We are in a bad position.

The best we can hope for is for the opposition to hold together and frustrate the President’s initiative, until he abandons his crooked advisors.

Our country is to important to allow any agenda with them as beneficiaries to succeed.

This is the key point:
“So yes, the point may well have been to enrich the Oligarchs, in the belief that their profitable participation in the economy is so important, there can be no recovery without it.”

The Washington-Wall Street nexus has become so strong that there is an out-sized impression of Wall Street’s position in the economy in the halls of D.C. Meanwhile, starting in 2010 a lot [more] regional and local banks are going to go bust due to poor commercial lending practices. They will receive no help from DC (as they should not), but the winners by default will the be troika of oligarchical banks in NY.

I did not vote for Obama, but I had hoped that his closeness to and support from Volker bode well. How disappointing to see that it was a facade.

This is the Democratic spin (yes, the Democratic Party’s spin) of how the bailouts and stimulus have helped: [1] (h/t Instapundit [2])

Democrats counter that their agenda has kick-started a recovery on Wall Street, even if it hasn’t trickled down to the job market yet, and that Republicans are putting what they’ve begun at risk.

So yes, the point may well have been to enrich the Oligarchs, in the belief that their profitable participation in the economy is so important, there can be no recovery without it.

Some of this is open corruption. Some is regulatory capture. If the Oligarchs are nominating Fed governors (Tim Geithner got his old job after a vote by large banks), and the analysts for the Fed and the Oligarchs are coming from the same pool (same assumptions, same training, etc), we shouldn’t expect the actions of the Fed to diverge from the interests of the Oligarchs.

Sadly, Obama does not appear to have the awareness to realize this.

[1] http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/worst_talking_point_ever.php
[2] http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/88006/

But then another student asked, “Why didn’t the Fed just raise reserve requirements? It would have been better for the deficit.”

At this point, I was cornered. I had no choice but to say what I really believe about what the Fed was doing. In spite of all the sophisticated rhetoric about “quantitative easing” and “new tools for monetary policy,” the only way that I can understand what the Fed was doing is to say that the goal was to stimulate bank profits, not the economy. If your goal were to stimulate the economy, you would inject enough reserves to do that and not pay interest on reserves. That might require buying some long-term bonds or mortgage securities, but not the hundreds of billions that the Fed actually bought.

Everything the Fed has been doing over the past fifteen months makes sense if you think of their goal as transferring wealth from taxpayers to banks. If you try to explain it as an attempt to implement an expansionary monetary policy, you won’t even get past my high school students.”

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/thoughts_on_the_2.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/civil-war-in-corporate-am_n_347704.html&cp

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/05/civil-war-in-corporate-am_n_347704.html

Thanks for the reference to FabMax. I see on his blog on reason for the vaccine shortage is that the government purposefully did not include an additive which RFK Jr (and other crazies) insist causes autism?!? [1] This pseudoscience is causing people to die!

Purpleslog,

The Democratic Party has never been against favoritism. However, this is the first time that Wall Street is in their coalition. It’s basically affirmative action for oligarchs.

[1] http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/swine-flu/#more-10976

Thanks for peeling away another layer to expose how rotton the core seems to have become. Ditto’s to you, Zen and Fab Max for shining a light on these cockroaches who have crowned themselves nobility