Hey Frank. Barack is Drowning Black Folk?
By Larry Johnson on March 22, 2009 at 2:35 PM in Current Affairs
Frank Rich. Meet Scooby Doo. Roh roh!! When Frank Rich, the diminutive New York Times columnist with a man-crush on Obama, writes that Barack Obama is having his Katrina moment–aka, a shiftless, no good, self-absorbed President who allowed poor black folks to drown like rats in New Orleans–then the worm has turned. Stick a fork in Barack. He’s done. He’s not been in office 65 days and has pissed away an ocean of credibility and goodwill with one boneheaded move after another. Bill Richardson. Tom Dashcle. Tim Geithner. AIG bonuses. Love note to Iran. etc.
Here’s some of the musings of Frankie Rich:
To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck.
Inquiring Americans have the right to know why it took six months for us to learn (some of) what A.I.G. did with our money. We need to understand why some of that money was used to bail out foreign banks. And why Goldman, which declared that its potential losses with A.I.G. were “immaterial,” nonetheless got the largest-known A.I.G. handout of taxpayers’ cash ($12.9 billion) while also receiving a TARP bailout. We need to be told why retention bonuses went to some 50 bankers who not only were in the toxic A.I.G. unit but who left despite the “retention” jackpots. We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those “stress tests” the Treasury Department is giving those banks?
That’s just a short list. In general, it’s hard to imagine taxpayers shelling out billions for a second bank bailout unless there’s a full accounting of every dime of the first, and true transparency for the new plan whose rollout is becoming the most attenuated striptease since the heyday of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Another compelling question connects all of the above: why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.
The “dirty little secret,” Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that “most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal.” An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary circumstances.”
This is more than some media hack looking to make a name for himself. Rich was the equivalent of Barack’s “Mini Me.” He worshipped at the feet of the New Age Messiah. Frank Rich may still hold out hope that Barack will find his bearings and do what he promised to do in the primaries. But that won’t happen. We have followed the lies and shadings of Barack Obama for too long. He pretends to be a new kind of politician but, if you simply watch what he does, he is just another slick Chicago politician who will say and do anything to advance a personal agenda regardless of how much harm he inflicts on the people he is supposed to represent.
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