Paul Krugman: In Defense of Obama (Rolling Stone)

[JDPriestly]

14. K&R.

I agree 98% with Krugman (but I still reserve my right to grouse and to push for improvement).

But I disagree on one thing. He said:

Let's be clear: The financial crisis should have been followed by a drastic crackdown on Wall Street abuses, and it wasn't. No important figures have gone to jail; bad banks and other financial institutions, from Citigroup to Goldman, were bailed out with few strings attached; and there has been nothing like the wholesale restructuring and reining in of finance that took place in the 1930s. Obama bears a considerable part of the blame for this disappointing response. It was his Treasury secretary and his attorney general who chose to treat finance with kid gloves.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-defense-of-obama-20141008#ixzz3FYzM1bj0

Krugman sits in an ivory tower at a university. He doesn't see what I see down here in reality. The distress of families who lost their homes. A couple who once had a thriving business, the big house, the good life reduced to living in one room and renting the rest through no fault of their own. The divorces. The children emotionally scarred and unable to do perform well in school. Elderly people who thought they had saved enough to supplement Social Security and who never recovered the money or homes they lost. Men and women in their 50s and 60s who lost their jobs and will never be able to save for retirement because when they work, they just don't earn what they did at one time. Young people who bet their lives on education and are now saddled with student loans they can't repay on the earnings from their minimum wage jobs.

As Krugman says, things are much better than they might have been. Obama deserves a lot of the credit for that. It is, however, just wrong that the very executives -- whose actions or inaction, caused the pain of so many Americans -- have profited so much in the aftermath of the economic crisis have not had to pay for their crimes, their violations of law, their fraud. They enjoy fantastic wealth while millions of innocent Americans have lost so much. That is not just a little unfair. That is an insult to the idea of justice.