Last Friday Bill Moyer’s Journal had on William K. Black, a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri. Blake wrote the 2005 book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, which covered the now quaint scandal that was the Savings and Loans crisis of the 1980s.
William K. Black: Obama’s Economic Policies are Bad, Lack Integrity & Violate the Rule of Law
by Jacob on 05. Apr, 2009 in economy
17 Responses to “William K. Black: Obama’s Economic Policies are Bad, Lack Integrity & Violate the Rule of Law”
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it’s interesting how this scandal is playing out in relation to obama’s presidency.
all of the major issues that W left him, he has continued the same course as W set, such as:
the war
this banking scam
but on domestic issues he put in place some progressives and ‘seems’ supportive of a progressive agenda.
wonder if he thinks the bigger issues are beyond his control? or he is a very slick silver tongued weasel(no racial slur here) either way how can he believe he can pull if off either way?
he is building a house of cards all around him and if people start to turn on him …not gona be pretty.
i think it may be a little bit of both regarding obama. not to get too conspiratorial (though we absolutely should be), but he’s fully aware that there will be no genuine overhaul or corrective change to the elite financial establishment. it’s beyond him, and he knows it.
thus his task becomes that of a slick salesman, like you said. he needs to sell the image of an overhaul, when in reality only surface changes will be made. this corrupt system will remain in tact, but now with new names and new “regulatory” agencies. but who’s gonna regulate the regulators to make sure they do their job? please don’t say that elf geithner.
it’s all very troubling. i don’t know, if the best we can hope for at this point is bread crumbs of a domestic progressive agenda… well that’s a bitter pill to swallow.
You guys are already backpedaling on the messiah? what gives?
hey he’s your (anti)messiah, not mine. i just voted for the guy.
what gives is that he’s making incredibly suspect policy decisions on this whole bank thing… and some on the left actually have the gall to call bullshit when they see it from the people they voted for.
he can make it up to us though… war crimes charges brought on cheney and co. would be a start.
thinking mine yours is pointless. he is ours’ just like w was is will always be.
but if he wants to make-up he has a candy store of choices w has left him:
war crimes
prosecuting those who subverted the constitution
dumping all nuc weapons
universal health care
holding Israel accountable for it’s actions
…
fuck it is hard not to do anything ‘different’ and not do some of these things
-maybe that is why he is tiptoeing around some many things?
and how badly do some of these orgs have to fail before before he has the balls to make serious changes?
That ‘backpedaling on the messiah’ comment is total b.s. within the context of who has been taking part in the dialogue on this site. If you actually want to have a constructive conversation, cool it a bit on the snide remarks and discuss some issues.
The essential point here is that at least we have enough integrity and commitment to our ideals, to call out ‘our guy’ when we think he is screwing up. We don’t march lock step for eight years like lemmings, following some jackass right off a cliff.
Point taken,I won’t treat Obama like you treated Bush, out of respect for our country and the presidency. Remember those who said “he’s not MY president ” referring to Bush.Did you have that opinion? The hypocrisy here is amazing.
Spot On, Malcolm.
how about judging their actions instead of bowing down to their position-
you can interpret ‘he is not my president’ however you like but in fact if you are an american he is.
one can pretend to distance oneself by saying ‘not mine’ but it has more to do with the person making the statement than anything else.
IMO, Bush should be jailed for reasons already stated. And if Obama commits crimes, such as Bush did, he should be treated with greater harshness than W received from the world populace but jailed right alongside W.
it seems Obama is trying to keep the status quo and maybe inch slowly to a centrist position. it just seems from being so far right for 8 years of neoconning and 8 years before that of neolibbing that this centrist drift is in a progressive direction.
it doesn’t make sense to me why he is doing this though. I don’t get the impression he is part of the ‘elite’ upper class, such as the Bush’s old money types or the Chenney CEO’s or a military background McCain types.
He doesn’t have any of that history or would he ever be truly accepted by them but he is not making the upper class edgy in the least by what he does. and all this money treasury is printing is just going to the people who already have most of it.
i had that exact thought earlier today bb. obama doesn’t come from any sort of elite background (beyond harvard law). he in fact left wall street to work in communities in chicago.
if you were to lay out a ‘hypothetical’ scenario to obama four years ago, detailing exactly the economic situation we are in now, and asked him what he would do as president… well i’d wager to say his response would resemble nothing like what we’re seeing now. so what gives?
what gives is he became president. and as soon as that happens you are beholden to a whole host of interests that have nothing to do with serving the common good. if ever there was a president that made this fact plain as day, it’s obama.
