Mortgaging the White House
By
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
From
Truthout.org
Finally,
here we are at the end of this week of a hundred days. As everyone in
the Western world probably knows by now, this benchmark for assessing
presidencies goes back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived at
the White House in the depths of the Great Depression.
In
his first hundred days, FDR came out swinging. He shut down the
banks, threw the money lenders from the temple, cranked out so much
legislation so fast he would shout to his secretary, Grace Tully,
"Grace, take a law!" Will Rogers said Congress didn’t pass
bills anymore; it just waved as they went by.
President
Obama’s been busy, but contrary to many of the pundits, he’s no FDR.
Our new president got his political education in the world of Chicago
ward politics, and seems to have adopted a strategy from the machine
of that city’s longtime boss, the late Richard J. Daley, father of
the current mayor there. "Don’t make no waves," one of
Daley’s henchmen advised, "don’t back no losers."
Your
opinion of Obama’s first 100 days depends, of course, on your own
vantage point. But we’d argue that as part of his bending over
backwards to support the banks and avoid the losers, he has blundered
mightily in his choice of economic advisers.
Last
week, at a hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP)
monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to correct AFL-CIO General Counsel
Damon Silvers. "I’ve practiced law and you’ve been a banker,"
Silvers said. Never, Geithner replied, "I’ve only been in public
service."
We
beg to differ. Read Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson’s front-page
profile of Secretary Geithner in The New York Times, and you’ll see
how Robert Rubin protege Geithner, during the five years he was
running the New York Federal Reserve, fell under the spell of the big
barons of banking to whom he would one day help shovel overly
generous sums of money at taxpayer expense.
During
"an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by
the financial industry," the Times reported, "… He forged
unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant
financial institutions.
"His
actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with
the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with
financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve
records."
Wined
and dined at the Four Seasons, and in corporate dining rooms and fine
homes by the very men whose greed and judgment helped bring on the
Great Collapse, Geithner became so much a favorite of the Club that
former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill talked with him about becoming
the bank’s CEO.
According
to Becker and Morgenson, "Even as banks complain that the
government has attached too many intrusive strings to its financial
assistance, a range of critics — lawmakers, economists and even
former Federal Reserve colleagues — say that the bailout Mr.
Geithner has played such a central role in fashioning is overly
generous to the financial industry at taxpayer expense."
The
two reporters write that Geithner "repeatedly missed or
overlooked signs" that the financial system was
self-destructing. "When he did spot trouble, analysts say, his
responses were too measured, or too late."
In
choosing a man to manage the bailout of the banks who’s so cozy with
its players, and then installing as his White House economic adviser
Larry Summers, who in the Clinton administration took a laissez-faire
attitude toward the financial industry which would later enrich him,
the president bought into the old fantasy that what’s best for Wall
Street is best for America.
With
these two as his financial gatekeepers, President Obama’s now in the
position of Louis XVI being advised by Marie Antoinette to have
another piece of cake until that rumble in the streets has passed on
by.
In
fact, other Wall Street insiders — many of them big contributors to
the Obama presidential campaign, and progressive in their concern for
the public interest — privately are expressing serious concerns that
Geithner, Summers and their associates are leading the president and
America’s taxpayers down a path toward further economic disaster.
This
week, as Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois
unsuccessfully fought for a congressional amendment he said would
have helped 1.7 million Americans save their homes from foreclosure,
the senator told a radio station back home that, "The banks —
hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that
many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on
Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."
He
could say the same of the White House.
Bill
Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the
weekly public affairs program, "Bill Moyers Journal," which
airs Friday nights on PBS.
