If I was American I would vote Obama in 2012. Definitely. As a left wing voter it's not like I can vote for that socialist candidate. Clearly, more than for quite some time, Wall Street, big money and big business has co-opted and corrupted the so-called democratic process (as in rule of the people, for the people, by the people - hah, amazingly, that's what democracy in America is supposed to be). Wall Street is funding both Obama and Romney, which leaves the American people with no real choice in this or any other national election. I suppose the question is, after Occupy, how much longer can the financial oligarchy stay in control of US politics - or rather, how long will the American people let them? Right now, they are the true puppeteers of Obama/Romney.
As Mehdi Hassan writes:
Official records show that JP Morgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, a major Obama donor, has made at least 18 visits to the White House since the start of 2009, meeting the president himself on at least three separate occasions. So should we have been surprised when Obama heaped praise upon the bank and its now-disgraced boss, in an interview with ABC last week? "JP Morgan is one of the best-managed banks there is," he said. "Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we've got, and they still lost $2bn and counting."
Like Romney, Obama ascribed the JP Morgan debacle to a failure of the free market, rather than to the recklessness and greed of its bosses, prompting the influential economist Robert Reich, who served as labour secretary under Bill Clinton, to respond: "Bain Capital and JP Morgan are parts of the same problem. The president should be leading the charge against both."
He won't – and it is worth noting that, despite the drop in financial support for him from the financial sector, the president and his party still managed to secure $152,000 from employees of – wait for it – {Mitt Romney's] Bain Capital. Such is his love affair with the guys who work on Wall Street – "very savvy businessmen", to borrow a stomach-churning line from Obama – that each of the three men who has filled the role of White House chief of staff during the president's first term has been an investment banker.
Obama, unlike previous reforming Democratic presidents, is an outsider who made the decision to be more American than his mixed background would suggest, and he did this, according to David Maraniss's new biography The Making of The Man, because he had his sites on high office. As an outsider, he has surrounded himself in office with insiders. They form a wall around him. Insiders protect their interests. By contrast, the great reforming presidents of the Democratic party - FD Roosevelt and LB Johnson - were consummate insiders. Very different men with different backgrounds - one a rich New Yorker, the other a lower middle class Texan, but 100% part of the Anglo-Saxon culture. Johnson came from nowheresville to be a young administrator of the New Deal so was a protege of FDR. Perhaps, and this is just my speculation, Obama's outsider status, as a black man born outside the United States, makes it harder to take on the establishment than if he had been one of them. Or perhaps Obama simply does not have the reforming zeal of these two great Democrats. In a leader, cool may be cool, but passion is what is required.
Here is an extract from a recent Salon.com article by Greg Greenwald highlighting Obama's complicity in protecting Wall Street from its crimes. It also confirms my fundamental belief that a president/prime minister's choice of appointees tells you most of what you need to know about his/her government. If Goldman and Morgan Stanley fund your campaign, and all the key appointees are from Wall Street, that is the government you will get:
Newsweek reporters note that “financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows”; in fact, such prosecutions under Obama “are just one third of what they were during the Clinton administration” — even though the 2008 financial crisis was drowning in financial fraud. Contrast that with the reaction of George H.W. Bush to the much less severe Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s:http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/wall_streets_immunity/
“There hasn’t been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI,” says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government’s response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. “You need heads on the pike,” he says. “The first President Bush’s orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
The Newsweek article offers two well-grounded theories for why Wall Street has been so aggressively protected by the DOJ. The first is that Obama filled his highest level Cabinet positions with Wall Street-subservient officials, beginning with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had been working as a highly-paid corporate lawyer for the law firm Covington & Burling, which represents “Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank.” The other top-tier DOJ positions were similarly filled with corporate lawyers from large law firms closely tied to and depended upon the financial industry. The problem is obvious:
Some suggest there is also the potential for conflicting interest when the department’s top officials come from lucrative law practices representing the very financial institutions that Justice is supposed to be investigating. “And that’s where they’re going back to,” says Black. “Everybody knows there is a problem with that.” (Two members of Holder’s team have already returned to Covington.)
Why would top DOJ officials — with bulging bank accounts from prior Wall Street service and, with their elevated status as top DOJ officials, future plans for even more bulging bank accounts upon returning — possibly alienate the very industry that will enrich them by prosecuting its top-level criminals? The full-scale immunity bestowed on Wall Street provides the answer.
Then there’s the reliance on Wall Street money for President Obama’s re-election effort. Newsweek notes the multiple investigations that documented numerous criminal acts leading to the financial crisis, including some explicitly incriminating top Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs. Anticipating possible indictments, “Goldman executives, including the firm’s chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.” Moreover, Black “says the conduct could well have violated federal fraud statutes–’securities fraud for false disclosures, wire and mail fraud for making false representations about the quality of the loans and derivatives they were selling, bank fraud for false representations to the regulators.’” Beyond the Wall-Street-subservient officials, why have those led to no prosecutions?
Meanwhile, Obama’s political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year’s scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama’s Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.
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