[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Obama's Secret Plan

Tue Apr 28 16:43:57 MDT 2009

In which we speculate that perhaps Obama has a secret plan to discredit
the investment banker cabal and thus undermine their vast political
power and reach.

by Charles Hugh Smith

of two minds.com (April 22 2009)

Many observers, partisans non-partisans alike, have been mystified by
President Obama's continuation of the Bush/bankers/Treasury's "privatize
bonuses, socialize risks" campaign of taxpayer-funded bank bailouts,
phony slight-of-hand "transparency" and political support for blatantly
bogus accounting of banks' profits, assets and losses.

The failure of the Obama administration to pursue real regulatory
"change" (such as actually enforcing regulations that are already on the
books instead of throwing bankers new squeeze toys like "relaxed"
mark-to-fantasy accounting) has moved many from mystification to outrage.

Where's the "change" in this continuation of Bush/bailout policies? What
is the rationale of a supposedly "progressive" president in filling his
financial administration with "investment banker Borgs"?

Let's begin our speculation with a question: if a new President (of
either party) wanted to destroy the political power of the investment
banker cabal which currently holds sway over Treasury and Congress, what
path would actually lead to success?

Does anyone seriously believe that a new President could dent the vast
political power of the Financial Aristocracy with a Jimmy Stewart-like
speech excoriating the bankers and their minions for gutting the U.S.
economy? The chances of that having any effect are zero.

How about tightening regulations? And what happens when lapdogs in
Congress quickly rush to gut the regulations or the regulatory forces
supposedly empowered to enforce them? If you doubt the power of bankers,
please look at what has happened to attempts to limit the most egregious
excesses of credit card usury and outrageous junk fees: they're thwarted
or watered down every time.

Does anyone seriously believe an obstructionist opposition which
supported Bush's giveaways and staggering deficits for eight long years
has any credibility? The moment to do something about deficits was 2003,
and the moment to vote down bailouts was last Fall (hmm, now there's an
appropriate season) when the TARP debacle was shoved down the nation's
throat by the Financial Aristocracy.

Does anyone seriously believe the Democrats who cheerily absorbed
millions in donations from scalawags and crooks in Fannie Mae, Goldman
Sachs et al while obstructing regulations which might have limited the
damage have a lick of credibility? To be a partisan in this age is to be
either blind or brainwashed.

So let's face it: any President who sought to destroy the political
power of the Investment Banker Aristocracy in a frontal assault would be
defeated if not destroyed. Any president of either party who dares even
mess around the edges of the real power structure gets "the treatment".

Is there any strategy would might actually work? How about "give them
enough rope to hang themselves"? President Dwight Eisenhower has long
been dismissed as a do-nothing who "got lucky" in his two terms. Perhaps
- but he was also a canny politico who didn't say much because he
preferred to give his opponents plenty of stout rope. And sure enough,
most of the time they promptly hanged themselves with their own excesses.

If you set out to completely discredit the bankers and eviscerate their
political power, you'd proceed exactly as Obama has done, enabling it to
reach its reductio ad absurdum conclusion of fat bonuses and tax-funded
bailouts in the trillions of dollars, at which point the public will
rise up in fury, doing the work which was impossible for you, a new
"liberal" president.

Imagine the uproar had Obama sought to send the bankers straight into
deserved bankrupty and eliminated their looting; he would have been
thwarted and second-guessed at every turn by politcos, pundits and the
ultra-wealthy Aristocracy whose perks and privileges were threatened,
not to mention a Republican Party spoiling to be spoilers.

What better way to discredit the bankers than to give them plenty of
rope to complete their tarnished, fraudulent "plan to save Capitalism
from itself"? How can they complain when their own bankrupt policies
have been supported?

What better way to trigger "change" that even the banking Aristocracy
are powerless to stop than to give them everything they want: no
restrictions on stupendous bonuses, no punishment or prosecution, no
mark-to-market rules with actual bite, no limits on accounting
legerdemain, and on and on and on?

You want the sharks to gather? Then keep chumming the water with
banker-designed policies; hey, even denounce the tax rebellion movement
as "off base". Make like you're doing the banker/Plutocracy's bidding in
every possible way. And what will be the result?

A complete repudiation of the entire Bush/Treasury/banker bailout and
"free pass" to further plundering. And when the public rises up in
righteous fury, then you appear to bend, almost reluctantly, to "the
public will".

If you set out to gut the political power of the banker/financial
Plutocracy which holds Congress on a tight leash, this is the only way
to do so: goad the public to rise up with such fury that they cannot be
denied, lest every politico who seeks to protect the status quo be swept
aside in the next election, regardless of party, age, religion or any
other bastion of "voter support" they were counting on to save their
bacon from an aroused public's righteous wrath.

If Obama had refused to support the bailout, the screams that he was
"destroying the foundation of the US economy and our way of life" would
have been ceaseless and deafening, for a stunned and stupefied public
had failed to process what was actually happening beneath the MSM
propaganda about "saving the banking system to save the nation".

Obama can now say, "I did everything you wanted". Is it a carefully
craft Secret Plan or merely the fumbling results of a status quo
politico? Either way, it's brilliant because it's the only possible
pathway to a future not dominated by trickery, fraud, collusion,
obscurity, propaganda and the looting of what's left of the US Treasury
and economy.

Can abject, impoverished debt-serfs distracted by hundreds of channels
of idiotbox TV, iPods, American Idle, oops, I mean Idol (now there's a
Master's Thesis topic for ya), "professional sports" (aka gladiators and
circuses) and all the other avenues of marketing which are sold as
"entertainment" rather than what they really are, propaganda and
distraction - can a nation of debt-serfs actually awaken from their
"entertainment" stupor long enough to register outrage at the looting of
their nation and liberties by a small Plutocracy?

We shall see. If the looting which is finally sinking through the
endless layers of propaganda doesn't spark a bloodless revolution
demanding real change in who actually runs the nation's policies, money
and regulatory structures, then nothing will.

Is there even a shred of evidence that Obama might have thought this out
one layer deeper than 99.999% of the bankers, critics, pundits and
opponents? perhaps one: Paul Volker. Volker - remember him? Where has he
been? Trussed up and gagged in some Treasury basement? He'd slipped from
the media radar until very recently, when he somehow escaped from the
duct tape and Treasury guards and had the audacity to stand up and call
inflation targets pure theft.

Whew. Was that a breath of fresh air or what? I see two possibilities:
either Obama really is just another standard-issue tool of the Financial
Plutocracy, and Volker resigns in disgust within a year to protect
what's left of his once-sterling reputation, or Obama is giving the
Banking Plutocracy all the rope it needs to hang itself. In that case
Volker is the "Trojan Horse" in the system, the one who will emerge
after the extremes have finally goaded the public to an anger which
cannot be diverted by propaganda and "entertainments".

So watch Volker. If he resigns, then Obama truly believed the absurdity
that bailing out the bankers and enabling their continued looting of the
nation is "the fix we need". If Volker stays, even in the shadows, there
may be more intelligence afoot in our leadership than has yet been revealed.

_____

New excellent reader essay, a provocative must-read: Madoffing the US
Financial System (Zeus Y.)
http://www.oftwominds.com/journal09/zeus04-09.html

"This guy is THE leading visionary on reality. He routinely discusses
things which no one else has talked about, yet, turn out to be quite
relevant months later."
--An anonymous comment about CHS posted on another blog.

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