OK, not on the cover, in the comments section of an online article. Just couldn’t resist the allusion.
I recently got an email from a friend that read as follows:
“I think they’re finally beginning to get it. Maybe….”
(With this link.)
> > **Please excuse the expletives. **
The article is by Matt Taibbi a founder of the underground expat pub The eXile in Moscow. It was a wonderful, hilariously obscene romp through the world of “Sex, Drugs, and libel in the new Russia.”
I corresponded briefly with the staff there (can’t remember if it was Taibbi) when a Romanian professor and I were applying for a grant to study the English-language expat press abroad. The eXile made me want to take my long-delayed trip to the heartland of Russia.
However, I was married by then – to a fierce Polish girl. If she’d caught me tomcatting around, she’d kill me. If she caught me tomcatting around with Russian women – it would be so much worse than that!
The first few paragraphs of the article (and I urge you to read the rest.) The go to this article in The American Spectator where Joseph Lawler tears it apart for inaccuracy. Then you can go to Tim Fernholz’s piece in The American Prospect, where a “Progressive” takes it apart. You can make up your own mind – the point is, Obama is losing his own constituency.
“Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. (Actually you did – Ed.) What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?
Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.”
My response to the friend who sent me the link, “I was inspired to go through the hassle of registering for comments at the Rolling Stone website.”
The comment I posted:
“You poor daft hippies. You expected an “outsider” – from Columbia,
Harvard and Chicago? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
My friend commented, “Ya think mebbe they figured that partly-black = “outsider”? Gee,
could liberals be closet racists?”
No, actually I think they’re racist racists, but that’s another story. What these poor sods are is naive, and they haven’t quite grasped the lesson of the American Revolution.
“One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on the more usual (and more exciting) principle of substituting “the good guys” for “the bad guys.”
Thomas Sowell
2 Responses to On the cover of Rolling Stone