And indicted inside trader[actually doing this fraud on the WH lawn]was reelected to congress 11/6/18.Wilbur Ross still seems to be hanging out in the 'swamp'despite many abuses.Will Pruitt be forced to pay back $$he stole from taxpayers??How 'bout Zinke and Melania.The swamp has never been deeper.
79
" But it was just another Trump con.... he has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance,” sparing corporate wrongdoers billions in fines."
America , you are better than the Trump-Kushner crime family and their swamp creature abettors...……. aren`t you ??
59
It is easy to blame a President with hindsight. President Obama did what seemed the most pragmatic to him.
The banking system of America, despite its shortcomings, made what America is today. Large projects, very large projects, whether providing a telephone connection to everyone, a toilet, underground gas pipelines, the electricity grid, drinking water from every faucet, a sewer system that seems to function without any effort on the part of a homeowner, are achievements which needed the banking system. Construction of massive dams, very large buildings, or even a single family home, requires help from the banks.
Obama was not interested in killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
18
The Republican modus operandi since Ronald Reagan has been to dress up robber baron pigs in the fictitious gentlemanly garb of honorable contributors to an America of hard work and free enterprise. W and others of his ilk actually believed the script.
What this ruse has accomplished is a complete train wreck of what a free successful society should be. It is such a mess the average person doesn’t know where to start in looking for leaders. Here is a clue- if a politician says tax cuts will pay for themselves, laugh. If it sounds like double talk, such as encouraging private enterprise to rebuild our infrastructure, laugh. The age of the business tooth fairy needs to be over.
58
Please read:
"Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions (G-SIFIs)," a policy paper published by the FDIC & the BOE on 12.10.12.
If you bank with Wells Fargo, Chase, JP Morgan, Goldman, and/or other institutions deemed "too big to fail," then the next time there is a 2008-type financial crisis, your hard-earned deposits, not the FED or the BOE or the ECB or the BoJ or some other governmental agency, will be used in an attempt to rescue the system.
The FDIC & BOE have adopted the Cyprus model where depositor funds are used to create a new "good" bank and depositors receive a haircut of at least 40% of their deposited funds.
Given the nature of opaque, highly-leveraged and hypothecated derivatives totaling hundreds of trillions in the global system, it is not clear that even the Cyprus model will be enough to save the banking system.
In sum, be very wary of leaving any money you cannot afford to lose in a G-SIFI.
10
We have always admired outlaws and criminals. We mad folk heroes of Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde.Why should we treat Trump differently?
6
Of course Obama, who took money from Wall Streeters—as Hillary Clinton did!—is responsible for DJT. Yes, that makes perfect sense.
Seriously, the decision to forego punishing Wall Street in the interest of keeping the whole system from collapsing was made before Obama took over and was probably a good one. To blame Obama for Trump is absurd.
52
In 2008, three huge markets crucial in our economy which had become huge bubbles all crashed at once. The loss of wealth was devastating.
Investors including institutions like pension funds saw their wealth simple evaporate as the financial markets crashed. The real estate market not only crashed, there was no way to minimize the losses nor to find a bottom where a recovery could be started. The credit market was totaled as well. Even small banks had lost huge amounts of money, like all others, and they raised requirements to shut out borrowing by well run businesses who needed capital to continue operations. The consumers owed huge amounts of money.
The economy was teetering on deflation and depression. Had it happened all businesses unable to operate without loans as well as those who could not survive greatly reduced sales would fail. Anyone able to lay their hands on lots of money could enjoy a fire sale of good but insolvent businesses. They would make fortunes from the unlucky, and then suck up the wealth that others had struggled to create and which they now owned.
Recovery was going to be very hard and prosecutions of the governance of big banks likely would have scared away investors when their money was most needed. So those who were the most responsible for the crashes got away, scot free.
9
Hilary Clinton and Obama are criminal Democrats, not corporate Democrats. They protected and catered to Wall Street; they protected and catered to the CIA. The only people they didn’t protect were their constituents, the American people. While taking photos with black kids, they covered up for the criminal elitists who have robbed this country and paved the way for Trump’s con men and their collaborators in the Republican Party to finish off the world’s oldest democracy.
Hilary Clinton and Obama rely on optics, and bogus “high road” platitudes to suggest that they are decent and caring. Elitists themselves, they believe themselves above the law.
They’re wrong, of course, as are all people who , like Icarus, fly too close to the sun. They crash and burn.
Protect Mueller by all means, but the Democrats shouldn’t be foolish enough to believe that they have fooled him.
10
“Who broke the law?” Cohn asked, adding: “Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
Binyamin Appelbaum, The Times’s economics wiz, riposted on Twitter: “A more accurate characterization of the housing bubble is that it was one of the largest orgies of white collar criminality in American history.”
I've always wanted to ask those who think this way: Do you believe that a banker, if left to his own devices, would lend money to someone who he knew couldn't pay him back?
It was obviously the half-witted politicians who dreamed up the Community Re-investment Act who were the original sinners and who own the biggest share of the blame.
9
We will probably never know but -
We had a new inexperienced administration coming in with the global economy falling into the abyss and 2 wars raging. They had to sit in meetings with the bankers who at the very least poured gasoline on the fire. When they tried to get them to take responsibility I’d imagine the bankers in essence put a gun to their head by threatening to let the system collapse. They had no choice really. I think there was a scene in The Godfather along those lines.
13
In our new century, Americans already have numerous examples of self inflicted wounds, beginning with allowing GWB to steal the presidency in 2000. (Stealing Florida, I think, is a well documented fact.) We still have people being killed in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the economic and environmental damage. As Ms Dowd reminds us, another wound occurred when the Democratic Party was charmed into nominating Barack Obama in 2008, rather than Hillary Clinton who could have been elected that grim year. Clinton would have prosecuted financial executives and surely sent some to jail. Unlike common crooks and thieves, the treat of prison is a real deterrent to billionaires, and many abuses of our system would have ended. Obama was too nice and ineffective in dealing both with financial criminals and Republicans. The Democrats should have held him on the bench for eight years while Hillary cleaned up the mess.
Instead, Democrats ran Hillary in 2016 because it was her turn, and we got Donald Trump, the worst self inflicted wound of all.
19
I believe you are wrong on one point, Mo. Obama and Holder did not go after guilty bankers because they knew they couldn't get convictions, at least for major perpetrators. It is tremendously difficult to prove intentional malfeasance, especially when regulations and regulators are so fluid. Much of what was done was grossly immoral but this won't convict--or if it does, it doesn't lead to debilitating fines and significant jail time. Time and money wasted. The Obama administration chose to tackle the problem through more systemic legislation (which the Trump White House has reversed).
26
Well spoken, Maureen. You've just underscored the most compelling argument against choosing Nancy Pelosi as next House Speaker. She has a commendable if, at times controversial, track record, and her accomplishments as a past Speaker cannot be denied.
However, when we look closely at the cross-section of recent, often unexpected and sometimes against heavy odds, winners in House and State races, among the preponderance of women, minority, and LGBT candidates the common factor of youth dominated.
Her leadership record notwithstanding, Pelosi represents a carryover of the same Old Guard which you quite rightly point to as bearing major responsibility for the divisional mess which America finds itself mired in today. It matters relatively little whether we assess blame more to Liberals or Conservatives, to Democrats or Republicans, the Right or the Left. America overwhelming mandated a fresh restart two weeks ago, and its indelible hallmark is one of youth.
It's time to retire the Old Guard, thank those who served well, banish those who did not, and give a new generation, hopefully more sincere and less self-serving than the old, the opportunity for which they've been preparing themselves to take over and show us that they indeed can rescue us from our national morass and begin the long, slow, and difficult process of repairing a quarter-century of selfish damage to our country. We can begin by insisting on electing a promising young, new candidate to be Speaker of the House.
6
As outlined in Ron Suskind's book "Confidence Men...", Obama was inexperienced, and inadvertently let the bankers in his administration secretly table all regulation for bankers - which he wanted. It's a sad story, and one of the blights on the Obama administration.
10
No matter how much we love Obama, we have to admit to ourselves that he is a corporatist, the establishment's lawyer. Money speaks louder than ethics.
14
It was clear leading up to the 2008 election that Bush was not going to do anything to rein in Wall Street. It was clear after the crash that Obama wasn’t either. Both parties owe their allegiance and campaign coffers to these banker criminals. I agree with Maureen, Obama’s failure to prosecute the worst Wall Street offenders was a huge political mistake. Many voters who had backed his vision were disillusioned and became disengaged. We desperately need campaign finance reform to make both arties accountable to the people and not corporate puppet masters.
15
Steve, I'm not claiming to be psychic or anything, but for the past few elections, maybe 4 (?), I've been of the opinion that there really isn't much difference between to 2 parties. Both are doing dirty tricks to try to win seats, both have gone completely negative in all their campaigns, both are owned by big business. Completely owned.
8
Elections are determined by those who vote. Democracy does not operate according to ideals but how voters decide, no matter how silly. It always comes down to trying to maximize good and to minimize bad. The perfect usually is the enemy of the good.
3
I still want to know:
1. Exactly which laws guys like Jamie Dimon broke.
2. Why folks can’t absorb the sentence, “the scandal is what’s legal.”
3. How Obama “enriched himself,” on Wall Street.
4. Why folks don’t know what capitalism is.
5. Why folks want capitalism, but not what capitalism does.
6. How folks thought they could afford homes they obviously couldn’t afford.
7. Why righties outraged by this craziness thought Trump would help them.
8. Why lefties outraged by this craziness won’t get up off the couch and go vote, and while away so many of the sunlit hours howling at their own side.
20
Dowd is a great comedienne but, commedinne's don't make good economic or legal policy. IF she has specific names to name, fine. But grouping all "bankers" into collective purgatory is about as intellectually solid as writing a column about "blacks" and saying they are responsible for all crime.
14
Donald Trump or Mr. Trump - never address this walking, babbling, mess of corruption as president - there's a power in words.
10
Maureen I always look forward to your articles because you always tell it like it is. You are never hypocritical unlike 99% of editorial writers.
With this article, however, you missed the mark, by failing to elucidate and explain exactly what the "evil"banks and bankers did wrong, and how they harmed us.
What furthermore, would you have proposed that Obama do? Create a new banking system; a new financial order? Perhaps in a future article you can explain this more fully. With all the threats this country has from beyond its borders, is there really a systemic, pernicious internal threat from the banking system?
12
Hilarious and rich that Dowd attempts to appear as a champion of the less than 2%. She had harsher words for Obama and Hillary than she did for trump, except until recently. Probably couldn't get invited as a dinner guest or given as many exclusive interviews with them, as opposed to trump.
She is the type of person who will lose vote for democrats because she attracts those who don't remember history, how the republicans sabotaged every good intention of democratic presidents, and how voters failed to show up at midterms so that Obama was powerless to continue with his agenda. Then they smugly and with their supposed moral superiority Post here agreeing with Dowd. These people are the real ones to blame for trump and the republican agenda for the last ten years. But oh, they are so pure and saintly
27
Eric Holder indeed played a huge role in draining hope out of America.
7
Maureen Dowd is in heart and soul a Republican, which explains why she lays most of the troubles our country has experienced on the Clintons and Obamas. She tries to camouflage her real identity by writing about situations and events in a way that is minimally supportive of Democrats. I used to question her motivations, but now I no longer care.
31
China Rules when it comes to arresting, seizing, disappearing and yes, executing, financial 'tigers'. Xi Jinping still controls the wealthy, unlike here where our politicians are butlers.
5
In 2004 Bruce Bartlett published an article in The American Conservative that should have been given much more attention.
( https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obama-is-a-republican/ )
Titled “Obama is A Republican” , the author- a Reagan and Bush aide - wrote this:
“In my opinion, Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. (Ultra-leftist Noam Chomsky recently called Nixon “the last liberal president.”)”
The simple fact is that there was no accountability for the 2008 financial crisis and the misdeeds that allowed it to happen. The same is true for those who lied America into the long and unnecessary war in Iraq. NeoCons who flat out lied us into a multi-trillion Dollar war that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of our troops get to go on TV and before public forums and treated like something other than the discredited political hacks that they truly are.
The only true accountability these days is for those too poor or unconnected to buy their way out of trouble. The true privilege in America is economic class- not race, faith or ethnicity, with few exceptions.
The real crisis of democracy is this- not Trump. He is a symptom of the ills of modern America.
9
Sigh...
Indeed.
“I’m sure we have nothing to worry about, though. As Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted Friday, “There must be decorum at the White House.”
And Trump always gets the last laugh.
4
For a reality check, consider that more than 50% of white female voters voted for Republicans in the Mid Terms. That is a great proxy for the sad state of the nation and for widespread ignorance and plain stupidity. Similarly, reckless stupidity was in evidence in the housing crash when so many Americans took on financial burdens they weren't qualified for. Cohn is correct that both greedy bankers and the public were culpable. Americans pride themselves on having the freedom to make choices and be held accountable for them.Caveat Emptor.
4
The sort of false equivalence in this column is sickening. Bush encouraged the investment banks to lever up* in an infamous April 2004 meeting. He was facing a jobless recovery going towards an election. The SEC relaxed leverage limits, and the housing bubble followed. From 2004-2006, the share of subprime mortgage origination roughly doubled, from 10% to 20%. Investment bank debt to equity ratios went from 15:1 (safe) to 25:1 (not safe).
The top 5 investment banks collapsed with $4 trillion in debt between March and September 2008; nobody knew if their assets were worth anything so the system locked up.
