Obama Was Always in Wall Street's Corner
By David Sirota, Jacobin
07 June 21
Barack Obama is now trying to pretend he was a finance industry critic who
was deeply pained by being forced to bail out Wall Street - even though he
was Wall Street's biggest cheerleader and enabler.
Former president Barack Obama wants you to now believe that he was actually
mad about giant Wall Street handouts that he voted for, then arm-twisted
lawmakers to expand - and then rescinded when some of the money might have
gone to help homeowners. Obama's foray into pure fiction is not only absurd
- it is a reminder that history can repeat itself if we allow reality to be
memory-holed.
Obama's comments came in a new interview with the New York Times' Ezra
Klein.
"When we came into office, the economy was in a free fall," the former
president said. "We had to scramble and do a bunch of stuff, some of which
was inherited, some of which we initiated to stabilize the financial system.
People hated it. It's hard to just underscore how much the bank bailouts
just angered everyone, including me."
Obama had an odd method of expressing his alleged rage.
During the 2008 campaign, he made a public spectacle of leaving the campaign
trail to cast a Senate vote for the no-strings-attached bank bailout.
A few months later, Politico reported:
Not yet in the White House but working the phones as if he were, Barack
Obama won a crucial Senate vote Thursday clearing the release of $350
billion more in bailout funds from the Treasury Department's controversial
financial rescue program. For the incoming president, the 52-42 roll call
represented a first major test of strength, and Obama threw himself into the
fight, reaching out to senators on both sides of the aisle and making calls
until he had won all but one of the seven Democratic freshmen elected in
November.
Then, Obama held a White House meeting with bank CEOs to tell them "help me
help you."
He used his bully pulpit to stop his own party's efforts to prevent the
bailout from subsidizing massive bonus payouts to American International
Group (AIG).
And when some of that bank bailout money might have been redirected into
helping Americans who were getting thrown out of their homes, Obama signed
legislation to rescind his own authority to spend the cash on such a
priority.
Official Washington then pretended the bailouts were actually paid back,
even though that self-serving talking point is complete bullshit.
Obama doesn't seem to grant interviews to anyone who might mention these
inconvenient facts - he seems only to give access to pundits and news
outlets whose obsequiousness guarantees that they'll never dare ask a single
follow-up question. On that score, Klein loyally held up his end of the
bargain, allowing Obama to pretend he was an enraged bailout opponent, even
though he was the driving force behind the handouts to a finance industry
that bankrolled his political career.
The result here is an economic version of the Iraq War, where all the facts
and the lying and the greed are erased, with elite media playing the role of
the brain-wiping machine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
In a goldfish culture that forgets its entire world every fifteen minutes,
we are led to believe that Wall Street was not enthusiastically rewarded for
destroying the global economy - and we are asked to forget that the whole
grotesque orgy of avarice and corruption ended up setting the conditions for
the rise of the Tea Party and then Donald Trump.
Indeed, Obama seems to imply that Trump's election was a weird anomaly
rather than a product of a backlash - he told Klein that "if Donald Trump
doesn't get elected - let's say a Democrat, a Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton
had immediately succeeded me, and the economy suddenly has 3 percent
unemployment, I think we would have consolidated the sense that, oh,
actually these policies that Obama put in place worked."
Somehow, we are all supposed to forget that the Obama era was defined by one
of the largest drops in workers' share of corporate income in the modern
history of the United States, according to a new report from the Economic
Policy Institute:
That decline was punctuated by huge Democratic electoral losses - which
strongly suggests not coincidence but causation. It suggests that the
Obama-led Democratic Party kicking the working class in the face while
enriching finance billionaires prompted a political backlash that ended up
(misguidedly) benefiting the GOP.
But, of course, facts like that are now supposed to just disappear - they
can't be discussed, they can't be mentioned, and they absolutely cannot be
thrown back in his face in an interview. It's an omerta of sorts -
inconvenient facts that challenge and humiliate the Democratic Party
corporatism that led to the Trump backlash cannot be mentioned.
No doubt, that kind of sanitization of history helps make liberals feel
good.
There's just one problem: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.