Obama has said repeatedly that his administration will make mistakes and try to correct them. He has already decided to continue Bush policies on rendition and FISA, albeit with sensible restrictions. These are unlikely to cause political problems in the near future unless abused by Bush-era holdovers and recalcitrants in the intelligence services.

But the financial fixes recently announced are getting deserved criticism from progressive sources.

If one used the analogy of cops and robbers, this current plan could be considered placing poorly armed cops who do not know whether they can arrest crooks, or even who the crooks are, in front of banks that the crooks have already broken into, and where they are now posing as tellers and bank managers.

Into this situation he and Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner have proposed poring more money and opening up the doors and waiting to see what happens to it.

The only change is that we now get to watch the robbery like some lurid reality show. Until they get the balls to tell these folks that you either use it (lend, invest) or lose it (taxes, government control) I doubt that they (the financial system) will take us (represented by government) seriously. They need decisiveness.

Both the US and World markets weren't thrilled with those plans.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28501808/

Given the appointments and O's links to Wall Street donors, this was entirely foreseeable.

Reading this thought-provoking commentary by "liberal" columnist E. J. Dionne it is saddening that the Obama administration did not act more aggressively to get at the source of the current economic recession: the financial markets' greed and the electronic advances that have greased the skids to allow the economy to slide into the current cesspool so quickly.

Banks and other financial institutions made bad loans - primarily in housing but throughout the economy in credit card debt, excessive speculative investment in luxury item markets, etc. - then resold the debt in fantasies (derivatives: being things that have no value in and of themselves but but merely things based on other things which may also have little or no value in and of themselves, which depend on other things which...well, you get the idea); and now we are basically printing money to give them more to do...what, moreof o the same thing.

They are supposedly doing some investigating of banks and other financial institutions on Wall Street. But what about the clever methods used by these institutions to hide profits overseas; or simply delay them indefinitely until a better tax environment develops? And surely Linda Chapman Thomsen is not the only person who should be fired at SEC. She could not have done this on her own. How many more schemes, less obvious than Madoff, are still proceeding out there producing no goods or worthwhile services?

As you may have heard, the "official" unemployment rate has hit 10.2%, the highest since 1983. The REAL rate is around 20%.

And here the Dems out-Rethug the Rethuglicans:



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/business...agewanted=print

The bottom line for economic reform - a line which none of us in this country, including Barack Obama, is acting as if we understand - is that it must redistribute wealth from those who are non-productive to those who are productive.

That is how capitalism is suppose to work. That is how all other economies, by any other name, should work. A socialist system would also supply the basic needs of those who are inherently unable to work, incuding those not supplied jobs by the capitalist system.

But we know what a sour reputation socialism has in the USA thanks to the cannibal capitalists and their lackeys.

Regulation can and has worked in the past. But Obama is being roller-coastered by the fancy (and false) theories of neo-capitalists in his adminstration who will be working for the institutions they are theoretically regulating within the next five years.

Here's the reason the Obama administration isn't aggressively dealing with the financial crisis using Keynesian methods that have proved successful in the past.

Obama is surrounded by neoliberals from the Rubin school, chief among them Larry Summers, and non-economist but Wall Street-Goldman Sachs puppet Timothy Geithner, and libertarian economists from the Milton Friedman-Chicago School, like Austan Goolsbee. Jared Bernstein is probably the one real progressive economist in the group, but I cannot but imagine that he's shouted down by Summers, when he isn't falling asleep or slurping down his Cokes.

And he just reappointed as Fed chief a "libertarian Republican," Ben Bernanke, who helped oversee the near-collapse of the global economy, and is using a discredited monetaristic policy to address the financial crisis.

Bernanke follows another "libertarian Republican," Alan Greenspan, who admitted to Congress that he blew it.

Obama is too afraid that people in the HEARTLAND won't like him if he acts on the progressive beliefs he once espoused while in the Chicago State House. He is surrounded by people who LOATHE progressives. There you have it.

Heckuva job, Mr. President.