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.
Financial Reform Bill Exposed As Hoax
June 28, 2010
You don’t have to look too far to find damning criticism of the so-called financial “reform” bill. Once the Kaufman-Brown amendment was subverted (thanks to the Obama administration), the efforts to solve the problem of financial institutions’ growth to a state of being “too big to fail” (TBTF) became a lost cause. Dylan Ratigan, who had been fuming for a while about the financial reform charade, had this to say about the product that emerged from reconciliation on Friday morning:
The best trashing of this bill came from Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge:
Robert Lenzner of Forbes focused his criticism of the bill on the fact that nothing was done to limit the absurd leverage used by the banks to borrow against their capital. After all, at the January 13 hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Lloyd Bankfiend of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan’s Dimon Dog admitted that excessive leverage was a key problem in causing the financial crisis. As I discussed in “Lev Is The Drug”:
At Forbes, Robert Lenzner discussed the ugly truth about how the limits on leverage were excised from this bill:
Another victory for the lobbyists came in their sabotage of the prohibition on proprietary trading (when banks trade with their own money, for their own benefit). The bill provides that federal financial regulators shall study the measure, then issue rules implementing it, based on the results of that study. The rules might ultimately ban proprietary trading or they may allow for what Jim Jubak of MSN calls the “de minimus” (trading with minimal amounts) exemption to the ban. Jubak considers the use of the de minimus exemption to the so-called ban as the likely outcome. Many commentators failed to realize how the lobbyists worked their magic here, reporting that the prop trading ban (referred to as the “Volcker rule”) survived reconciliation intact. Jim Jubak exposed the strategy employed by the lobbyists:
At the Naked Capitalism website, Yves Smith served up some more negative reactions to the bill, along with her own cutting commentary:
So there you have it. The bill that is supposed to save us from another financial crisis does nothing to accomplish that objective. Once this 2,000-page farce is signed into law, watch for the reactions. It will be interesting to sort out the clear-thinkers from the Kool-Aid drinkers.
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