I didn't know the specifics when I called Obama a Chicago pol during the campaign for the nomination. Now the specifics are out.
Read it at Naked Capitalism
Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance
by Yves Smith
The comment section on that post is interesting. I don't think the issues are as straightforward as the piece would suggest. Here's on of the comments for example:
ReplyDeleteAs much as I don’t like what Obama has done in office, I think this piece is naive. To get anything done in a big city as a local politician, requires frequent, large compromises. He saw that it was in his interest to hook up with the development crowd to try to improve his district. So what. Virtually everyone with a brain would make those compromises given the desperate state of parts of Chicago.
No doubt this experience softened him for the disastrous compromises he has made as president with the rent extractors in the health and finance sectors, but the two situations are not analogous. In Chicago, he had no power and wanted to get something done, as POTUS he initially had power but wasted it on weak compromised policies instead to using the bully pulpit to savage the opposition and get important work done.
Right. "Everyone does it."
ReplyDelete"Gee, ma, all the other kids are doing it."
I'm just saying that if you represent people in the projects of the South Side of Chicago the options available for improving the lives of your constituents are not great. Pulling investment money into your district somehow, some way is going to seem mighty important to you, even if you have to sleep with snakes to do it.
ReplyDeletePlus, I have to say that the tenor on the Pragmatic Capitalism discussion turned me off a bit, as this kind of stuff drags a lot of Tea Party-style racial animus out into the open, along with some pretty ridiculous and simplistic kneejerk judgments from people.
I live in New Hamsphire, a state that is overwhelmingly white, and one of the wealthier states on average. I just try to remind myself that I have no idea what it is like to function and get something done in a place where the problems and misery contained in a six block area probably dwarf the problems of my entire state.
I am not accusing the president of acting in bad faith. Chicago pols are wheeler dealers. They know that getting in bed with snakes comes with the territory and not all of the them are corrupt in the sense of lining their pockets. But part of the dealmaking involves their getting ahead.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that the president thinks that he is getting the best deal he can for everyone concerned while helping him get to the next iteration.
That's not the way that progressives saw him during the campaign. I don't think that the president misled them then. He just put his best foot forward and a lot of people were willing to interpret that in a way that met their own aspiration.
Then they were disappointed at what happened, and many instead of waking up to the facts of the deals, think that the president was a victim, unable due to circumstances beyond his control to be the progressive they saw him as, when he was never that.
He was and remains a centrist, as the convention speech that made him famous nationally shows.
Exactly right Tom. Looking back now it's clear he presented himself as a centrist and deficit hawk all along. He didn't BS people; they BSed themselves. Remember when he said Social Security was "in crisis". He had to walk it back, but that's what he believed.
ReplyDeleteStill, the question is always how people will alter their agenda and respond to emergencies in an emergency - when things stop being normal. Given the kinds of things he said in various speeches about FDR's response to the Great Depression - like the Knox College speech - I think there is every reason to be extremely disappointed that he didn't step up to the crisis and take things in a different direction. Instead he doubled down on financial capitalism and punted on systemic reform - even when handed with a historic opportunity for those reforms. And his decision to redouble his fiscal conservatism and sound money agenda was a tragically bad decision.
I had at him a little bit today in this post:
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/
Dan, I think that Obama buys into the neoliberal ("capitalist") paradigm more than a Keynesian one. He really believes that the financial sector is the lynchpin of an economy as the experts on financial capital, along with those who control production capital. For him finance is key to investment and investment is the driver of the economy. He doesn't really get the demand thing. Jobs follow from investment. I think he is surprised and miffed that the financial sector isn't lending after they got bailout (he thought that was part of the deal) and that corps on sitting on cash instead of investing (when he bailed out the auto industry and saved all their asses). He just doesn't see that income > demand > investment > income, and that the Keynesian approach is to increase income at the bottom through govt spending and transfers. And he really believes all the nonsense about the US going bankrupt.
ReplyDeleteObama is an extraordinarily smart guy, like Clinton, was and unlike virtually all of the GOP presidents since Ike. But you can't know all about everything and have to make informed choices about experts, as well as where power lies.
In economics, I think he looks at the Harvard, Chicago, etc., chairs as the top of the line, not without good reason. they have made it to the top after all. But he apparently doesn't see how skewed academia is with the filters it imposes. It's not actually a meritocracy based on the ability to perform practically.
Moreover, he listens too much to the political experts about what is possible and these the Dem Establishment, the sworn enemies of progressives.
So all in all, the president has chosen bad advisors and he seems unable to realize his mistake. I am confident that they are telling him that everything is on track when it isn't and he is not paying attention outside the bubble.
Finally, bashing the left burnishes one's centrist credentials, so count on the president to do it from time to time, while throwing some bones, too, so that don't stray of the plantation but just sulk in a corner for a while and commiserate with each other without bothering anyone else.
My takeaway from the speech is that Obama sold out the poor to benefit the rich (and himself).
ReplyDeleteRegardless of how poor Obama was as a child, the adult Obama sees himself as one of the elites. This speech merely confirms that, and sheds some light on how it came to be.