What can be realistically expected in a society as complex as ours run by elites, including most Democrats, who since Reagan, if not before, have lost any vestigial sense of what the common good is? What can be expected of a class of people who have got to the positions that they hold by caring about more than anything else their own narrowly defined careerist self interest? What can we expect from a class for which principle and service are just b.s. concepts one pays lip service to, and where savvy and being a player count for everything? Even if you are one of the few who cares about doing the right thing, who's there for you to work with?
Let's assume Obama wants to do the right thing, that he even knows what the right thing is regarding the financial meltdown--what is the set of people from which he can choose which actually understands how the system was built and how it works? Who is he going to call upon if not people from Wall Street? Left-leaning academics? But what do they know about the real guts of how Wall Street works? And what makes any of us think that they wouldn't make a bigger mess of things with unintended consequences?
I'm not knowledgeable enough to know for sure, but my take is that with a few exceptions the only people who are knowledgeable enough to manage the complexity of Wall Street system are people who have been shaped by the Wall Street system and its culture. Nobody who would be useful because he knows enough about how the system works would come from outside the system. No one would have risen to a position of knowledge or power on Wall Street unless he accepted the Wall Street mentality as normative.
Obama could go at that culture with a sledgehammer, and we'd all cheer him on, but then, because they are in the guts of the system and understand it better than reformist outsiders, and because enough of them are nihilists who care about nothing except themselves, once the people who are creatures of that culture see that the Feds are on the warpath, they'll find a way to loot the system, move their money offshore, and light a fuse to take care of what's left. The looting is going on as we sit here; it's just a question whether the whole structure will collapse and bring ruination on the rest of us. And if it does, you can be sure that the right wing media will blame Obama and his radical socialist agenda. We are dealing with a white-collar criminal mentality here, and the people who have it hold us hostage. It's not about Obama'sdoing what justice seems to demand; it's about restoring stability for the common good. How to do that--not so easy.
Maybe I'm overestimating the way these Wall Street thugs hold all of us hostages, but my guess is that the degree to which they have the capability to sabotage the system is an x-factor, an unknown, that forces Obama to play it cautiously, at least in the short run. His situation is like Kennedy's dealing with the Bay of Pigs--the thugs have set everything into motion before he took over, and a momentum had already built up that was close to impossible to slow or stop without his first having established a foothold somewhere.
It's too bad that Obama, like Kennedy, had to deal with this in the first couple of months before he could find his feet, but I understand why he's going along with the conventional wisdom types. It's not clear to me that he has any other choice, and if he has any sense at all, he's worried sick about the unintended consequences of doing too much without really understanding what he's dealing with, and so in the short run he has to lean on financial system insiders knowing full well that their self-protective agenda and concerns get in the way of the best solution.
It just seems that Democrats in general come into power to clean up messes created by the Republicans that preceded them. To think that Clinton, for all his faults, left office with a balanced budget and a surplus, and the American people voted these thieves back into power. As a people we're getting what we deserve. The question is whether we will learn anything from it. We certainly forgot lessons learned from 1870 through the 1930s.
We are always in trouble when ideology trumps common sense and common decency. Common sense dictates that we should never have let these institutions grow so large as not to be allowed to fail.Common decency requires that we push to the side the right wing, libertarian mentality that always leads to this kind of trouble that causes the people on the bottom to suffer the most. Because the "liberty" in Libertarianism, whatever some of its defenders might argue in theory, in reality is the liberty of powerful elites to screw the rest of us.