What's Obama supposed to do? Prosecute bankers who did what Bush told them to do? Why didn't Bush start the prosecutions when Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008, nearly a year before Obama took office? What laws specifically was Obama supposed to enforce?
Of course Republicans then put party before country in trying to stop Obama from fixing the damage, trying to block stimulus, banking regulation, the auto bailout, and higher taxes on the top 1%.
Sickening. We have Trump because Republican voters chose him in key places; despite losing by 3 million votes overall he's our President.
*NYT "Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt" (October 2008)
21
Rein, not reign. Autocorrect will be the death of me.
3
Banking has always been a scam of the rich sociopaths to enslave the rest of the population. Banking Capitalism is the law of the jungle, eat or be eaten. Nomi Prins has written a great book "All the Presidents Bankers" which is enlightening and explains fully the incestuous relationships between bankers and politicians. It is the wolf owning the chicken coop. The bankers want more than money, it is about infinite power. It is a very close fraternity that few are allowed to join. The rich don't need to be politicians, they employ people like Mitch McConnell, Obama, Robert Rubin, to be their dutiful financial prostitutes. Jack Morgan, who was JP Morgans son, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson Sept 4, 1914: "The War should be a tremendous opportunity for America." The only driving force that keeps the American Empire afloat is the debt fueled military industrial establishment which benefits the Wall Street banking industry afloat.
5
Please document the specific laws in 2008 that would have allowed prosecution. I've not seen any, though there should be.
4
You have Obama and we have McConnell. Oh yes, we also have Trump. Well, there goes my Sunday.
3
Nice to see Ms. Dowd revealing her apparent awareness of reality. Where was this piece in 2016? Where was the accompanying deep dive by The Times concurrent with the catastrophe? There have been 17 million foreclosures. The full scope of the bailout was $24 trillion by 2009. I think we’re pushing more than $30 trillion now. What happened? Who did it? Who knew about it in Justice and what didn’t happen? The fact that we have Trump as President and now this insanity at Justice is exactly what should happen when integrity dies. Ask yourself how it effects the power structure and simply pull the thread. If Trump goes does does he take whole system with him? If the masses can’t wrap their heads around it thanks to access journalism and hedged interests, how might we characterize reality? I love it when you guys show your cards.
2
So..tax evasion by the Trump and Kushner families, for decades on end...is not a crime? They have the blessing of Uncle Sam?
7
At times I wonder if Maureen isn't playing her readers. I ask myself, why does her opinions many times take an illogical position?
Is it because the Opinion Section has become more entertainment than thoughtful debate? We read her comments and lock ourselves into prolonging commentaries of disbelief, is she just acting the foil.
Does her analysis express her true thoughts or just what's need to engage our frustration?
7
Its true that," There must be decorum at the White House.", and that will happen when the traitor Trump and his ilk leave, sooner rather than later. However, if one thinks Trump got elected because his voters were a populist movement alienated by the wealthy, one would be wrong. The Trump rallies, then and to this day, scream "build that wall", not spread the wealth.Trump voters are simply racists.
16
As a minor aside, "Too Rich to Jail?" The country should have sent MARC Rich to Jail! Instead, Bill Clinton pardoned him. And who connived in it, signing off for DOJ? Eric Holder.
3
Gail Collins does a magnificent job of not so slyly poking the eye of the miscreants who who we ridiculously refer to as public servants, and Paul Krugman staunchly gives the wonkier of us a better understanding of how misguided economic policy eats at the fabric of society while allowing the 1% free reign to further stuff their coffers, but Maureen... oh, Maureen, when she is firing on all cylinders, there is no one who does it better. Yes, I would like like less space given to her brother's rants (they do serve a purpose, though) or to snarky columns that don't illuminate what we desperately need illuminated today, but this one was spot-on in the way only Ms. Dowd can do. Thanks.
5
Re Decorum@theWhiteHouse,
When Sanders is around there is Day-Glo at the White House.
2
Great writing, Maureen. Readers should post this one on their refrigerators. The problem is that trump supporters are some of the dumbest people on the planet. They don't understand the difference between belief and knowledge. Trump has mass-hypnotized them all. The Tea Party is dumber than sin.
Trump's skill at lying to the uneducated has created one of his fantasies, as you write, Maureen, that he's charging the elitist windmills to protect the naive heartlander. But right, Obama's performance was a platform for trump. That trump has been bankrupt six times is no indicator that he will correct Obama's policy toward the financial industry. Thus we have the same financial structure, maybe even more aggressive, that we had pre-crash.
But we have fear itself to fear. As David Axelrod said, that dislodged brick could bring the house down. So, do nothing. And trump is a master of fear mongering among the uneducated. That the idiot Republican presidential primary voters nominated trump over sixteen other more qualified candidates is actually the beginning of the fall of our democracy. Trump incited this mob with his fear tactics (thanks to Fox Noise). No intelligent person believed that trump would fix our financial system.
Trump's relationship that he's established with the financial industry is a major part of his fascism. It's an uneasy one, but they have figured out how to stroke trump's fragile ego, trump, a man who's company desperately needs money.
4
The argument that banks were too big to fall was the most horrible lie ever. I still don't understand this Obama's choice. c
2
Thank you Maureen. Nice job. To be sure, every thing you wrote is true. Yet I am sure there is much still to discover. Keep on it.
2
Decorum at The White House. Yes, absolutely. Sarah's working on a program where everyone who serves the president must have ruffles on their person. Designed by Ivanka. And patented in China.
7
I often feel that Maureen Down is too hard on former President Obama, but on the failure to hold Wall Street bankers accountable, her opprobrium is completely justified. Thank you for the reminder, Ms. Dowd,
1
would love to hear Timothy Geithner's opinion on why Obama folded and his own role in that fiasco.
3
And you wonder why people don't vote (or at least *didn't*)? Neither party can, realistically, claim the moral high ground. The 2016 campaign (not only for president) seemed to be based on one idea only: "I'm not the other guy!"
Admittedly, Obama was working with one hand tied behind his back: it's the fact that he couldn't appear to be too forceful because he was, you know, one of THEM (and not one of us) and pretty much anything he did would be criticized on that basis if no other (which sort of ended up happening anyway--paging Merrick Garland!)
But that aside: I may have said it at the time but it bears repeating. The 2016 election will go down in history as the one time when both parties nominated the worst possible people. What it boiled down to was that Trump was a better salesman (which we'd always known) and now we're stuck with the consequences.
PS. the bulk of people who voted for Trump wouldn't read these columns--or anything else published by the NY Times--and besides, Hillary herself did more damage than Dowd ever could have...
2
Those who think that trump will get his comeuppance are seriously underestimating the top 1% and delusional vis a vis the top 10%.
1
So it has come to pass that The Don did not drain the swamp. He gold-plated it. He restocked it with sinister, monstrously evolved nutria bred to destroy the democracy, the environment, education, healthcare, and to gut the U.S. Constitution and Rule of Law.
Only Mueller can save the Republic from the gold-plated Trump Swamp's devouring monstrosities.
6
As time moves on from the Clinton Presidency, we have seen evidence of complicity between what was the Democratic Leadership Council and the elite it kept company with during the 90's and into the beginnings of the 21st Century. The end of Glass-Steagall, the invasion of Iraq, the growing inequality between the struggling low- income workers, labor, and middle -income earners and the upper 1 %. The country has also stepped back on civil rights and enforcement of voting rights for African-American citizen, the student, senior citizens, and the poor.
As a nation, we are missing the signals of the consequences of the Flint water crisis, wildfires, and, and overall health issues for our children and those citizens afflicted with long-term illnesses. Our national infrastructure has been at risk for years but neither Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump failed to address the financial needs to fix this country's public works. Instead, each leader chose the easy fix instead of the long-term fix along with implementing the Bush and Trump tax cuts.
Meanwhile, some members of the fourth estate are chasing the shiny balls that Trump throws out to them in his tweets. Ms. Dowd should write some on this subject while the White House writes up new rules for decorum at the White House.
6
I always believed the guy the right called a socialist was center right. Obama not only did not throw bankers in jail, he didn't prosecute the Bushies for war crimes.
That all but guarantees Donald will never go to jail. First, where would the Secret Service stay? Mostly, we don't really want past presidents in the pokey. It looks bad.
So. When the new AG is read in on the Mueller probe, will he dash off to the WH like Nunes? Will he recuse himself from the FBI criminal investigation of his practices for the patent company?
The problem seems to be, we're all waiting for the other shoe to drop. But we already have more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Will we ever be whole?
7
The wall, as David Axelrod calls it, did not collapse when the stock exchange halted trades post 9/11. the bailout was politicized as a rescue. Vulnerable investors and homeowners deserved better. Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky were prosecuted, but today we have gordon Gekko running the country.
6
Is Jimmy Carter our only President in recent money who didn't immediately hightail it to Wall Street post-presidency to start raking in cash?
6
It would seem so. He was also, it appears, the only actual “Christian “ to perhaps EVER occupy that address. He’s was duly rewarded for it as well.
7
Again, blame Obama. Or as you used to call him, "Barry." It wasn't enough that he saved us from a major Depression. Gave millions the possibility of health insurance even though the Republicans screamed about "pulling the plug on Grandma." (Plenty of grandmas have had the plug pulled on them by insurance companies that refused to pay for their health care, but nobody mentioned that).
If you want to blame Obama, why not blame him for letting W. and Cheyney off the hook for the war in Iraq? They were comfortable with our using torture on suspected enemies. Hardly the American way.
A little looking in the mirror would be in order, when you ask about who enabled the current occupant of the White House and his party.
12
Maureen, you seemed surprised. Goldman Sachs was the largest contributor to the Obama campaign in 2008. Naming an attempted reform bill after Chris “friend of Angelo” Dodd and Barney “let Fannie Mae ride” Frank only adds to the irony.
4
spot on oped and until progressives come to terms with the cult of Obama and his core failures such as backing Bush on warrantless wiretaps pre 2008 or not holding those responsible for the financial crash crash or Iraq travesty right on up to his dismal failure of not being proactive in dealing with Russian mischief in the 2016 election will result in another possible election of Trump and his own worshipers.
3
Obama is a brilliant person and a great visionary leader. He did a fabulous job bringing the country from almost bankruptcy. What baffles me is what happened in his head to treat those criminals so well. Is it his lack of experience? Or, his sidekicks were on the payroll (or big promise for a future job)? We know how powerful the special interest groups are. It is a shame that they own our legislators. Regardless, Obama will be judged poorly in the history for his reckless decision to protect the fact cats who only belong in the prison for life. Obama achieved many things during Presidency. But this black spot destroys his legacy. It is a true travesty.
3
People are remarkably resistant to recognition that the Presidency of Donald Trump and the appalling caravan of sycophants and criminals who make up his administration owe their ascension to power totally to the political calculus and faintness of heart of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Maureen Dowd is one of the needed but too few voices who regularly remind us.
1
"I’m sure we have nothing to worry about, though. As Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted Friday, “There must be decorum at the White House.”
Did anyone ask S.H. the definition of decorum? No. I didn't think so.
2
Considering that Donald has turned the "swamp" in to a toxic cesspool, blaming the Obama administration is bogus! He inherited an economy close to slipping into a second Great Depression, what was he to do?! Jail all the players, most of whom literally run our nation's economy?!
Trump is here, because Russia attacked our democracy, because Americans are naive enough to believe lies, because the MSM did not call out those LIES! Wake up!
9
The idea purported by obama that nobody, there were no convictions, was criminal that caused the banking crisis is like believing purple men live on the moon.
1
Are you kidding me?
Number one, the President does not control the Justice department; number 2, a law has to be broken before a crime can be charged; number 3...oh that's right President Obama was saving the World Economy. (Lucky he didn't have a bunch of calls to make)
Imagine if the republican party had tried to help, instead of hyping birther conspiracies.
Quite hating Maureen, it's not Bill Clinton's fault you're so unhappy.
13
Two things come to mind reading MaDo and the comments. I wish WilberRoss would shave his head and "The Powell Memo" is sitting on my left shoulder whispering in my ear.
Maureen Dowd still has her journalistic claws into President Obama. She who lifted a champagne toast to his election, only to spew vitriol about his governance. She has twisted herself into a pretzel over Trump's election to absolve herself for having any part in it. Her favorite scapegoat is President Obama. Just as he is Trump's. She has never given President Obama his due for saving this country and the world from what could have been a Great Depression, with no support whatsoever from Republicans. President Obama is a decent man. Decency counts for nothing with Ms. Dowd. She seems to be seeking the politically pure. Good luck with that.
13
Still mid-term. I expect that as the 2020 campaigning gets going, Ms. Dowd will again spew hatred on all the Democrats and develop a crush on the Republican candidate. It happens every 4 years. And, yes her constant diatribes against Obama Ana the Clinton's did help put Trump in office.
Hmm, maybe it's all about selling her work, and not about her politics at all.
9
Good points, Ms. Dowd. Now tell us when you're going to accept responsibility for spending 2015 and 2016 trashing Hillary Clinton. You bent over backwards not to touch Trump for most of the campaign. And in doing so, you helped enormously in his political rise. And now you want to dump on Obama again. Own up to your own mistakes, dear.
