There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged [View all]

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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/16/there_is_no_meritocracy_its_just_the_1_percent_and_the_game_is_rigged/

***SNIP

Public revulsion against this incredible state of affairs is what delivered Barack Obama to the presidency, and we rightfully expected him to address the problem. His resounding failure to do so outweighs all his noble statements about studying hard and climbing ladders of opportunity.

The distressing fact is that Obama had perhaps the greatest chance of any president in recent years to smash the barriers that keep the talented from climbing the ladder, and he chose to do nothing. The sledgehammer was in the president’s hands, the nation was cheering for him to start pounding—and he walked away from the job.

Oh, he is ready to hold kids and teachers accountable, all right—to make sure they all take some Big Test and are sorted accordingly. There have been a few other bright spots as well. The people he has put in charge of the EPA and the Labor Department no longer try to subvert their own agencies, as they did in the Bush years. He appointed the capable Janet Yellen to run the Fed. And: He meted out a satisfying ass-kicking to upper-class twit Mitt Romney.

The other side of the ledger? Well. Obama continued virtually unchanged the Bush Administration’s bailout of the banks that were—let us never forget—the culprits in running up the housing bubble and vectoring its toxins into the economic flesh of the world. He declined to put obviously failed banks into receivership, as the standard practice has always been, and he didn’t remove incompetent bank management in any numbers, as was common with bank bailouts during the Roosevelt Administration. On the contrary, his officials seemed to forget how to negotiate when negotiating might turn out to be costly to bankers. They twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid wielding their ownership stakes in the various financial companies they rescued. In one infamous instance Obama’s team did the exact opposite of accountability, making sure that bonuses went out as scheduled to the AIG division responsible for the instruments that wrecked the company, thus rewarding the fuckups. After that they fanned out to the talk shows to insist on the sanctity of contract—a inviolability they find it easy to violate when it is autoworkers or homeowners on the other side of the table.