This opportunity will not be taken.
I'm not going to pretend to understand why.
But Obama is not going to remake the economy.
No, not even baby steps.
Not when, every week that passes, we get another example of this.
NPR brought in a couple of experts, one of which was Mr. Johnson, to talk about what to do with the banks and other financial institutions -- like AIG -- that are "too big to fail."
Mr. Johnson's view?
If they are too big to fail, they are too big to exist.
The response from the Obama administration?
Diana Farrell [senior Obama advisor]: We understand Simon Johnson's views on this, and I guess the response is the following.
Moderator [summarizing]: The problem with Johnson's approach, they decided, is that bigness also has its benefits. Sure, the economy used to be simpler and financial institutions weren't so big and dangerous, but GDP was smaller then, too, and people were poorer. We can discuss a time before we created huge, complicated institutions like CitiGroup and AIG all we want, says Farrell. But...
Ms. Farrell: We have created them, and we're sort of past that point, and I think that in some sense, the genie's out of the bottle and what we need to do is to manage them and to oversee them, as opposed to hark back to a time that we're unlikely to ever come back to or want to come back to.
In other words:
The banks that are too big to fail are here to stay.
Get out your wallets, People of the Globe, you are going to be doing a lot of bailing out of banks ... for the rest of human history!
Similarly, if you look at other challenges facing the American economy, we're being told again and again by the Obama administration that "that ship has sailed" or "the inevitable has happened" or "you need to adjust to the new reality."
Globalization? Sorry, it was inevitable.
Lost your job? Sorry, adjust to the new reality.
We can even look further, toward civil rights, insurance reform, the Iraq War, Afghanistan ... All of the promises of the campaign year are evaporating before a wave of inevitables and new realities and ships that have sailed.
Perhaps the most pernicious example, though, is the example of the big banks -- the big, bad, failed banks that are just being allowed to get bigger. How long until they swallow us up entirely?
The NPR moderator noted the following interesting fact:
The conservative expert who supported John McCain during the election thinks that the Obama gang is doing a fine job managing our current economic mess. The liberal expert who supported Obama, Simon Johnson, is giving the team an F.