10
Cy Vance, the Democratic Manhattan DA, refused to indict Harvey Weinstein despite clear evidence of his sexually assaulting a woman. Vance also refused to prosecute Ivanka and Don Jr despite having their personal emails clearly describing how they were committing blatant real estate fraud, inflating the number and price of units they had sold at Trump “SoHo”.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-didnt-manhattan-da-cyrus-vance-prosecute-the-trumps-or-harvey-weinstein
Worse data is clear that Vance is tougher on lower income offenders, even those committing minor offenses, than the other NYC DAs.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/manhattan-da-cy-vance-record-on-prosecuting-the-poor.html
The Trump kids and Weinstein are donors to Vance but even if they weren’t I bet he would have declined to prosecute. He can empathize with fat cats but not the hoi polloi.
1
No “we” didn’t.
I sure didn’t.
Obama did.
I voted for the bum, and he sold us out for the millions in corporate bribes he’s collecting now.
Lesson learned - there is no Republican or Democrat politician - they are all owned by their corporate masters.
2
Wow! Mo continues to blame the 1 black man (Obama) and the Clintons for the whole economic crisis. Mo, you never suggest how to fight the powers that be, you only know how to assign blame. Dig a little deeper, Mo. Find the true root of the problem so we can extract the real culprits of this scourge against democracy.
8
America lost its moral compass when it failed to prosecute the Bush Cheney war criminals.
7
I have several questions.
1. While I’d have loved to see some bankers and financial CEOs in the slammer, exactly what laws did they break? No, I mean EXACTLY. Because it looks to me like what we got here is a case of brand, spanking-new crookery that wasn’t covered by the law.
2. If both parties are equally gawdaful, how come Democrats passed Dodd-Frank and built the CPB and went after education loan and oayday loan gouging, and republicans immediately attacked all of that?
3. If you’re a Trumpist because of the Big Banks, how in the world do you justify Cohn, Mnuchin, deVos et al? I mean, this, “Yeah they’re wealthy crooks, and I want a wealthy crook on my side. What? No, I ain’t got a thing from them yet. But Trump’s my boy,” weirdness—how is that esplicable without mentioning racial and religious bigotry?
4. What happened with the $2 billion fine Deutschebank got whacked with? Pardon me for cynicism, but looks to me like Trump—who has $600 mil in loans with them—backed off. Gee, I wonder why?
5. Why in the world are folks who claim to be lefties happiest when they’re shouting at their own side? And how do they manage to swear up and down that Obama never did nothin’ for the working class, given a long, long list that Trump’s now gleefully dismantling? How do they yell this, then yell about Obamacare needing to do more, all in the same paragraph?
This is a good column, which offers a fair assessment. Maybe read more than the first three paragraphs?
4
"After warning them about ‘the pitchforks’ of an angry public, Obama reassured the frightened bankers that they could count on him to protect them; that he had no intention of restructuring their industry or changing the economic direction of the nation.” (After he left the White House, Obama followed Hillary’s lead, buckraking on Wall Street.)
Gasp! Maureen, how dare thy cast dispersions on your Messiah? Off with your head!
Whitaker is more crooked than a bag full of snakes and just like his boss full of blatant incompetence. Fits right in with the administartion.
8
Ms. Dowd is rehashing old news - anyone paying attention knows this. Still slapping around Obama and Hillary Clinton, though - thematic continuity. Time to try new material or retire.
12
The litany of white collar crimes seems endless, and our checks and balances seem as worthless as a subprime loan.
3
I've always wondered if things would have turned out differently if Ford had pardoned Nixton after he was convicted.
2
If Obama had poor judgment and Trump has no judgment,is it any wonder the people are alienated and cynical...and become radicalized ?
Study the 1930's in Europe and see how that worked out.
The big difference is the web and the social media that has accelerated the rate of anxiety, panic and ignorance.
Technological progress is way over rated.
2
It can be said that Obama made a mistake by not going after the Wall Street crooks who were behind the fiscal crisis. But it can also be said that if he had chosen that path, it would have absorbed all the oxygen out of the political environment, and none would be left over for the programs he wanted to get approved which would really help the citizenry. And he knew that he had a limited time frame to get things accomplished, since he could always lose the midterms, which he did. So, he prioritized things like healthcare above revenge. And don't forget that he had to deal with the stimulus and economic recovery to get the country out of the financial ditch it was in, too.
Obama accomplished a remarkable amount of things which helped the country. His biggest mistake, though, was to assume that the Republicans wanted to collaborate with him about getting the programs he envisioned enacted. The Republicans had no interest whatsoever in any type of reaching across the aisle cooperation, so Obamas's legacy of accomplishments stalled.
Trump's promise of having only "the best people" in his cabinet was a self-serving fiction, like everything else he does. It would have been good to get rid of the Wall Streeters behind the financial crisis, but they're like rats - you can exterminate a bunch of them, but there are always more behind them to fill in the gaps. Frankly, Obama did about as much as he could to help the country. Revenge will have to wait until the next administration.
9
What I sense from reading Maureen Dowd's columns is that she has a higher standard for Democrats than for Republicans, and when Democrats fail to meet that standard, her disappointment turns to anger. No one is perfect, or keeps all their promises. Everyone should be held accountable, but I often find the comments about Democrats snarky and mean. She seems to set the bar so low for Donald Trump, however, that she fails to call him out for behavior that she would never accept from Democrats. For example, how about a column this week addressing his lack of empathy for the fire victims in California? He wants to blame the fires on forest management, but in the red states that voted for him, did we hear him discussing poor flood plain management when people were losing their homes?
12
"Too rich to jail". Could have had the same headline during the Wall Street and banking industry bail out years. It's worse with republicans, but let's not kid ourselves, the government, no matter who is in charge, is here to serve the top, not us peons.
5
Obama didn't prosecute bankers because he didn't want to lose their campaign contributions in 2012.
2
Part I
Regulatory capture, also known as “pay-to-play,” has in the past few decades steadily chipped away at the foundations of our democratic institutions transforming a nation that was once considered the premier democracy in the world into a plutocracy with increasingly symbolic democratic features.
The clear reason for this deterioration has been the government’s failure to regulate shareholder capitalism. This failure has led to a runaway brand of capitalism that has allowed corporations to resume the domination of American society they exercised during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
As a result of this actual and constructive deregulation, corporations have grown dangerously large, autocratic, and ambitious. Corporations have come to dominate all three branches of our law-making apparatus in our state and federal governments.
(continued)
4
Part II
The demos, the people, who are supposed to be sovereign in a democracy, have been largely forgotten by our elected representatives because they owe their positions to wealthy corporate interests. As a result of this population neglect, wealth and income inequality has widened, aggravating every socioeconomic problem we experience today in our society.
So, it is no accident that our American criminal justice system is obsessed with punishing powerless petty convicts for silly little crimes, such as marijuana distribution, while rich powerful engineers of complex financial schemes that rob millions of dollars from millions of people and wreak havoc on our national economy, escape justice.
5
For a prosecution to occur (vs a persecution), there needs to be a violation of statutory law. While repulsive and damaging to the economy, a willful effort of feigned ignorance and blind greed is not a crime. And they never will be for a variety of legitimate reasons. Liberals have to give up this aggregate faith in government as the solver of all problems both big and small. No one is entitled to a level playing field and those who cannot or will not complete belong watching from the sidelines. Otherwise, we will descend into the ruinous clutches of communism by way of the Social Democrats.
1
"Icelanders were bragging about putting the corrupt bankers who ravaged their economy in prison."
I believe that Sweden too jailed its big bankers in the early 1990s for their fraudulent activity and wrecking the economy.
So why do other countries punish their white-collar big bank criminals and corporate thugs but the U.S. does not?
Where there is political will, there is a way.
We need to answer the question fast: Why is there no political will in the U.S.?
My guess is if we want to see justice done and rich fraudsters and corporate thugs, who do tremendous damage to an entire economy, held accountable and go directly to jail , then we need to get rid of Citizens Untied and have public financing of elections.
Get legalized bribery of politics, and level the playing field so people and justice have a chance.
3
Ms. Dowd, the bankers hate and hated Barrack Obama as much as they hated FDR.
Neither of those two presidents made prosecution of bankers their policy when the American economy totally crashed before the one's election to the White House or all but crashed before the more recent of the two won election.
No, they made their chief aim recovery as best they could manage it with and from that flaw in the U.S. Constitutional system called the Congress.
With recovery as policy they walked the roads they could, found the exigent allies they could while each did what he could to put Americans back to work and stabilize a shattered economy.
Governing is much harder than campaigning and much, harder than criticizing. The problem today, now, is that we do not have and for two years have not had a government.
We have instead a den of thieves, schemers and moral imbeciles in the likes of Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Wilbur Ross stealing the common wealth of the commonweal.
On my bookshelves are five bios of FDR, the essential 3-volume one of Eleanor Roosevelt and ones about Harry Hopkins, Missy LeHand and others in the close-in circle around FDR.
If Ms. Dowd had her historical allusions and comparisons right she'd know FDR would have approved of Barack Obama. He would have agreed that the bankers hate and hated the 44th president as much as they hated him, the 32nd president.
7
I believe Obama privately agreed not to criminally prosecute Wall Street bankers, and Bush Administration war criminals, when he first started his presidential campaign. This is a long-standing understanding about the presidency: you may be elected by the people but your are the employee of the plutocracy, established by the Founding Fathers, that rules the country.
2
It must have been Icelandic justice or a sauna followed by a sudden and icy dip. Reagan, the Clintons, the Bushes (especially 'W') and a really, really disappointing Obama did it for me. And then came The Donald - my icy dip. Whatever. This is your best column in a long time.
3
And who, exactly, will do anything about this issue, and imbalance of power, that will not be described by this paper, for example, as engaging in "overreach" and "veering too far to the left"? Who?
1
For once I am with Ms Dowd, about Barack Obama. He failed because he did not slam the Wall Street scammers who got away with their sins. With Democrats controlling the House and Senate he should have just ramrodded through the Democrats' agenda in his first couple of years. Instead he extended his hand to a Party that called him a liar, questioning his citizenship, a bigoted, racist Party whose sole agenda was to make him a one-term President. And his undoing has been our Country's downward trajectory in every sphere - financial, political, institutional, honesty and personal integrity. Obama's beliefs, decency and bi-partisanship has cost America beyond reason. He danced with wolves and wolves can only be wolves!
In a related article about China's reason not to have failed - autocracy with democratic characteristics, Obama was a Democrat in a Democracy totally Democratic. And now we have a Democracy which is totally autocratic.
1
Do you remember when Obama told us "Jamie Dimond is a really smart guy". And David Axelrod was afraid of taking a brick out of the "wall "and having the whole thing fall down. Well President's Obama's idea of not looking back; whether it was the crimes of the banksters or the the war crime of Iraq and the failure to hold those responsible to account brought the whole wall down with the angry mob being led by a demagogue demanding to "build the wall."
2
I imagine Obama felt the same way Gerald Ford felt when he decided to pardon Nixon, or Mandela felt when deciding to forgive those who had persecuted him for 27 years: punishment is just going to alienate those you’re going to have to work with in order to bring the country back together. I think Obama’s motivations were also fueled by a feeling that, as the first black president, and one with a relatively short political life prior to being elected to that office, he felt like he didn’t have the mandate to disrupt things too much. In fact, Ms. Dowd herself is one of the pundits who has called Obama “arrogant”; who knows what she and others would have said had he started jailing executives and dissolving corporations. In any event, in the course of eight years he turned the country’s economy around from the weakest it had been since the 1930s to the strongest it had been since the 1960s - so maybe, just maybe, he knew what he was doing...
6
Mo, if you think it’s bad now, just wait. Uncle Donald, the wannabe strongman who didn’t have the courage to serve in the military, is just warming up. Think of the unqualified people he has yet to appoint to Cabinet posts! Think if the tariffs he will impose! Think of the kids who be locked up at the border, the school lunches not served to hungry kids whose only fault,was not to be born into a wealthy family, the elderly who will be denied surgeries due to Medicare budget cuts.
No Ms. Mo, the slide into the abyss is only accelerating, fasten your seatbelt.
4
Obama betrayed everything he ran on in 2008.
He coddled Wall Street after campaigning on bringing them to task. In his administration he put the foxes in charge of the hen house.
He expanded the wars in the Middle East after claiming he wouldn't.
He expanded domestic surveillance and went after the news media.
He caved on the Republican resistance to his agenda.
He remained firmly entrenched in the elite power structure and championed the "meritocracy", discounting the impact of the global economy on the average wage earner.
And he paved the way for Donald Trump.
His presidency was a disaster.
Are we better off after his presidency? The answer is clearly no. This said from someone who voted for him and had the audacity of hope.
I was misled. It was a bait and switch.
As it turned out, Obama was just another politician, and not a very good one at that.
2
If there were a Pulitzer Prize for Hindsight, Maureen Dowd would be the hands-down winner. If hindsight is 20/20 vision, Maureen is definitely a 20/10.
Every week with amazing precision and clarity she tells us what everyone should have done back in 2003 or 2008 to resolve the crises of 10 or 20 years ago. Last week it was the Iraq War, this week the 2008 Recession. Clearly if only she had been in charge back then, none of these catastrophes would have happened.
If only we could persuade her to devote her vast analytical powers to resolve present and future problems, such as climate change or health care policy, in the same way she solves the problems of the past, we would all be living in a better world.
As to the substance of her column, talk about the Bigotry of Low Expectations and Double Standards! In the pundit world, the Democrats, in addition to pursuing their traditional policy goals, have somehow been given the added responsibility of protecting the democratic system itself from the depredations of the Republicans, while the GOP is free to act however it likes, starting wars and recessions.
In this reading, it was somehow in the Democrats' and Obama's exclusive control, as guardians of the political system, to prevent Trump from being President and that the failures of the GOP are ultimately the responsibility of the Democrats, for not doing their jobs as protectors of the system.
