The Nation: Obama and the Big Dogs:

[amborin]

By William Greider

"The big dogs of banking and finance are playing a rough game of bump-and-run with our president, trying to knock him off balance and demonstrate their dominance. The best names in Wall Street--Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase--pumped out happy talk about quarterly earnings, then announced that they intend to give back the government's money (more than $50 billion, if counted honestly). The crisis, they announce, is over for them. They want to be free of official meddling in their private affairs. The arrogance is breathtaking, even for Wall Street bankers.


Forget the financial numbers. What we are witnessing is a high-stakes melodrama of glandular politics. This rival power center, though gravely weakened, is contesting for control with the president. Think of dogs circling one another to establish who will be leader of the pack. For three decades, the Wall Street guys in good suits have ruled the economy, demanding deference from the political system and from corporate managements, too. Those who failed to follow them were punished, either through stock prices or election financing. Despite their catastrophic failure, the surviving bankers and financiers are trying to hold on to their thrones.

For the last couple of weeks, they have poked the kid in the chest and mocked his economic advisors with condescending gestures. Jamie Dimon of the Morgan bank handed Treasury Secretary Geithner a fake check for $25 billion. They threw complicating wrenches into the government's financial rescue plan. Their essential message, crudely colloquial, was intended for Barack Obama : "You don't have the balls to take charge of us." "

snip

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090504/greider?rel=hp_picks>

[ddeclue]

1. OK then.. let them fail.. if they want to play chicken it's better than we let them fail

if they refuse to recognize that they are living in a new world where regulation and supervision exists and they must be held accountable for their actions. After some of them fail and Obama doesn't cave, the others will find out they've argued with a freight train and lost.

[amborin]

2. there's

another article in The Nation, however, pointing out how the current set up really leaves them many loopholes for treachery....there still isn't enough supervision

[RandomThoughts]

3. Commenting on the last quote

President Obama showed quite a bit of strength and tenacity in his many victories to get to the Presidency, and in his first 100 days, he has done the same.

And more importantly he has also shown a high degree of competency, something Wall Street has not shown. Unless you think competency is defined only by ones own bonus.

So thinking on that colorful metaphor used by the writer, I would say all that the worst of Wall Street has is, rotten low lieing fruit.

[chimpymustgo]

4. Bailouts/torture.

-snip-

I saw a Zogby opinion poll the other day that said only 6 percent of the public supports the financial bailouts. Obama is on the wrong side of that bipartisan consensus.

The moral dilemma in the financial crisis is oddly parallel to Obama's reluctant approach on the torture issue. The president bravely made public the sickening documents from the Bush administration that reveal how CIA and Justice Department officials rationalized their illegalities and authorized crimes against humanity. Yet the president said it would be wrong to prosecute (or even investigate) any of the CIA agents or military officers who committed these crimes. Likewise, we are told it would be wrong to punish the financial malefactors or look too closely into how they engineered the gross fraud and false valuations that destroyed trillions of dollars in American wealth. Let's not dwell on the past, the president says, let's look forward.

-snip-