I don’t mind losing when we lose, but I hate losing when we win.
One big reason that Barack Obama now occupies the big chair in the Oval Office is that he embraced the public’s rising indignation at the blatant greed of Wall Street bankers, striking the proper populist tone in last year’s presidential election. After all, these slick financial elites crashed our economy, yet they kept enriching and pampering themselves, even as taxpayers were being forced to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at their failing institutions.
Having won and taken office, Obama proceeded to rip right into the bankers’ shameless avarice, denouncing their “culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else.”
Great stuff! Go get ’em, Barack!
A week later, however, the president’s treasury chief, Timothy Geithner, rolled out the administration’s plan to add more than a trillion dollars to the ongoing Wall Street bailout, and — Holy William Jennings Bryan — Obama’s populist bark had been reduced to a puppy whimper! It seems that Geithner and Obama’s top economic advisor, Lawrence Summers — both of whom have long been cozy with the very same greed-headed bankers who caused the financial mess we’re in — had been cooing into the president’s ears about the “danger” of “harshly” punishing executives and “spooking” private investors.
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