Why can't we hold the GOP to the same standard of accountability?
4
Dowd can't come right out and admit it yet, but she is edging towards the realization that we created Trump (we, the reasonably liberal establishment). It will take awhile longer for most voters to recognize that queasy feeling deep in their guts.
2
Homeless? On the street? Can’t get a home loan? Countrywide can! That is, provide you with a loan you can never pay off, even if you do earn a decent salary. Now, that’s an eggageraton. I don’t think Countrywide ever marketed to the homeless, but what they and other lenders did was about as bad. For example, the word (I guess it was a word) re-fi was tossed around like a cute little pet that everyone should have. Bankers engaged in questionable practices, if not outright larceny, should have been punished. But W had allowed things to fester so long that a collapse of the world economy seemed tangible. I blame him. I can’t think of a single decision President Obama made that wasn’t strategic in nature. I was always “single-payer or nothing” on healthcare. But look at what President Obama’s decision led to: The Republicans’ unbelievably hypocritical portrayal of themselves as the protectors of those with pre-existing conditions.
2
Repealing Glass Steagall enabled the fraud by the banksters and the 1 percent to take America and its Treasury to the cleaners. However, not underwriting the loans was the domino falling that caused the collapse of the financial markets.
Shareholders and stakeholders in banks writing mortgages had a right to expect that loans would be underwritten to insure that the borrower would most likely pay off the loan.
We have to accept the fact that every President after Jimmy Carter was corrupt/corrupted by Wall St., starting with Regional Banks and Derivatives in the Reagan administration.
Maureen is right if I read her right, the problem now is just much, much worse. Trump is the perfect storm: Putin's poison pill and the Con in Chief with a cabinet of grifters, incurring massive deficits during high employment and a roaring stock market with a climate forecast of widespread flooding and drought conditions over much the world.
Right, only Trump can fix it.
3
The uber wealthy pay for the political campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans. What did you expect?
2
If only there were "decorum" in our media and pundits who see the faults of others, but are blind to their own.
3
Don't 401k's create a problem? If the government tries to regulate Wall Street, those accounts can Poof! disappear.
I guess that keeps the masses on their toes and in line.
1
I supported the tack that Obama took on the economy when he took office. I thought it more important to stop the rolling and pitching of the ship of state and stabilize our economy. But with the Pubs fighting every attempt to reverse the damage done it was inevitable it would be a slow go, slow enough to last until now. So don`t put the blame on Obama, put it on those crazy economic anarchists in the Republican Party who keep trying to either run the ship aground or scuttle out of spite.
1
Excellent! I finally read something that counters the amnesiacs who mythologize Obama, especially given his allowing those crooks to get off the hook. I was extremely disillusioned with Obama about many such things about six months into his first term. People who disregard serious mistakes in history enable people to repeat them, as a take on Santayana. As another observation, yes, the people with ample features of a seriously dangerous personality disorder but also with money and connections clearly avoid the penalties of others without such advantages here. It's the "if you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" mentality in this culture.
As good professional practice, the standard approach to addressing such people is behavioral quarantine, either through incarceration (because they drift into crime, with convictions and sentencing) through the justice system or court-ordered behavioral monitoring by health care providers. Poor people who still require such measures get them; not so for the wealthy and connected. "Them that has, gets"...off the hook. For Trump and his ilk, it may be not for long, I hope--if there's any justice left in this country.
2
Dowd: "If you thought Trump’s flimflam about his namesake university was bad, if you cringe that Commerce and Interior are run by men accused of grifting, check out our acting attorney general. His very appointment could be illegal."
If this appointment is NOT illegal, then it should be. Not only trump, but any future president will be free to nominate people for cabinet positions solely for their ability to be confirmed by Senate, then just fire them and appoint totally unqualified lackeys in their place. Indeed, this is exactly what trump has done. It makes a mockery of the Constitution.
3
"President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook"
"Donald Trump scooped up “the forgotten,” promising to punish Wall Street...But it was just another Trump con."
Rarely do we see such an accurate summation of the extent of our oligarchic form of government.
“The game was rigged — that became the consensus of the alienated.”
The "alienated" constitute the overwhelming majority of the electorate when you realize that it includes the non-voting public and much of the registered independents, and of course, registered independents far outnumber either of the pro-business parties.
Yet the Dem party bosses continue to talk of the need to reach across the aisle, in the spirit of bipartisanship blah, blah, blah. When you hear a Pelosi or a Schumer proclaim this while ruling out ruling out popular policies such as Medicare for all, increased Social Security benefits or a financial transaction tax, they are presenting a veiled example of their disdain for democracy.
So long as the people, or more accurately, sheeple, tolerate this, the country will continue to be scavenged by the wealthy.
4
Obama couldn't jail Jamie Dimon or any of the rest of them.
He took their money to get elected.
He just never owned up to it to his hope-charmed followers.
And that's why I'm no longer a Democrat.
2
Over the years, there have been many expect analyses of this issue. The problem with arresting the CEOs is that there were flimsy laws in place, if there were laws at all. Remember that the financial machinations and investment "instruments" were new, and were not covered by 2008 regulations . Plus, Cohn is correct to point to homeowners who lied about income and leveraged themselves with interest-only loans and balloon payments. At the time, it was thought that $6 trillion in paper equity disappeared. Why doesn't anyone look at who got the first cut of that $6 trillion? Certainly not the big banks. 100,000s of local mortgage bankers and realtor got the first 6-10% of that $6 trillion. These are our neighborhood real estate professionals who helped buyers lie about income and loan eligibility, who directed these buyers to the new types of home loans that doomed these buyers to failure. These 100,000 local real estate made about $60,000,000,000 helping home buyers commit fraud. When Americans continue to only focus on Big Bank irresponsibility, the criminals living next door are left to create and profit from another financial maelstrom. When the Dems gain control of the House and Senate, laws and regulations need to enacted to prevent another real estate crisis that occurred in 2008. To do so requires placing local realtors and mortgage bankers under federal law fraud law, as well as banks.
Absolutely spot on article. What most folks were consoled with was the pound of flesh fines the banks received, punishing primarily shareholders and retirement funds. Meanwhile, the bankers responsible for the carnage were left unscathed and learned nothing. Welcome to America.
5
They said Obama was a socialist. He didn’t socialize healthcare except for Medicaid expansion but he certainly did socialize the financial debts of Wall Street. Private debt became public debt.
3
I remember Greenspan in an interview trying to explain the debacle by saying that he “could not have predicted that the banks would act against their own self interest” . The truth is that bakers followed the path of personal greed and not that of responsibility for the institutions for which they were the stewards.
To blindly trust “market solutions “ as the final arbiter is suicidal. Regulations to protect the “common good” must be seen as an essential role of government by, for ,and of the People.
Note to Liberals and Progressives:
Saying we should not criticize Obama and the Clintons is like saying Republicans should not criticize Trump. We will not reform what we do not dare to criticize, any more than we we will stop criminality we do not dare to prosecute.
3
...to say nothing about the Citizen's United decision by the Supreme Court, which has allowed private money to poor into politician's coffers. An instant conflict of interest corroding democracy...
3
From a 2104 investigative NYT mag article [ "Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis" ] "During the past decade, the Justice Department suffered a series of corporate prosecutorial fiascos, which led to critical changes in how it approached white-collar crime. The department began to focus on reaching settlements rather than seeking prison sentences, which over time unintentionally deprived its ranks of the experience needed to win trials against the most formidable law firms. "
That would seem to indicate a long term trend of judges being lenient on white collar crime. Judicial independence means that Obama could not override judicial judgements or replace the judges.
2
The second paragraph of this column captures the essence of our current political and economic environments brilliantly. Hurray for Maureen Dowd,
2
All true. Looking to the future, where is a visionary leader for us?
They do not know what "decorum in the White House" is.
As far as the Bankers go, the problem is that these guys know that if they portray themselves "to Big to Fail" they will be bailed out. Why any of these Wall Street Investment firms were giving Bank Charters is a mystery.
Supposedly Wall Street is a Capitalistic enclave. How can that be true, since Capitalism's principals are that if you fail, someone else or some other entity will enter the marketplace to fill the void by your failure.
Our country is not a true Capitalistic country if our Government can step in and save the company. That is called Welfare, only not for the poor, just for the Big Guys.
So really we are a Socialist Country for the 1% and a Capitalistic country when it comes to Health Care and other much needed programs.
The hypocrisy is amazing.
3
Thank you for writing this piece. There are so many new examples of corruption to be outraged over that it's ready to forget this recent history. With Tim Geithner whispering in his ear, Obama made the critical error of not holding any of the gonifs behind the 2007 crash accountable. It was then that I realized with disappointment that the chosen one was just another politician in thrall to our domestic oligarchs. And like Clinton, he has been amply rewarded by his clients since leaving office. There are no atheists in the foxhole, and no socialists in the White House.
3
"Followed Hillary's lead in buckraking on Wall Street"? Is that an allusion to the eye-popping speaker's fees that Hillary collected?
Well, if so, the facts are that (1) Hillary's fees were middling for celebrity speakers, (2) she gave something like four talks, total, to big bankers (out of over 80 total, the others were to outfits like the American Scrap Metal Association). And from all appearances, she was scrupulous about funneling her fees to her and Bill's foundation, which is a real foundation that spends its money directly on worthy causes and has operating overhead well below the average of such charities.
2
This looks like a attempt to rebuild the Republican party, bad Obama, very bad Trump. Both parties share equal blame, really? Where does Bush 43 figure in this? Which party sells deregulation? Was the problem with banking, to much oversight?
For someone as apparently sophisticated and insightful as Ms. Dowd, her glib one-liners about Obama’s failing to put allegedly miscreant bankers in jail misses a key element. I saw firsthand how very smart and very hardworking prosecutors tried to make criminal cases against the likes of executives at AIG, Goldman Sachs, BofA, and many others. But the exacting evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these executives intended to commit fraud, knowingly represented as facts statements they knew were false, or created fictitious financial statements, was simply not there. Yes, thousands of people made errors, and behaved negligently, or even recklessly, in pursuit of profit, but there were insurmountable differences between those mistakes and those negligent acts and federal or state crimes. Obama and thousands of dedicated prosecutors tried mightily but the proof wasn’t there.
1
culinary workers in southern Nevada are grateful for Obama. not many people know, that as a candidate in 2008, he sat in on negotiations between the culinary union and MGM properties. he also updated, by executive order, existing overtime rules. this industry tries to do away with union positions and hires low level managers, working them 70 plus hrs a week, on straight salary, thanx to Obama, no more. any manager making less than 50k annually is entitled to overtime pay. was he perfect? no. all politicians take money from wall street. you can't get elected without it. don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
1
Iceland was the ONLY country to put those in power during the financial meltdown behind bars. It was the women who lead the charge with a literal pots and pans revolution.
Blaming Obama is ridiculous in my opinion. There was no having his back anywhere or anyhow. Not in the press and not in the millions who had turned out to vote him in. The structure that was in place from the election was supposed to hold together and help a list of progressive ideas be enacted after the election. But, as usual people went back to their own needs first and were confused and frightened by the hype of the crisis in our economy.
1
Distraction and misdirection replete with confusing anti-Obama constructs and covert Clinton references.
Too rich to jail in today’s context means Trump, the entire family. Not “Kingpin”, Mnuchin, or Koch minion Pompeo, the too rich are Donald, Don Jr., Ivanka, Kushner, and even Eric. How does Maureen manages to spin this title into a “double-think” attack on Obama? An accident? Take warning. Dowd’s long term hatred of Bill that leaked into her hatred of Hillary is glaring to include Obama. Some propaganda is less ham handed than Laura Ingraham but on inspection, just as vile.
3
"There must be decorum at the White House."???? Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
If that is the case, Sarah, pray tell why, in the names of our founding fathers, there is none?
And I must ask, Maureen, does "flush with power" refer directly to Matthew Whitaker or to the "masculine toilet" of the preceding paragraph?
Porcelain/genitalia mingling is quite appalling.
1
oh, Ms. Dowd, you focus on such bad news and evil doings.
when we all know it is much, much worse. yeah, they're crooks, which should come as no surprise to anyone other than some Rip van Winkle, but they are also on the Nazi sprectrum, which should be much more alarming.
2
Finally a reporter who gets it. Barack Obama's failure to jail white collar criminals from Wall Street led directly to the Tea Party victories and the midterm loss in 2010. Furthermore his signal failure was called out by Senator Warren, failure to indict even one of the major criminal masterminds who looted the USA, his failure to enforce the law against Wall Street criminals. Obama's failure to fulfill his duty to enforce the law against Wall Street criminals, criminals who are even now still enjoying their ill gotten gains, Obama's great failure caused Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016.
2
@Federalist Well said!
1
in some ways the phot at the beginning is more damning than the article. Four guys who wouldn't be allowed to park cars in most other administrations, now running the country...
The only correct about this piece is the title. Thanks (Not) for blaming the Black Man once again. As if Mitch McConnell and the Tea Party aka Freedom Caucus would have ever supported President Obama in any kind of accountability of their GOP donors .
Yes, our US Congress on both sides of the aisle is beholden to the mega CEO's of our country. That is now enshrined with the passing of Citizens United and the costs of politics have ramped up to our current state of our representatives being bought outright by the rich. And the rich do not want to go to jail much like the rest of us but they have the money and power to make sure they don't no matter the law.
Trump was just pissed because Hillary was offered more money for speaking engagements whereas Barry was never invited in the first place.
