Crossposted from the PeoplesView
How sweet is it to write a compilation of some sort, seating in a comfortable sofa with your feet up while drinking espresso or cappuccino and shreding the President of the United States into so many pieces for not moving the mountain? Well, that is exactly what Frank Rich did in this article he wrote today. How sweet and convenient it is to be a critic when you don't even have a responsibility to run a home owners association.
Well, Mr. Rich, I wish Obama can move the mountain too. Really. I do.
The premises of Mr. Rich article was about what Obama should have and could have done regarding the financial crisis that has bleed this country long before Obama became President, ridiculing the President as most critics most often do like Monday morning quarterbacking, going through an inventory of some lengthy negativism projecting all sort of nonsense including how elitist of a certain sort Obama is, not to mention he thinks the dirty secret of Obama’s background is the values of Harvard. Yep, he said it, the values of Harvard, hanging out with the best and the brightest Ivy League liberal white guys as if this under privileged black guy who is raised by a single mother should have decline the invitation to attend Harvard since of course there are plenty of Ivy League opportunities for them black folks not to mention he sought out to be a community organizer and not a wall street lawyer after he was finished hanging out with them white liberal guys. /shrug
The whole narrative is not something we have not heard amplified by some who claim he is really another George Bush, a sellout, corporatist or even imply he is in bed kicking it with the bankers. The only way to see justice in the eyes of these kind of people is seeing the day where at least a handful of top bankster dogs are behind bars or at least we see some picture of them in handcuffs like Bernie Madoff so that they can feel good seeing those assholes only dream of the money they will never enjoy. Fair enough but it does not fix what has been done to our country and the article does not provide any solution except how Obama missed an opportunity to put them CEOs and CFOs in jail and how he missed out on dismantling the too big to fail banks ones and for all.
I guess Obama should have thought things through in the eyes of Frank Rich since Frank knows it all. The article is long and basically promoting vengeance on the bankesters pointing out how Obama lacked leadership to destroy these banks that ruined our economy not to mention the ridiculing of the President's effort to bring down the ideological barriers that separates the parties trying to pass legislation as if he can do it all by himself.
What Frank Rich seems to have forgotten while enjoying the ridiculing of the President is the fact that we have the single greatest threat to economic growth, prosperity and more jobs in our country -- the Republican Party, who have been undoing what has been done bit by bit while the likes of Mr. Rich thinks the problem of this country is Timothy Geithner, Jeffrey Immelt, Larry Summers and the lack of being called that angry black man since Obama is not angry enough for them.
I can go on an on about how lopsided Frank Rich's arguments and the ridicule of the President was but I will try to may be add a perspective for him to take into factors before he blames the Obama Administration for everything that went wrong in this country because the pace he is going, I am mindful it might come to that.
Here are the truth and the REAL DEAL if you are looking to find SIN Mr. Rich:
While Mr. Frank Rich is enjoying wide readership putting the rope on Obama head for the sin of the fathers when in fact the problems we see today is something that has been in the making for decades while the Obama Administrations' effort has moved the pendulum in the right direction while it might be slow to some, Factcheck.org had it right long ago if people want to point fingers about who is to blame for the state of our current union.
So who is to blame? There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn’t fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn’t do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility … with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here’s a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
1) The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
2) Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
3) Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
4) Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
5) The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
6) Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
7) Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
8) Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
9) The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
10) An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
11) Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation.
Undoing what took decades to do indeed takes time but the Obama administration has been working hard to date against the powers that are stacked up against them and I am certain will continue to do more given it has a Democratic Congress and Senate with less blue dogs come next election. However, I would like to point out to Frank Rich that he should not forget that this Administration has in fact signed a sweeping bank-reform bill (the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act)into law, managed the $700 Billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that Banks have repaid more than 100% of TARP funds ($251 of the $245 banks owed) as of March 2011 exceeding the original investment by $6 billion, cuts salaries of 65 Bailout Executives; closed offshore tax safe havens, tax credit loopholes on companies that use the tax laws to ship American Jobs oversees HR 4213; signed into law the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act to fight fraud in the use of TARP and recovery funds and to increase accountability for corporate and mortgage frauds; and signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act just to mention some of the things that have been done on Banking and Financial Reform areas to ensure we are on the path to undoing what has taken 40 plus years to do. I am certain if Mr. Rich looks deeper, he will see the Administration in its own pace working across many intersectional issues is doing a whole lot more than he gives them credits for.
Yes, Mr. Rich, I wish Obama can move the Mountain too.
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Happy 4th of July
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Happy Birthday, Malia!