Republican side" alike.What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?
by Frank Rich
October 24, 2010
It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in "Inside Job" than in the hit movie of election season, "The Social Network." Summers - like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson - is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry's advantage.
As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has "step by step captured the political system" on "the Democratic and the Republican side" alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration's image of being lax in pursuing finance's bad actors. This tone is set at the top.
Asked in "Inside Job" why there's been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: "Because then you'd find the culprits." With the aid of the "Manhattan Madam" (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were "perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer's personal vices to force him to resign in 2008" have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.
The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It's shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance. This caution was exemplified most recently by the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, whose response to the public outcry over the banks' foreclosure shenanigans was to take to The Huffington Post last weekend. "The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating - it's shameful," he wrote.
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash's con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he's fronting for the industry even if he's not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn't commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC's "This Week" last month, he typically railed against the "extreme" government of "the last year and a half," citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction - the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it - went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.
Read the full article at:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/24-1
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