The Bush/Cheney era was the 1% on steroids driving us to where we are today. Their greedy failures blamed on everyone else and protected by Mitch McConnell. Trump is the GOP's version of the corrupt coming back after 8 years of having to be 'tamed' into fiscal responsibility by an evil Democrat. No worries, Trump is getting rid of Dodd-Frank.
And now with the anything goes corruption of the Trump administration, we have the GOP misdirecting yet again with Soros money Bad, Koch Brothers money Good and Wilbur Ross raking in millions. The GOP and Mitch had to wait 8 years for their tax cuts for themselves and darn it feels good to have finally achieved their goal.
The bankers various and sundry are the ones doing the buckracking. The politicians various and sundry are following the manure spreader. Sorry to be so ag correct.
I would bet in the industry they find it hilarious (intended) they can buy off such "big names" out of petty cash.
Where do I get one of those toilets?
Ain't America great? Still!
Yes, the one big failure of President Obama was to not go after the criminals. His early years were characterized by believing he could work with the Republicans. His second term was much more in line with Whitaker's toilet.
But too little, too late to Make America Really Great Again.
2
Obama derangement syndrome continues to consume her. Always blame the black guy is Maureen's con-- or in this case two: Obama and holder. The racism is transparent as is Maureen's big role in helping elect trump with her fake equivalency. Disgusting
1
Wealth can buy influence, significant influence. The rich do seem to go to jail, most times, when they are convicted of crimes involving serious violence like murder. Simple bar fights, drug use, etc., is usually often met by probation or sometimes meaningless community service. Rich people usually don't sell drugs because they don't need the money - same goes for robbery and burglary. Why steal if you don't need the money? The rich do seem to often get a pass on financial crimes unless it's notorious like in the case of Bernie Madoff or they steal from other rich people who have influence. Fines and tax penalties are unpleasant for the uber rich but they have enough money to still continue to live well. We are a nation controlled in large measure by large corporations and the wealthy control our large corporations. So long as this is the case we will have two justice systems.
2
Allowing the “best and the brightest” to craft a financial legal code that allowed - actually encouraged - the type of fraud that created the Great Recession was a major downward step in the West’s decline.
As custodians of this civilization, they remind one of the myriad self-serving aristocracies that ‘innocently’ undermine the most important feature of great nations - it’s character.
Sad.
3
I give Obama the benefit of the doubt in deciding not to prosecute The Banksters in the wake of the Great Recession. Should he have tried the likes of Countrywide's Mozilo (or Mnuchin, for that matter)? Yes. Yet hind site is 20/20. And while the statute of limitations has likely run out for Mozilo, there is no shortage of *current* Wall Street Banksters who can be prosecuted starting January 3. Given record profits, you can't make the argument that prosecutions will lead to economic depression any longer. Democrats have no excuse not to press this issue.
2
@LCS - What laws have the current bankers violated?
Frankly, everybody is much cleaner now than they used to be. I don't really see anything that could be prosecuted.
1
I teach a course on business ethics in an MBA program. I use the 2008 financial crisis as a case study of how government and industry (specifically financial services) are integrated and interact.
One of the most common questions from my aspiring-business leaders is to ask how it is possible that so many people could be so enriched at the expenses of virtually everybody else in society . . . all during a crisis that threatened the very stability of the industrial world.
Here are the key questions:
"When the government gave out vast bailouts to Wall Street firms, why didn't they require Wall Street to rein in compensation and make meaningful commitments to lend money rather than simply using it for stock buy-backs and bankrolling even more dubious trading operations?" Answer: because Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Barack Obama didn't have the guts to offend Wall Street CEOs.
And, "Why didn't government regulators intervene when it became apparent that a large number of people were being victimized by predatory mortgage lenders conducting industrial-scale fraud in foreclosing hundreds of thousands of homes?" Answer: because Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner and Barack Obama didn't have the guts to offend Wall Street CEOs.
The more you know about business, the more you have to acknowledge that capitalism is deeply broken in America. I see nobody on the national scene who has the insight, vision, and political skill to actually lead an effective reform movement.
11
A course in business ethics? While I commend you, sir, for making the attempt, I have never associated any business w/ any sense of ethics.
In fact, I think it would be easier to just say, "businesspeople are crooks, by nature," and let it go at that while amping up lawmakers' ability to monitor, regulate, and indict when necessary. Possibly, there should be a"medal of honor" annually for businesses that do not cheat, lie and/or harass their female (and occasional male or LBGTG) employees. It might encourage the few.
Sure, I know there are honest people who run honest businesses. But my impression is that those businesses don't make it to the Fortune 500. And then there are those who misapply their ethics to increase employee pain. Specifically Hobby Lobby's attempt to not cover birth control in their benefits package, because it goes against the owners' ethics and religious beliefs.
Who said employers have the right to determine their employees' sense of morals and ethics, or that it is any of their concern?
Why trump of course, that bastion of ethical purity and truth telling. Not!!
Let's be clear. Businesses are not churches. They're in it to make a buck, and when that process turns illegal, they must be indicted, charged, tried, and punished where guilty. Making a buck is not a bad thing,but let's not confuse it w/ethics. It is what it is, and becomes especially repugnant when dressed up as moral turpitude.
President Obama's reluctance to hold miscreant bankers accountable after the near-depression of the late 00s turned out badly for the reasons that Ms. Dowd articulates. The mistake was made in decent faith, I believe, out of a desire to turn a corner from the bitter partisanship following eight years of Republican mismanagement of everything the Party touched. We are now seeing how that turned out.
The GOP has become noteworthy for one thing and one thing only: soul-destroying partisan spite that will spare no tactic, no matter how divisive, to sustain its hold on power. Sadly abetting this political dysfunction, the Democrats insist on sustaining its own gerontocratic hold on the levels of Party power, snuffing out the fresh energy in its own ranks.
The Democrats have renewed a wet noodle of fecklessness to lead them in the US Senate. Over in the House, Nancy Pelosi rules from her four-score perch on the rationale that she is holding American politics safe for feminism, as though there are no other women (or men for that matter) capable of a fresher, more inspiring brand of leadership.
4
Here is one good reason to vote for an avowed Socialist, leaving all the Cold War hysterics that will be invoked in the dust, and not another establishment Democrat who will run on the ability to mollify Trump voters, when what this will really mean is giving crooks yet another pass. Do we have the courage to do this?
4
I’m stunned that so many smart people still seriously believe that President Obama unilaterally “allowed” the wrongdoers in the financial industry responsible for the 2008 financial crisis to escape justice.
The United States of America is a constitutional democratic republic. In our form of government, the Presidency is not a monarchy. The President makes his/her decisions with the help of teams of advisors who often consult with many other officials who work inside the government. Moreover, presidential decisions are subject to being checked and balanced by the legislative and judicial branches of our government.
There are many factors that go into making a presidential decision, including how it will be received by the U.S. Congress, by the federal judiciary, by the American people, and by the financial markets at home and abroad, as well as its effect on both national security and international stability.
Please consider these factors, and specifically how it would have been received if the administration of America’s first African-American President, a liberal former U.S. Senator who had not yet completed a full term, had aggressively pursued for criminal prosecution the elite bankers responsible for the financial crisis.
7
@Howard Gregory - I think it would have worked if he had selected his targets carefully, and picked the leaders of banks that had gone broke through mismanagement. Nobody would feel too sorry for Angelo Mozilo, Stan O'Neal, or Kerry Killinger once they no longer were running a financial institution.
2
As a former commercial banker, I can say without hesitation the vast majority of commercial bankers expected those responsible for the massive sub prime mortgage fraud to be prosecuted. 20 years earlier, more than a thousand individuals were prosecuted for their parts in the Savings and Loan fraud; a Republican president directed the Attorney General to give these prosecutions the highest priority. The failure of the Obama administration to mount equivalent prosecutions against the investment bankers for their parts in the much bigger sub prime fraud mystified those of us in the finance industry, who recognized sub prime for the criminal activity it so obviously was.
5
Eric Holder is mostly responsible. His feckless management of the Justice Department was monumental.
2
I agree with Dowd, although I usually do not. If the Clintons and Obama, all of whom I have no doubt meant well and acted as they then thought best for the Country, have a meaningful answer I would like to hear it. No interest in excuses, just Let's Figure Out How We Got Here? If no answer from them, we move on, but they are no longer factors in what is done. Even with a meaningful answer, their time has passed on this issue and we need to listen to people still active who saw better in 2008. Their mistakes should not be magnified into Being Evil, but their Judgment in 2008 et seq is clearly Bad and should not be repeated. Now Calm and Wise Economic Decisions are needed, not emotional vengence or See How Liberal I Am Posturing. We need to do What Works.
3
By mentioning the Clintons you bring up an interesting point. Perhaps the overwhelming desire of the Clintons to fill the coffers of the Clinton Foundation to the detriment of ethics, integrity, and policy played a bigger role than we know.
1
People say Obama and Clinton paved the way for Trump.
Funny how W Bush didn't pave the way for Trump although he gave us the worst recession since the Great Depression.
I lived through all those things.
I didn't fall for Trump's con.
There is no excuse for the American people.
Worse, they keep listening to right-wing media and voting Republican who then cut taxes for the wealthy and cut social programs for those same voters.
It has been happening since Reagan gave us trickle-down economics.
They changed the wording after trickle-down didn't sound so good. Under W. Bush, that became tax cuts for "the job creators."
And they didn't even bother to come up with a new name for the Ryan / McConnell / Trump tax cut.
The projected $600 Billion deficit before the tax cut is expected to rise to at least $1 Trillion in the next year or two.
We are projected to add $12 Trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. That is $80,000 per tax payer.
And Ryan and McConnell are once again talking about cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
That is not Obama's fault.
That is the fault of all those who vote Republican.
29
According McKay Coppins in the November Atlantic, it was Newt Gingrich and his Contract On, uh, For America who got what would become the Trumpist ball rolling. True dat to a good extent.
1
There may be a reason why the Justice Department hesitates to prosecute people like Rick Scott for the biggest Medicare fraud at the time and the Goldman Sachs for helping to give us the sub-prime meltdown.
In general, they pay a fine but never admit guilt.
It may be that admitting guilt would open them up for so many shareholder suits that it would bankrupt the companies.
It seems that would only make the problems worse.
On the other hand, a company doesn't have to go out of business because of bankruptcy. Just reorganize.
4
Ms. Dowd has hit the proverbial "nail on the head". Obama missed an opportunity to stand up for the people but instead chose to mollify corporate America. It's no wonder so many people choose to not vote when our only viable choices are red corporations v. blue corporations.
Meanwhile, voters recently sent a strong message for change. Yet Democrats appear poised to re-elect Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. It appears we can only expect more of the same old pandering to corporate America at the expense of the people.
10
Ms. Nancy Pelosi - like President Obama - knows how to get things done without destroying the system, LH.
Go ahead and try to smear her because republicans are afraid of her. WE THE PEOPLE are not listening.
15
Oh please! Your point is bogus!
@LH: If their demands are not met, they will burn down the system. Isn't that Trump's MO?
Actually John Adams warned Thomas Jefferson about this rich oligarchy being the biggest danger to democracy. He predicted this would happen, the rich owning the government. Does not seem to matter Dem or Repub , once the money is presented they roll over. The public is also part of this, admiring all rich folks regardless of how it was obtained. Listen to the poor unemployed , who admire Trump because he "is Rich".
9
@RichardHead: No tea was destroyed in the Boston Tea Party. It was packed in water-tight barrels because wooden ships leaked like sieves. Men in boats stood by to recover the barrels and the tea found its way to its consumers. Tea was the safest non-alcoholic beverage to drink in those times.
1
Ms. Dowd you say, "President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook rather than saying, as F.D.R. did, “I welcome their hatred.”
President Obama and Eric Holder did not have the wealth, power or social standing that FDR did - or that the inherited/stolen wealth Robber Barons do today. However, they quietly fought fraud and put safeguards into place that would help tame the financial system without breaking it.
They deserve to be honored for preventing a global financial meltdown of epic proportions that would have destroyed 99.9% of us and left the International Mafia Robber Barons with even more stolen wealth and control over the world.
The one who deserves to be ostracized is George Bush, Jr. who used OUR hard-earned taxpayer dollars to bail out the Robber Barons with no control over how the money was used. Naturally - and probably as part of the master plan - they used it to protect their own and line their pockets even further.
WE THE PEOPLE will make sure the next people WE hire/elect as President of the United States and to manage OUR governments at all levels will not make the same mistake.
NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW AND NO ONE IS TOO BIG TO JAIL.
11
@njglea: There are two sides to these hedging deals, which are really a zero-sum game. The crisis followed from all those bets becoming payable at the same time due to panic: a classic liquidity crisis.
1
@Steve Bolger
It didn't help that companies like Goldman and the others got the ratings agencies like S&P and Moody's to fudge the AAA ratings on the CDOs.
Nor did it help that AG Edwards was allowed to sell unlimited CDSs as protection without any financial foundation when those bad ratings came to light.
4
Nothing "classic" about it, Mr. Bolger. Reagan gutted antitrust laws, which allowed Wall Street Robber Barons to manipulate every segment of corporate America. He also defunded regulatory agencies and his republican brethren in future administrations took away more or their power at every turn so Robber Baron corruption and robbery took off like rockets.
The "markets" were manipulated so the Robber Barons could enrich themselves and, rather than pay for the meltdown, they made craters more money, which is why we have the too-gigantic-to-believe wealth disparity today.
4
Reading the column and many, many of the comments brings one glaring concern to mind. How much longer will such active debate and criticism of the "power elite" be tolerated before being crushed into silence, along with other Constitutional guarantees?
