I remember hearing about Obama's poker-playing way back early in the campaign; not so much lately.
Wall Street has pretty much run the country since, oh, since about Hamilton's time, with a few time-outs for Jackson and Jefferson. Or didn't they even make a dent in our Republic's control by bankers?
Matt Taibbi states our predicament forcefully, without really identifying Obama's ultimate role or possible strategy in it all:
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
In this country and age, you don't get elected President without Wall Street's at least tacit acceptance.
You don't signal a threat to their control; you take their henchmen into your Cabinet.
If you are a game-changer, Step One, you get in -- then you look for your power base for change.
But you can't yell for it out loud, you have to just make P.O.W.-type eye-blinking signals to let them -- us -- know you're still one of us.
I'm having trouble seeing much in the way of signals; could be my fault, dunno. Help me out here.
[WARNING! CONFUSED LATE-NIGHT ANALOGIZING IMAGERY FOLLOWS! Your brain must be this buzzed to go on this ride.]
It would be pretty ironic, wouldn't it: We get the first non-all-white President in, and he lets Wall Street loot the Treasury. Advertises it for them! I didn't think there was much left after Paulson and Bernanke last year, but they seem to think there is. Hmmmm...
So. So far this story could be going either way. I just can't see the signals yet that Obama isn't totally taken with the "give Wall Street everything they want -- all of our money -- and it will Trickle Down to our economy and us. Believe us! We really really know Economics shit! (And you don't!)"
The forecasting of expensive second- and third-order effects as if they were first-order certainties at no cost to us worth even considering.
The supposed leveraging magic of "getting banks to lend again" vs. just giving us our money directly -- we wouldn't need to borrow it. Leveraging is always just a sales pitch to us -- and a paycheck for them.
Sounds like the various jokes about guys who can become millionaires -- if you just start them out with ten millions.
"Give us $500 billion, and we'll lend you back 250! What!? What did I say wrong???"
I just read the diary about not getting rid of Geithner. "...Keep your enemies closer..." would be my only contribution there.
To me, Geithner and Bernanke look like clueless morons, the kind that give us intellectual-types the bad rep. Deer in the headlights. Actually, Geithner looks like the "friend" in "Ghost", the guy that has Patrick Swayze murdered so he can put through his money-laundering deal, and then chases Demi Moore around until he gets impaled.
Maybe this is the best that Wall Street can serve up? All expendables, of course, as the really Big Ones would never expose themselves to public visibility. Geithner and Summers are certainly plants, just, how dangerous are they or can Obama trace back from them and find out the weaknesses of the controllers behind them?
Can he be that fast a learner of the power flows in Washington?
BTW, Wall Street via the Fed has been co-opting academics like Bernanke since before its beginning in 1913. Using them to placate the public with "expert pronouncements" about "monetary reform" (came in handy in 1929, didn't it?) promote its existence and its three-card-monte agenda. Making it all sound so, uh, "liberal", as in government benevolence, for those of us who would otherwise be wanting to stomp all over capitalism's most extreme sport: Banking.
BTW #2, I'm saying "Wall Street" over and over again here, and I know "Wall Street" was the proverbial BoogeyMan in Left rhetoric as the label for all American capitalism.
No -- this time, I really mean "WALL STREET" As in: Where are the billions for the other regional, smaller, local banks -- the ones who never fucked around with CDS's and CDO-squareds? The ones who aren't holding us hostage and scaring us with Jason-in-the-basement. The ones who could jump right into "getting lending going again" right where it would help the most, locally, if they had the extra deposits, not having to first pay off Goldman Sachs another twenty billion, and then another...
No, Wall Street has a gun to our Economy's head threatening to pull the trigger if we don't hand over all our dough; e.g., all tax revenues for the next 20 years. All our Social Security checks and medical care and educationl funding. You can kiss all that goodbye. So Obama better be bluffing DAMN GOOD! People be dying real soon from all this.
The pre-Paulson pre-Obama GAO picture-of-the-century:
http://www.gao.gov/...
Not sure how sucked into it all Krugman has been through his career, but he and Galbraith sound like they got religion and are running counter to it now.
Anyway, Obama probably knows that he must run with the Fedsters for at least awhile. During AIG Inquisition Week, all of 7 long political days ago, it occurred to me that Obama could be playing these guys off against each other. Congress, Republicans, Liddy, AIG, Geithner etc.
He needs Wall Street to wound itself so badly in the public view, that, even if Obama takes a few flesh wounds -- (not as in the Pythonesque "It's only a flesh wound") -- he can finally dislodge Wall Street from the cockpit of our plunging airplane and take over the controls himself.
That may be the best maneuver he -- or you or I in his shoes -- could come up with in this Most Corrupt Empire Since Rome. A longshot, but best one we got.
Or Maybe He Really Believes Their Shit. Be Verrrry Afraid.
That was close to the original image I had in starting this one -- no, not the poker patsy one of "If you don't know who the patsy at the table is, it's you". I don't know poker, and if Obama does, I hope it indicates talent that will be used to our advantage. Paulson certainly was loaded with "tells", but Obama's up against other players now.
I remembered a longshot maneuver that I heard about jet fighter pilots trying when their plane or its engine had been shot and set on fire.
You take the plane into a steep dive to see if that will put out the fire. (Otherwise, you Bail Out. That's really Bail Out, as in, bye bye airplane.)
That's the Trillion Dollar Financial "Rescue" analogy, but in government finance, a Trillion Dollar dive is pretty hard to pull out of. Better be worth it, and not just be guessing. You gotta know.
Only, I had imagined the plunge as also being an effort to shake Wall Street -- the fire -- out of your plane completely. Hmmmm, not sure I can make total sense of that analogy -- it's late -- sleep calls.
The other image popping in near the end of writing this is, Geithner (Wall Street) and Obama as the two Bond-like action characters who fall out of the plane fighting over the one parachute. Of course, the "good guy" ends up putting it on and kicking the other guy splat into a parking lot somewhere.
No, Obama's best guess here would be to maneuver -- bluff, fool, play off against each other -- these guys away from power, and grab it himself for us. (How one might envy a vegetable like Bush who only had to sit right where they wanted him and not budge.)
Barack better do it soon, and it better work, before those hundreds of billions really do get handed to GS and JPM and BOA and and and... instead of to schools, and elders, and the sick and the homeless, and our doors of opportunity close, likely forever on the Federal entity as an aid to the American Experiment.
China's closing its checkbook soon enough, and we may not even get to make a choice which we want to do. We may get neither.
If poker playing won't work, then he's just gotta grab the ball and run for daylight -- go on Prime Time -- every night for a week or two -- with those Perot-like charts and pointers and arrows etc, and tell the people where we be and where we're going. Ask them if they're game for it, or should we just quit right here?
And kick W.S. to the curb. Not a penny more. "Time to go."