Obama DOJ invents radical authoritarian theory to defend Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping
POSTED BY CORY DOCTOROW, APRIL 7, 2009 9:41 AM | PERMALINK
The Obama administration has filed a brief in EFF’s lawsuit against the government for its program of illegal, mass wiretapping of Americans, defending the practice, arguing that the lawsuit should be dismissed, endorsing the Bush administration’s invented “State Secret” theory, and augmenting it with a new theory, that “the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is “willful disclosure” of the illegally intercepted communications.” This brief was not written by Bush cronies left behind by the outgoing administration: this is an invention of the Obama administration.
I don’t expect the guy to walk on water, but I’d sure like it if he’d stop wallowing in the mud.
Every defining attribute of Bush’s radical secrecy powers — every one — is found here, and in exactly the same tone and with the exact same mindset. Thus: how the U.S. government eavesdrops on its citizens is too secret to allow a court to determine its legality. We must just blindly accept the claims from the President’s DNI that we will all be endangered if we allow courts to determine the legality of the President’s actions. Even confirming or denying already publicly known facts — such as the involvement of the telecoms and the massive data-mining programs — would be too damaging to national security. Why? Because the DNI says so. It is not merely specific documents, but entire lawsuits, that must be dismissed in advance as soon as the privilege is asserted because “its very subject matter would inherently risk or require the disclosure of state secrets.”
What’s being asserted here by the Obama DOJ is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face. It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior. As EFF’s Bankston put it: “President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties. But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a “secret” that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again.”
BJ- do you feel a sense of satisfaction or ease that our political situation is no different now (except a new wrapper)?
BB-The political situation is much different.I just think Obama is naive-he’s an ass kisser to the poor people and the “workers” as he likes to say, and hates the producers and the people that employ the “workers”. Bush understood our capitalist system,obama doesn’t. I could care less about wiretaps,I guess if I was a criminal or subversive, than it would be a big deal.
WHA???
if only obama was an ass kisser of poor people and workers. right now he’s paying off the ‘producers’ gambling debts on wall street with the taxpayer (‘workers’) dollars. it’s a big f-you to the middle and lower class. where’s their bailout for their upside down mortgages?
and if by “understanding the capitalist system” you mean bush further exploding any regulatory safe guards in the financial market, letting banks in turn run hog wild lining their pockets with cash on dangerous investment loans, turning a blind eye to a giant housing bubble, basically doing absolutely nothing to prevent precisely the huge mess we’re in right now… well then i guess he did understand.
j- the lenders were required to make many home loans to unqualified borrowers in depressed areas. The other people should have read their loan paperwork.Again,”the law of unintended consequences”,well intentioned though.
that’s fair. but looking at the flip side of the ‘unintended consequence’ of home owners getting screwed (or screwing up), you have the banks knowing full well they’re taking advantage of loop holes in lending laws, conscious they’re pushing shady loans, then packaging and selling them into risky CDOs. they reaped major short term gains, but rome was burning the whole time.
i’m just saying that if we’re going to bail out poor decision making, it should be a two-way street.
bb, you’re on it….. beetlejuice, with all due respect, the blaming the little guy theory for the financial meltdown has no legs. Some people did take out loans they were not able to sustain, but the reasons for default are many faceted. If you would like to get a relatively simple and clear idea of what went down in the ‘mortgage securities’ biz, go on line and check out “The Giant Pool of Money” put together by the radio program This American Life. It’s pretty amazing and non ideological. “Just the facts mam” As Jack Webb used to say.
Happy Easter to all…
A statistic…..Supplied by the FBI after thorough investigation:
80% of the bad mortgages lay at the feet of the banks and mortgage industry.
20% with private citizens……and within this group lie a percentage of scam artists trying to make a quick buck in the expanding bubble.
Plain and simple.. The little guys are getting screwed.
Oh yeh.. ..and we the tax payers just gave the Swiss Bank UBS billions while they provide tax shelter for thousands of wealthy Americans. Gee and they were just required to pay the US government a fine. Lucky we gave them all that money so they had plenty of money to pay it. And on top of that The FED just handed over quite a few billions more to them.
One more thing…. This buying up the toxic assets scam. We the tax payers are assuming approx 95% of the risk and ‘if’… it is successful we the govt. ‘get’ to share any profit 50/50 with the hedge funds that are investing in them. And over the weekend the Obama administration has been quietly pushing to exempt the execs. of the funds from any limits on compensation, even though ‘we the people’ are assuming nearly all the risk. This whole thing is totally insane.