4
two years and two months, if all goes badly.
@Lee: Here in the US, we overwhelm wisdom with noise.
Finally, a column that ties the threads together. The collapse in 2008 of the housing bubble and the resultant Wall Street generic pardon and bail out damaged this country in more ways than we realized at the time. By leaving the average American to fend for themselves while pumping cash and forgiveness into the banks and brokerage houses convinced millions of Americans that they simply didn't matter. That waitress was encouraged and abetted by the banker who gambled that should the waitress default on those homes the appreciation on the real estate would bring an instant profit. The banker was actually betting on the foreclosure. The waitress was, in many ways, the victim of a con. That not one of the architects of that debacle went to prison, not one really lost their jobs, that not one suffered any real consequence was a bright clear message to everyone else that they simply didn't matter. The Democratic Leadership Council is just Republican light and it pulled the rest of the party that way. Money has purchased both parties and correcting that should be our focus.
13
@AnObserver: The whole system looks to growth to bail out risk. Meanwhile, growth itself has become the biggest risk.
3
@AnObserver Should be our focus, but hasn't been and probably never will be. Florida voters twice elected as Governor Republican Rick Scott, a known Medicare thief. Now, in spite of his gross mismanagement of the state apparent to anyone willing to take the time to read about it, in spite of how visibly he's used the governorship to line his pockets, he's been elected to the U.S. Senate where he can enrich himself even more lavishly. Go figure.
Even worse than not punishing the bankers was not passing the legislation to protect homeowners when the housing market crashed and everyone was underwater on their mortgages. There was simple legislation that would have allowed people to go to court and get there mortgages reduced to the value of their house that the bankers fought and the Obama administration and the congress, incredibly, therefore did not back and pass. It not only would have given the public the same bailout as the banks (at no cost to the government), it would also have helped the economy tremendously. The bankers argued we "didn't deserve it" and it would "reward our bad behavior for borrowing too much" all while they did the same thing with their buildings and mortgages. Instead we had to wait years to have any equity, paying more than we could then afford with the economy crash, not spending money to grow the economy. All while watching the bankers get relief. It was inexcusable.
7
“Simple legislation,” would have allowed debtors to go to court and get the terms of their loans radically changed? Enough to keep homes they couldn’t really afford in the first place, or that were paid for from the jobs they no longer had? Really?
What was it, please?
4
@Robert: I don't think they get that cash must keep flowing like electrons to keep the wheels spinning.
1
The way the Obama administration let the bankers off the hook, combined with how the DNC basically told all of his volunteers to go home, help explain why the Dems lost so big in 2010 and then got Trumped in 2016.
2008 was a chance to really reform parts of our system that were broken, and when it came to Wall Street, we blew it. (Even Obamacare was a Republican idea!) Yes, the GOP obstructionism and gerrymandering were also to blame for Congress' inability to function. But a lot of the problem is that the Clintonian wing of the DNC seems to be bought and paid for by big business. They seem like they're Reaganites, just without the race-baiting. Neither party wants to hold the wealthy accountable.
8
the real bottom line is neither party can AFFORD to hold the financial sector responsible, because as now constituted, our system runs on money - big money - and those with mountains of it buy the government they want.
we have so many challenges ahead, but the big structural ones, in my personal opinion, are getting money out of politics through legislation, reform of our election system (including getting rid of the obsolete Electoral College), and revisiting the way we wind up being represented in DC to make it more fair to more Americans.
without structural changes, anytbing else is thin wallpaper.
4
Wall Street bankrolled Obama’s campaign.
A week after he got elected, I recall Obama saying “Change in the economy means from the bottom up, not the top down.”
That was the last time I ever heard him say something truly progressive in regard to economics. It’s as if someone from Wall Street took him out to the wood shed and had him set straight.
We all know about how, after saying all ideas would have a seat at the table, in regard to health care, he labored to keep universal single payer from the table. Then after that, he labored to keep it’s cousin, public option, from the table.
Remember those t-shirts with the Che-esque pose of Obama and the words “hope” underneath it? In hindsight, it all seems a bit like the matador waiving his cape at the masses to me.
Bernie, however, seems as much like the real deal for progressives as there has been since FDR. Wish he was 20 years younger.
14
Could you explain to me exactly what St. Bernie’s ever got done by way of legislation? Anything comparable to Dodd-Frank?
My economics professor imparted one very important lesson about monetary theory: If more people understood how our financial systems worked, our financial systems wouldn't work. David Axelrod has the right read on the subject. The economy was in free fall and the banking sector was collapsing like a house of cards. No body knew exactly what was happening or where or how we would hit rock bottom. In the moment, indicting bankers was not a wise decision.
The problem of course is the moment never came. I don't think flashy show trials with bankers in handcuffs were even necessary. The public wanted punitive action against the industry, not the individual. That never happened. Obama, and to some degree Clinton, ultimately paid the political cost. Bernie Sanders is still stumping the outrage Obama failed to address in 2009 and Clinton dismissed in 2016.
I will agree borrowers are partly to blame though. However, not in the way Gary Cohn suggests. Borrowers are to blame in how they reacted to the housing crisis as voters. By handing Republicans such an overwhelming victory in 2010, they insured their own destruction. Democrats would never again be able pass a stimulus package with an explicitly obstructionist Congress. Underwater homeowners hung themselves out to dry. We're still waiting on that infrastructure bill too.
Republicans pivoted to austerity in order hurt Obama politically and gave America an anemic recovery. The fault belongs to the voters who gave them the power.
17
As she mulls another run, Hillary had best pay close attention to the role played by Obama's Dems in the banking crisis. She'll be answering for it in the primaries. Ask Pelosi: the left is awakening, and not just to the tyranny of Trump.
10
Oh, please. She’s not running again—and if anything shows how disconnected a certain chunk of the Leftish has become, it’s that they’d rather take a swipe at Nancy Pelosi than at bankers and at Trump.
Ms.Dowd has read —or not read— a different history than I read. Spilling venom is not helpful and trying to understand the intricacies of the financial system is very difficult. Juries did not convict charged Bear Stearns executives (I learned that from google, which surely she Can access). At least 11 bankers I read in a competitor did get sentenced. And Dodd Frank was a real reform. And I have also read how officials were terrified of a complete meltdown, and for good reason.
12
Obama was not perfect, we all knew that. However, his actions stopped the recession from turning into another Great Depression. Which at the time, seemed more important than punishing people.
Criticize him, critiques of the president are part of our Civic Duty, but don’t ignore the real danger of the situation.
17
As far back as late 2000 Federal Reserve Governor, Ned Gramlich, urged FED Chairman , Alan Greenspan, to crack down on sub prime mortgages.
But Greenspan refused believing in free markets and so Greenspan did nothing.
16
The problem is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party needed/needs Wall Street way, way more than Wall Street needs them. Wall Street banksters have won and will continue to win, because both political parties are completely dependent on them in order to win elections as well as feather their own personal nests.
This just affirms that the real power in this country is not in Washington, DC but instead resides in Lower Manhattan. Said another way, Washington is a reality TV show, and Wall Street is reality. What goes on in NYC is way more consequential than what happens in DC.
13
Corrupt fraudsters like the Trump and Kushner Crime Families will continue to flourish too as long as the state and local prosecutors give them free rein for their criminality. Where was the State of New York when the Trump Foundation abused its nonprofit status and Trump University defrauded its "students"?
Minor technical details include the inconvenient fact that Obama hasn’t done any such thing.
It's not only the Congress. There is also the Supreme Court, where Republican Justices are making speeches to political organizations, likely for big fees. Congress should pass laws making it illegal for judges and justices, and their families, to accept any money from anyone, for speeches or as donations or as fraudulent loans. No plush jobs for their wives or children (Kennedy's son). They should be limited to living off only their own salaries, and prohibited from working for anyone or any organization when they step down from the Court. No free trips, no invitations to speak in front of any organizations. And they should not be permitted to speak in public. Shut down their ability to profit from showing favor to any political party. Of all the institutions it should be forbidden to buy, the courts top the list.
12
Wow. From the comments here, it seems an awful lot of people who voted for Obama simply can't stand to admit he was a big disappointment. Well, I'll admit it. Given the Republicans who ran against him, Obama was obviously the better choice. But he utterly failed to live up to his campaign rhetoric that led voters like me to think he cared about those who are not rich. I felt very betrayed by his corporate behavior and self-enrichment (just like the Clintons). That's what happens when money/corporations decide the elections and run the government. Most Democrats talk one way on the campaign trail but act little different from Republicans once in office. They may tweak the system a little now and then to throw a few crumbs to those of us who voted for them (as the lesser of two evils), but they aren't about to make any big changes that would do much to level the playing field. Sadly, Trump is just way more obvious about the scam. No Republican deserves the support of the 99%, but few Democrats do, either.
13
Precisely how did President Obama “enrich himself,” pray tell? And while it’s fair enough to complain that his Administration didn’t throw some bankers in jail as they richly deserved, I’d like to know which laws got broken, exactly? And if both parties are the same, why’ve Relublicans spent so much time on handing their rich guys tax cuts and deregulations?
Hear, hear.
Your Glibness might do better by concentrating - with brother Kevin's permission, of course - on the reprehensible McConnell who stated openly his prime mission as United States Senator was to see Obama fail. Today, after two embarrassingly shameful years, we see to what degree it has been McConnell's sole mission, aided and abetted by cheerleader Graham and a huge majority of the congressional members of the GOP, to see a thug administration succeed. Imagine for one moment if Trump were black. Uppity comes to mind, in his case a mild rebuke. It was nothing short of a miracle of grace and intelligence that Obama was able to do as much as he did given the political, purely partisan hurdles maliciously placed in his way. You, as a woman, should know better what the challenges are in a world largely controlled by white men. Look at the legacy W and Co inherited in 2000 and in short time squandered. Then take a good, hard look at the economic trajectory under Obama's aegis from 2008 to 2016.
38
Maureen fails since she has not named one crime or one criminal in her column - just a blanket, they should be in jail. As for the cause of the 2008 financial crisis, it is multiple, including many, many in government and many Democrats.
4
Obama is just a symptom of the problem. Both parties are owned by big money. The repubs have never been for the working class and the dems haven't done anything either over the last 40 years. ObamaCare would have worked if the lobbyist's big money did not pay off the dems to water down the program. The American empire is going down and the American voter doesn't even really know why.
Reverse Citizens United people!
18
Dems haven't done anything for over 40 years? What about ObamaCare? What about equal pay? What about financial reform? What about the consumer protection bureau? Dems have helped. Republicans not!
Read Stanley Greenberg's op-ed piece today. He has all the ducks in a row.
3
Ms. Dowd, please don't enshrine as fact George Packer's false equating of Occupy Wall Street with the "astro-turf" Tea Party. Those of us who try to keep up are aware of the irrefutable evidence that the Tea Party was spawned by the Koch brothers and other right-wing American oligarchs to serve their own self-interest. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations
13
You hit the nerve, Ms Dowd. The money manipulators were never called to account. And, for the interested onlooker, they weren't required to change their ways. Ugly people. Perfectly presented. And the former president gave them a free pass to continue stealing the nation's seed corn. That issue alone has always stuck in my craw. I liked that leader because he stood between us and the would be fascists amongst our congressional bodies. But he left the money doors open. Anyone not wealthy was left standing vulnerable to future bad behavior. And of course that's happening.
4
Ms Dowd is always at her snarkiest when she berates her favorite targets: Obama and the Clintons. And the historical record matters not when her poison pen takes aim. But, her assertion that Obama failed to punish the miscreant bankers is patently false:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/business/11bear.html
Prosecutors of Cioffi and Tannin, the Bear Stearns hedge fund managers who managed to lose $1.6 billion of investor’s money thought they had a slam-dunk case. Instead, the two were acquitted on all charges. This was Nov of ’09. barely 10 months into Obama’s 1st term. It was pretty clear after that debacle that prosecutions were not going to go well, primarily because juries would certainly be challenged to understand the financial chicanery involved in these cases. It would have been a tremendous waste of resources and political capital. As it turns out, Dodd-Frank was the best punishment that could be meted out, as it severely restricted banks’ ability to gamble with investor assets.
And, to much hue and cry, Obama bailed out the automobile industry - at a profit to the US Treasury - and would have continued the economic stimulus with a jobs and infrastructure bill that was torpedoed by the Tea Party. Who were swept into power by ignorance-fueled rage.
And the bankers chortle, especially when they read pieces like this.
28
@Tony Randazzo
Agreed. From Ms. Dowd's column we learn that the entire great recession was all the Clinton's and Obama's fault.
Gee, who knew? Thanks for making all of that clear Maureen. We can't wait to hear from your brother next week.
No politician can win high office without groveling to corporations and oligarchs. The corporate coup began with the infamous Powell Memo, picked up steam with Reagan's war against organized labor, took a huge hit of capitalistic crack when Clinton deregulated Wall Street and telecoms and ended welfare and began Incarceration Nation, got drunk on bloodthirsty power and endless wars during the Cheney regime, and then put a sophisticated ultra-cool face on the corruption during the Obama administration.
And people act all shocked and appalled when Trump becomes the end-product.
It's gotten so crazy that even plutocrats are trying to paint themselves as "progressives" these days, knowing full well that centrist pragmatism and incremental crumbs for the masses of desperate, miserable people are no longer sufficing to keep the lid on all that anger. As the Times reported on Saturday, liberal billionaires have taken to gathering in secret to plot their "democratic" strategy for the 2020 election. All they think they need is a "better story" to make more black and brown people to vote Democrat. They have already washed their hands of the white Heartland Deplorables. They apparently either don't know or don't care that the voters they alternately crave and dismiss might actually be reading about their cynical machinations in the newspapers.
