President Barack Obama has now, unfortunately, embraced the anti-capitalist, anti-markets Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as a way of continuing to occupy the Oval Office for another term.
At the Martin Luther King Memorial dedication, Obama said King would “want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there.” (Like, you know, the secretaries, IT guys … and wealthy potential campaign contributors.) Also over the weekend, senior Obama adviser David Plouffe said critiquing big banks will be “one of the central elements of the campaign next year.” And in a conference call with reporters, Obama spokesman Josh Earnest adopted the phraseology of the OWS rabble, saying the president would make sure “the interests of the 99 percent of Americans are well-represented” on his upcoming three-day bus trip through Virginia and North Carolina.
To many Republicans and conservatives, Obama the Class Warrior is now front and center. It’s this incarnation that they’ve been warning Americans actually resides beneath the president’s centrist, technocratic exterior—the guy who told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” the left-wing professor who said it was “theoretically” O.K. for the Supreme Court to redistribute wealth. Let Obama really be Obama, and this is what you get.
Yet here’s what’s weird: Despite Obama’s attacks on Wall Street and the wealthy, his policies have been pro-big bank. The Obama administration favored the TARP bailout. It rejected the idea of an FDIC-like takeover of troubled banks in early 2009. It supported letting banks keep assets on their books at inflated values. It rejected calls for a financial transaction tax. It dismissed calls to break up big banks, reinstate Glass Steagall, or place hard caps on their size. No wonder a major bank lobbyist told me in 2010 that he had “no problem with Timmy [Geithner.]”
Or Geithner’s boss, really, other than the tough rhetoric. Financial reform is the law of the land, but Too Big To Fail still exists as evidenced by the funding advantages big banks have over small banks. (Lenders are betting Uncle Sam is still ready to catch them if they fall.)
Going after banks may be smart politics. But there’s a danger that Obama’s election-season, populist flip is undercutting public support for both free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism and real reform of America’s financial sector. Obama campaign guru David Axelrod told ABC News that he thinks “there’s this question about what [Mitt Romney's] core principles are.”
Maybe he should wonder the same about his own guy, too.
The President’s calculation about the risk inherent in embracing the incoherent and irrational messages emanating from the OWS crowd, that everyday Americans who are busy trying to deal with today’s challenges, will truly understand the reality (net of MSM propaganda) is quite small. And that P.T.Barnum’s observation about “a sucker being born every minute” is still quite valid. The 99%ers, if they had an IQ higher than their shoe size, ought to be in the streets of Washington DC, where this mess originated.
This subject deserves more serious discussion than given it above.
First, what is it that the Occupy Wall Street movement seeks? Sure, much of it is anti-capitalist and all that, but what’s the underlying message and purpose?
The answer, I think, lies in the name. Not that anybody wants to physically occupy Wall Street, but figuratively, they do. By that I mean the movement’s purpose basically is to socialize the allocation of capital in the U.S., away from the private sector (corporate greed, poorly run banks, etc.) and towards the public sector.
And, superficially, they have something of a case. How well did the banks and investment houses allocate capital up till 2008? And what did that cost the public? Sure, Washington had a lot to do with what happened, but that’s hardly apparent to most people. And how well do corporations do in rewarding their CEOs and other top managers? Lots of examples where it’s pretty clear that these people are rewarding themselves through very-compliant Boards.
So, are the purposes of the OWS movement consistent with those of the President? I’d say the answer is yes, not only in the re-election campaign, but in the longer term, philosophically and practically. The President seems to believe that government is a superior capital allocator to private parties, and has acted on that belief since taking office. So, the movement and he are soulmates in a sense, their purposes are his, at least up to a point.
If I’m right, the aims of the OWS movement need to be clearly explained, and then rebutted for the damage that would be done if they got their way. And, if that movement can be put on the defensive, then so too would be the President. But it’s not a straight shot; there have been abuses in private capital allocation and it would be foolish to deny it. In any case, in my opinion that’s the type of discussion that this subject merits.
Since the president seems to be aligning with the OWS crowd, maybe a new term for their settlements should be used:
Obamavilles
I wonder how well that would go over?
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