

Ouch!  If that weren’t enough, Ms. Dowd’s June 1 punch had to hurt:

This president has made it clear that he’s not comfortable outside whatever domain he’s defined.  But unless he wants his story to be marred by a pattern of passivity, detachment, acquiescence and compromise, he’d better seize control of the story line of his White House years.  Woe-is-me is not an attractive narrative.

Also at The New York Times, Frank Rich expressed his impatience with the President – now that the real “Katrina moment” has arrived:

We still want to believe that Obama is on our side, willing to fight those bad corporate actors who cut corners and gambled recklessly while regulators slept, Congress raked in contributions, and we got stuck with the wreckage and the bills.  But his leadership style keeps sowing confusion about his loyalties, puncturing holes in the powerful tale he could tell.

*   *   *

No high-powered White House meetings or risk analyses were needed to discern how treacherous it was to trust BP this time.  An intern could have figured it out.  But the credulous attitude toward BP is no anomaly for the administration.  Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was praised by the president as a “savvy” businessman two months before the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman.  Well before then, there had been a flood of journalistic indicators that Goldman under Blankfein may have gamed the crash and the bailout.

It’s this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed to him.  Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them.  But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

Back on December 14, I pointed out how the so-called “race card” has not been a free pass for the Disappointer-in-Chief:

As we approach the conclusion of Obama’s first year in the White House, it has become apparent that the Disappointer-in-Chief has not only alienated the Democratic Party’s liberal base, but he has also let down a demographic he thought he could take for granted:  the African-American voters.  At this point, Obama has “transcended race” with his ability to dishearten loyal black voters just as deftly as he has chagrined loyal supporters from all ethnic groups.

The most recent example of this phenomenon appeared in the form of an opinion piece by Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Here is some of what Mr. Norman had to say:

At a Memorial Day dinner I attended, there wasn’t just disappointment with Mr. Obama’s inability to find his inner Huey Long — there was an undercurrent of genuine anger.

It went far beyond the handling of the BP crisis.  As far as anyone can tell, there isn’t much to distinguish Mr. Obama’s policies in Afghanistan and Iraq from his predecessor’s.

Beyond the Deepwater Horizon, Mr. Obama has been a disappointment on civil liberties, banking reform, military spending, the drug war, Middle East policy, immigration and the environment.  Political gamesmanship and calculation of the rankest kind continue.  Even his latest Supreme Court nominee shows every indication of being as colorless as the president has proven to be in recent months.  It’s too much to expect this president to champion a progressive Supreme Court candidate.

Meanwhile, the corrupt culture of Wall Street continues to set the agenda, thanks to cowardly Democrats and nihilistic Republicans.  Accountability is as much a dirty word for Mr. Obama as it was for President George W. Bush.

*   *   *

Honestly, other than the particularities of the historical record, it no longer makes sense to blame Mr. Bush for much when Mr. Obama has done little — other than improvise a less belligerent foreign policy — to distinguish himself from the 43rd president.

I won’t spoil the rest of Mr. Norman’s article.  Just be sure to read it.  (Hint:  It includes some nice speculation about how the new President was likely pulled aside by some members of the plutocracy, who gave him “The Talk”.)

Meanwhile, the Presidential disappointments continue.  It appears as though we are going to wait for God to stop the oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.  Since we have left it to God to do the wetlands protection and the clean-up, this shouldn’t be too surprising.   I’m beginning to suspect that President Obama’s religious ideas are even more far-out than those of President Bush. –  It’s just that President Obama doesn’t talk about them.





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