It's not only the economy stupid, it's the class war. The rich are not on our side, try as they might to put lipstick on a neoliberal pig.
13
Obama is a decent man. He would have made a terrific ambassador. He was not a fighter. He wanted so much that first two years to "reach across the aisle" while the GOP hated his guts and promised to ruin him. He was likely afraid, as a black man, to come in as being angry, lest he really scare the white people in charge of almost everything. He had a calm temperament, not one of a reformer, and he had the position of being the first black man in that highest office. He had a family to protect.
We all knew that once he saved the banks (and more so, the bankers) that the "little guy," who saw the fraud, would feel betrayed. And why not? If the government doesn't protect the average citizen from rampant corporate whatever, who will? We have seen almost all the protections created in the last 70 years dismantled under the GOP congress. The people who will be most harmed by this disintegration are the ones who think it's great because they have been brainwashed.
Blame 24/7 broadcasting of FOX. Blame those who think Trump is wonderful or that he is smart. (?!). You, also, can be blamed, Maureen, since you spent so much ink on hating Hillary and Bill. You could have written more positively for her and less vituperatively in general leading up to 2016.
You seem to have lately gotten your Irish fire back. Good. Use it. You are down to Sundays now, so be sure to kick up lots of fuss towards the lot of them. It will make up for past transgressions in many people's minds.
9
Maureen is like many posters: Focus on a few of Obama’s bad decisions and ignore the good. A more credible essay would have been to show that all previous presidents had a more balanced ledger. President Magat’s ledger has entries only on the debit side.
9
Apparently we’re supposed to believe “reckless and stupid” is itself a violation of the law. Or that either the waitress or banker had to have broken the law. But until someone cites a statute I’m doubting it.
2
Have you noticed that the GOP act as if George Bush Jr. were never president? They skip right over him as they picks scabs, mostly imagined, from the Obama and Clinton presidencies. In return, George Bush Jr. stays out of sight, doing his paint by number or whatever occupies his time, also acting as if he were never president!
7
How nice it is to read such a concise history of financial crisis flowing into today's immoral reality. Trump, as foretold by Mitt Romney, is a con man. And Gary Cohn accuses those who suffered the most as the culprits:
“Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?"
In order to answer this questions honestly, one must accept that Americans, at least in booming economic times, trust the banks to offer fair loans, as well as trust in regulatory agencies who would have outlawed no-doc and stated loans if they were overly risky. Most Americans aren't stupid; they are ignorant. The fact remains that we were all guilty of greed. But consumers will buy what's available. It's part of the American Dream psyche.
In the end, victims of these bad loans (consumers) ended up in their own prisons--foreclosure, bankruptcy and despondency. And the bankers who pushed them, like drugs, took the money and ran.
7
... to think that djt picked matthew whitaker
"because he despises the department of justice".
3
Maureen you hit it on the head. If this was a made for tv movie I would say all of this is too far fetched to be believable.
The sooner we can punish these malfactors the sooner we will be free.
1
Sherrod Brown for President, 2020. Someone has to break this revolting, scandalous cycle of genuflecting to the Wall Street Plutocrats. Too corrupt not to jail, for lengthy terms of incarceration!
2
I've never liked Maureen's trashing of "Barry." But the sad fact is, she's right here. Obama should have punished the bankers, not rewarded them with a huge bailout that immediately went to their bonuses. I voted for Obama, but I felt so betrayed when that happened. I voted for Hillary too, but I can't say I was looking forward to someone as politically tone-deaf as she is and was, feeding at the trough of Wall Street via those inflated "speaker" fees. As she said at the time, "Everyone does it." Is it too much to hope for a candidate who won't?
4
I was hoping the Obamas, already wealthy, wouldn’t. Boy, was I wrong.
"Obama, the great hope to revitalize the left, immediately folded."
Preach on, Sister!
4
"President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook rather than saying, as F.D.R. did, 'I welcome their hatred.'"
Stop!!
"....made a terrible mistake"...."miscreant bankers".
I couldn't get past this paragraph, although I finally did, after I could breathe again. It still ranks as one of the most godless comments if only because of the intentional confusion it creates. Smoke and mirrors to make a point. Has that become your calling card?
It almost reminds me of the PSYOPS scenarios I had to encounter in a previous lifetime.
It's just devilishly weird, your viewpoint, Maureen!
2
Bush=Obama=Trump. Let the middle class eat cake.
@Paul Wertz correction:
Reagan=Bush=Clinton=Bush=Obama=Trump
4
Me thinks it's all about greed, Maureen. Have a go at that.
When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses. - Shirley Chisholm
Greed is an imperfection that defiles the mind; hate is an imperfection that defiles the mind; delusion is an imperfection that defiles the mind. - Siddhartha Gautama
I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy. - Warren Buffett
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. - Henry A. Wallace
4
“When you are tasked as politicians are with being all things to all people, all the time, it becomes increasingly impossible to be true to yourself, let alone anyone else.” RGM circa 2018
1
Considering that the present acting AG supposedly made threatening phone calls one can only hope that someone has a recording of one of these. If you do, please send it to the Times,
6
So going after the bankers would have been better for America. Taking over the
banks, breaking them up and put hundreds in jail. We could have done that and not do healthcare. Instead, we saved the banking system, stabilizing the economy, saved the auto industry and tried to give us healthcare. All the while Republicans fighting against thos all the way. Frozen government, failu6to pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling. Murren remember. But Obama was weak. No he was courageous and Democrats did things to save and restore all the taking the blame. Murren grow up.
7
@dave - That would have been very difficult. These huge banks are huge entities with hundreds of thousands of employees. Many of the employees may have been involved in improper practices, but they are still the only ones who know how to run the place. How could the government replace even 5% of the 250,000 employees at a big bank? Where would they get the people, how would they learn the jobs and the systems?
Ms Dowd, let's get one thing clear. When you use the word "failure" do not use it to define President Obama. Okay? You want to talk failure, you look to his predecessor who triggered the Great Recession from which Obama saved us. You want to talk failure you look to his successor. And let us elaborate on that man called Trump. It is in his DNA to be a failed human being. He is all about lying and greed and thuggery. He is the quintessential Fat Cat who defines the worst characteristics of Wall Street and mega-banks. If this country goes down the tubes financially, you look to Trump. It will happen on his watch.
14
The bankers who designed and executed the financial meltdown should have been held to account. The bailout deal was a slap on the wrist with one hand and a no consequnces bailout with other by the White house and Congress.
It should have gone like this. Here is the money to keep your bank afloat. The price is, all fiduciary C-level execs are fired, except HR and IT (someone has got to run the company). No bonuses for anyone until the money is paid back, (If we shut your bank down there would be no bonuses). Your bank cannot hire any executive who held a C-level position at any failed bank or other financial institutions, (C-level execs, you are lucky your poor business decisions are not resulting in your going to jail). Got it? Sign here.
7
@joe parrott - The rot went much further down than that. In a company with 200,000 or 300,000 employees, there are thousands who take aggressive risks.
Throwing out huge numbers of high-level people risks sending organizations into chaos. They may be bad, but they know how to the place runs.
At the risk of oversimplification, I contend that what we have now isn’t an administration it’s a crime syndicate that would rival the Gotti family.
And while our sage journalist knocks the judgements of Obama and Holder, why neglect to mention the Golden Horde of enablers and defenders in the GOP for turning deaf, dumb and blind to our poseur , his family and sycophants.
9
"Like his new boss, Matthew Whitaker has a pattern of thuggishness, threats, scams and abusing the power of his office to wage partisan feuds. Our new top cop was on the board of a shady patent company that has claimed Bigfoot exists and time travel could be coming. It also touted a “masculine toilet” to give well-endowed men “peace of mind” by ensuring that their genitals would not touch porcelain."
For my entire life I have decried a system that throws a poor teen in the clinker for nicking a radio (net cost to society $19) while so-called "white-collar" criminals pull off heists that collapse entire financial institutions, bankrupt states, cost millions their jobs, homes, pensions, health, etc. and, in the most dire cases, their lives.
Or are we to continue to pretend that Bernie Madoff ($65 billion)and John Rusnak ($381 million) and John Leeson ($1.4 billion) were anomalies? That the 2007 crash ($16 trillion)and Enron($1.4 billion) don't "really count" because, hey, they're white guys in suits.
We need new names. There is nothing filthier or more toxic than these white collar thugs. In a just world, those responsible for destroying lives would spend the rest of their lives in prisons. To date, only a few even receive sentences. These names stand out because the did, though some received as few as a few years in penthouse prisons.
Instead of a just system, we have a White House stacked with criminals and thugs. Without accountability, this gets worse. Impeach DJT.
3
Eric Holder, who is now running for president, claimed at the time that convictions of the ultra-rich were so hard to get that it was not even worth trying! That ruinous falsehood overlooked three real values of even failed prosecutions: first is the prep walk, itself a very public shaming that has real social currency. Second, consider Robert Mueller's approach, then remember Michael Milken's conviction, the key to which was turning Ivan Boesky into a prosecution witness. Finally, the evidence that becomes public in such prosecutions can be as useful as any jail time in leading to future reforms.
The use of a Special Counsel approach to investigate broad financial malfeasances should become the preferred method in taking on these giga-rich corporations and people. Rewards can be large. The fines for Boesky and Milken were $100MM and $600MM. Flip a bunch of underlings to get to the top guys, as does Mueller.
7
@Tom Jeff I stopped reading at "prep walk".
We had the pleasure of seeing Thomas Frank speak in Witchita this summer. His seminal work, What's the Matter with Kansas, explores the question of why Kansans voted against their own self interests and concludes that they didn't but were, in point of fact abandoned by the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton, who as we recall, was the guy who cheerfully signed Glass-Steagall out of existence. The handling of the banks seems less like "mistakes" and more like and offer our democratic politicians couldn't, or at least wouldn't, refuse.
Trump is a useful idiot, the tip of the kleptocratic iceberg, keeping us at one another's throats with our eye off the ball as Mitch and his gang transform the country into a banana Republican's dystopic dream.
7
GREED is truly the most terrible challenge of our times, and capitalism is its tool, its means to power and more greed.
Greed is a (contagious) mental illness, an unfillable hole, a hunger that denies justice, a brutal expression of broken egos.
Greed is having a million times as much as the poor and still feeling you don't have enough.
Greed consumes the earth without respite, and is a cancer on humanity.
Greed destroys us and our children and their future.
Greed is death.
15
@William - Greed is an important part of human nature. In a sensibly designed system of government, you put human nature to work. Greed is regulated, and channelled into socially useful activities.
Obama's failure to prosecute the Wall Street devils was the greatest disappointment of his tenure.
12
I can't remember Jimmy Carter ever pumping himself for some Goldman cash
10
@11b40
Mr. Carter has been the only president in the past 40 years who wasn't an irredeemable narcissist.
"“Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”"
To whatever extent this symbiosis existed in their financial judgments it was certainly present in the voting booth when both likely voted for Trump, the waitress because she lost as a result of the system being rigged while the banker because he made a fortune as a result of the rigged system.
Only in America.......
4
The GOP has become the part of thugs, liars, cons, bigots and hate mongers. Like million of other educated, professional women of suburbia, I will most likely not vote for another GOP candidate competing for federal office in my lifetime. We will need decades to balance the balance of power in D.C., one GOP Congressional seat at a time.
Oh, and I used to be a registered Republican!
8
In the era of Trump it is hard to believe that Maureen is still trashing Obama. Obama was not perfect. I concede that. BUT Trump is an unmitigated disaster both domestically and globally. And to think that Maureen during the campaign failed to expose the real Donald Trump. Like Michael Bloomberg she had to know that Trump was a con man and totally unfit to be President.
11
Conclusion: Trump is just as bad as Obama. Wall Street reigns supreme. Stop complaining, this is America!
3
@Michael Dowd
Yes, it is America, where young people early understand that financial success comes only through deception.
We should all reject your false equivalency between Obama and Trump. Come on Maureen you know better. Thanks to you and the other media showboats who just love the idea that they would actually be listened to and read because of the horror of Trump, we are stuck with a criminally inclined narcissist as our president. The press, and particularly you, bear a high level of responsibility. White nationalists sell better than thoughtfulness and morals. You should all be ashamed.
12
Just when you think they couldn't fit another clown in that car another one jumps out.
5
Ms. Dowd,
We’ve all read and remember your soft-ball interviews and columns regarding Trump, in the run-up to the election. You had no problem supporting this film-flam man, and his obvious cons and NOW his actions bother you?
Perhaps, if you hadn’t been so blinded by your dislike of everything Clinton, you might have made a more honest effort at vetting this morally corrupt, shamelessly hypocritical grifter.
Your complaints aren’t wrong, but it’s too little, too late.
13
Roosevelt did invite their 'hatred' to later invite them to organize US private industry provide finance for war production.. 1 yr later all out production in quantity of superior military hardware commenced
eagerness to kick aside ,, ms. Dowd's suggesting" kickem when their up ,kick'em when their down" brings to mind the Don Hendley song.
Is there any LOW we can't go as a country with this administration.
Our corruption reached unprecedented levels.
We have a fraudulent democracy.
Anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head again.
There're no civil rights to speak of.
Our government ruled by scammers, fraudsters and downright criminal characters.
We could rival the most lawless countries on the world map.
The statue of liberty is drowning in a Sea of Tears
3
The corrupt crony capitalist corporate plutocrat oligarchs take turns fleecing the American people. The Democrats claim to love you and promise to call you back. The Repbulicans promise to pay you a fair price then you are on your. Neither party delivers anything but excuses.
If you are not born to wealth then the best ways to climb to the top are politicians and preachers. One promises your reward on Earth after their election. And the other requires you waiting for an uncertain supernatural hereafter. Both professions prefer their reward now. Except after leaving office politicians maximize their returns. The Obamas followed the Clintons collecting and counting their coins earned from their " public service ".
A small time Chinese American New York City was prosecuted aka persecuted for the Great Crash of 2008. And an Indian American New York City securities fund manager was prosecuted. With the help of his family the Chinese banker " won". But the Indian was convicted and went to prison.
While the white Judeo-Christians got away with their corrupt fraudulent scam with no criminal justice consequences.
3
@Blackmamba, wondering if white privilege includes protection from persecution. Historically. Blacks browns Asians all become examples for punishment, for the same "non-crimes" white Judeo-Christians get away because these financial crimes weren't a big deal in any case, everyone bribes lobbies, nudge nudeg wink wink, you know. Feel kinda bad that Martha Stewart was made into an example...perhaps...wait for it...a "woman", doesn't matter if she is white.
1
Dear Maureen:
Thank you for laying the wood to Barack. He has about as much credibility as Mark Zuckerberg.
The sooner we remove both of these charlatans from the American and world landscape and scene, the better off we all will be.
It is truly a shame that American government and industry and banking is such a corrupt, criminal and cancerously toxic tumor on our land and ourselves. From the very get-go, 200 and forty-some odd years ago, the American citizenry never had nor stood a chance.
2
My parents had little equity, and one of their largest investments was $25K in Lehman Brothers common stock. When greedy executives ruined that company and wiped out my parents’ investment, and those executives got away with their $millions with no consequences, I remained so angry with the Democrats that I considered voting Republican. But then I did not let my anger become stupidity.
4
While I share your pain regarding your parent's investment - $25,000 investment in one stock which was a large part of their portfolio - just seems well irresponsible. Was your father an employee of LB or did he get conned?
Here is a real catch 22. You read the New York Times because you want to remain informed and the Times is a great source for that. Then you read Dowd and the article by Kim Brooks in today's Times about pregnancies and blaming the mothers and you become so discouraged that you swear you will stop reading but then you join the ill informed and uninformed. That's a catch 22. That is the dilemma.
PS: And that's the "con" the president has been working every day.
3
"Republican scammers are now infecting the entire infrastructure of government."
Let's start the purge by cutting off the head of the snake.
Donald Trump.
3
Gee...another feather in the cap of the mensch in the rumpled suit.
Bernie says...told ya so.
No, he wouldn't. He has too much class.
But I don't!
WE. TOLD! YOU!!!
5
Overdue for a nasty bloodletting
Yes, we know Maureen really dislikes Obama. There’s some truth here but it feels a little overstated.
3
"... Whitaker -- flush with power --". Nice phrasing following the preceding paragraph.
Now yer talkin', MBD!
Finally a column that we can agree on.
2
I have never read so much half baked tripe in my entire life. What actually happened was that President Obama literally forced the TARP Bailout Program upon the financial services industry to maintain the nation's economic stability.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase toxic assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector that was passed by a Democratic Party controlled Congress and signed into law by Republican Party President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008. It was a component of the government's measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis.
The TARP program originally authorized expenditures of $700 billion. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 created the TARP program. The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law in 2010, reduced the amount authorized to $475 billion. By October 11, 2012, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stated that total disbursements would be $431 billion, and estimated the total cost, including grants for mortgage programs that have not yet been made, would be $24 billion.[1]
On December 19, 2014, the U.S. Treasury sold its remaining holdings of Ally Financial, essentially ending the program. TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit.[2]
6
In 2008 the economy was wrecked by greed.
Americans revolted by electing a corrupt, unstable narcissist who has never done a thing for someone else in their lifetime thanks to the enablers in the media like mo dowd.
3
@Brad kudos!!!
A black man could never have gotten elected in this country unless he was unfailingly polite at all times to the white power structure. No drama Obama completely fit the bill. Then somehow we expected him to pivot in office and become the angry black man taking down the establishment. There would have been no second term.
Obama is a great man and was a good president. No one man however accomplished could fully break the bonds of hundreds of years of racism.
7
Trump wants decorum, then Obama's his man!
But her emails!
Maureen, don’t forget your part in “elevating epic grifters” to office. You fought tirelessly for them.
9
Regardless of whether you supported President Bush--there are plenty of valid criticisms that can be made of his presidency--there were prosecutions of major figures in cases like Enron and Worldcom under his presidency.
Alternatively, regardless of whether you supported President Obama--he certainly had certain accomplishments that he deserves credit for--it's hard to rationalize his administration's failure to bring significant prosecutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, especially given the amount of credible evidence of fraud and other wrongdoing. The failure to do so is, by far, the biggest failure of his administration.
3
@Louis Lieb yes, i agree. obama failed on this one and cannot even blame mcconnell for it. sadly, the affect of obama's failure to prosecute the dirty-deed bankers has made it possible for trump to elevate these same people to positions of influence. and we see how this is going........straight back to the rich. every time i look at obama, i think of this massive mistake.
1
I hate to agree with Maureen Dowd, but she's right. So many ordinary Americans lost their homes or saw the value of their homes skid to nothing during the financial crisis. Homes went unsold in established neighborhoods and were outright abandoned in less solid ones. It was a betrayal of hard working, taxpaying citizens, to see bankers get off free. The financial crisis was caused by greed, and that greed should have been punished. I think a lot of lifelong Dems or people who grew up in solid Democrat families, threw up their hands in disgust and sought out the retribution Obama failed to provide. As insightful as Obama was in so many other areas, he failed to see how many hearts were broken and how much faith was damaged when the Democrats failed to take care of ordinary people and exact justice for those who were wronged by greedy people in the banking, financial and mortgage industries.
6
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has been in the pocket of Wall Street for years, yet senate democrats ashamedly voted him their minority leader.
Schumer is a symptom that probably runs rampant in both parties when the pols, family members, and cronies profit on the backs of the 99%, who eventually pick up the tab. Welcome to the 21st Century gilded age. Let the 99% eat cake.
Granted, the The 0.1% and 1% rule America, but the Roberts Supreme Court went one better with its Citizens United decision granting “personhood” to Corporate America which led to unlimited dark money influencing elections.
Elections have consequences. Only 9% of Millennial's voted in the mid-terms, down from 14% from the 2016 presidential election. Don’t they care about their future and the future of America? I’m really dumbfounded.
3
Hip hip hooray Maureen Dowd!
In the eighties, we jailed the perpetrators of the Savings and Loan crisis.
I was absolutely floored that we did nothing to the perps of the 2008 financial crisis.
The reason they got away with it was the dumbing down of Democrats by telling everyone that it was too complicated for them to understand. Remember ‘what is a CDO’?
Dems must re-educate people in real terms about financial policy. It is NOT too hard to understand. (And no, Senator Warren, it is not about the consumer, it’s about the producers grabbing all the power to get more for themselves.)
Please keep writing about economics, Maureen. You have a gift to express the truth in ways everyone can understand.
4
This is your best piece ever. Spot on brilliant. Thanks.
2
The Obama administration failure to curb much less punish the financial indusrty for their misdeeds
led to Trump. The cynicism about politics in general was exacerbated when the supposed party of the working man failed to deliver. Sad
3
Yes I was always confounded by President Obama’s failure to pursue and prosecute bankers, who clearly put America at risk with their illegal greed. Then, after leaving office, administration leaders Eric Holder and Timothy Geitner wind up working in that same financial industry that they should have been prosecuting the decade before. President Obama also never acknowledged the criminality of the Bush/Cheney administration’s waging war and torturing captives bringing then Vice President Cheney a financial windfall. Today, we pay the price with Donald Trump on Pennsylvania Avenue, for the lack of courage, or in some cases maybe the complicity of some in his administration.
5
Perhaps, it was difficult to separate the greed of the bankers from the irresponsible and reckless waitress from Vegas. And those who saw it as the 'end of the Democratic Party' were being just as absurd. Trumpy won because there's a section of the country who'll always vote Republican, regardless of the candidate. Those who vote for the Democrats like to be inspired, and sometimes flattered. Proverbially 'throwing out the baby with the bathwater' is a progressive thing. It's also a progressive thing to never take responsibility for any setback. It's always the fault of the other person, the banker, the teacher, the cop, the politician, the date. Remember, when the ACA bill was passed at considerable professional cost to the Democrats, it was the progressives who didn't show up to vote in 2010.
1
I happen to agree with Mr. Cohen. The demagogue can point to the black-hatted , mustachioed, evil banker but like everything in life, it is complicated. The “waitress” in this scenario was stupid and greedy as well and just because she is a waitress should not be excused. I saw a lot of this at the time - people buying homes they couldn’t afford with money thy didn’t have. Walking away at the end, leaving us all to hold the bag. Let’s stop looking at the world with such idealogical- tinted glasses.
2
Obamas line during the financial debacle was”Their acts were egregious but not illegal”!!.He could have changed the laws to make them illegal but Nooooo.Would like to see an op-ed by Mr Obama in response to this article explaining in detail why he did not ACT.
1
@J.RAJ Under the Constitution, you cannot enact ex post facto laws.
According to this article, Obama and Trump share the blame in the banking abuses in the last 20 years. Really? Everybody does it, according to this op/ed piece. Except maybe Iceland.
2
Was that a mistake by Obamaor intentional?
1
All politicians make mistakes in their decisions whether those decisions made are of their own making or from competing advisory positions.
Yes, Obama did make a mistake in coddling the grifters from Big Money.
However, Trump, that marvelous con artist, grifter and tax dodger, has taken grifting and fleecing of the public to uncharted territory particularly given many of the like minded grifters are licking his boots in order to curry more freedoms and less interference from regulations.
Yep, the draining of the swamp and the making America great again is just underwhelming.
2
Blaming Obama for a positive approach and not employing backward looking punitive effects?
1
One of your best pieces - thank you. I urge everyone to read the book Maureen highlights, Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal - or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People. He traces the devolution of the Democratic Party - how it went from the party which pushed for protections for the middle and working classes from rapacious corporations and monopolistic mergers, to the party infatuated with Wall Street, Tech, Pharma and (sorry) Hollywood. Meanwhile, the middle class was hollowed out, as jobs were outsourced, unions shriveled, top executive comp soared over the salaries of most employees, and we moved to a gig economy based on insecurity. Obama, for all his good points, pretty much ignored all of this. We now have Trump.
http://listenliberal.com/
3
jail is for the little people.
1
Every column of Ms. Dowd's should be required to start with a warning, "Reminder: I did my utmost to get Trump elected."
Any other points she mahy make need to be. seen in this light.
6
@Andrew it's amazing to me that ms. dowd continues to sweep her involvement in hillary's loss under the rug. she owns that like she owns her wardrobe. now she continues to receive praises for her insights. not from me. from me, she owns the trump presidency.
It was around 2010 that a Cuban immigrant summed up the entire government with the comment “They no longer work for us.”
A British immigrant, regarding the 2010 elections “ No matter who you vote for, the government still gets in.”
And the government doesn’t work for us, it works for them. Democrat or Republican. The Democratic Party sells itself as the party of “ the little man.” The only little men that the party cares about are short bankers. The Republican Party sells itself as the party of Main Street. The only Main Street that it cares about is that the one in front of corporate headquarters.
Rebel. Stop buying the con. The best rebellion is to stop feeding the beast with working, spending, and obedience. Live simply and enjoy relationships. Indulge in a bit of sabatoge. Give the overseerers bad data and misdirection. Show the elites the contempt they deserve instead of fawning adulation.
Wow. Fantastic post by Ms. Dowd. She should channel her inner Thomas Frank more often. It’s almost like her column was ghost written by Bernie Sanders this week. It seems as if Dowd, like Greenspan when called to testify before Congress concerning his role in the 2008 financial crisis, has “found a flaw in her worldview”.
The Regan revolution was a scam. FDR had it right. Markets don’t self regulate, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism left to its own devices will destroy itself and democracy, morphing into a captured, corrupt, fascist state ruled by oligarchs and corporate monopsony. 40 years of neoliberal capitalism, centrist, triangulating Democrats eager to copy the Republican playbook for self enrichment and campaign fundraising have lead us to this inescapable moment where a faux-populist, billionaire, reality-TV vulgarian like President Trump isn’t only possible, but inevitable. The Russians didn’t elect Trump, the Democrats and their 30-year betrayal of middle and working class Americans did. That is the unspeakable truth which the DNC must reckon with if they have any interest in saving themselves, the country, or ever winning Presidential elections again.
Neo-liberal Capitalism and one-party Washington Consensus rule is a cul-de-sac. Old school FDR style lunchbox liberalism with a laser focus on bread and butter politics is the way out. There will be shrieks and cries of communism though, and it will be loud.
1
Exactly why Dowd felt a need to attack Hillary in this article is unclear. Obama made too big errors. Not prosecuting Bush officials for lying about the war in Iraq and not prosecuting bankers for the Great Recession.
Gee Maureen. Finally an article with some facts in it. Maybe you’ll see the light and start doing some investigative journalism and make sure that trump doesn’t get the last laugh.
Well, if we are to believe Stormy Daniels, our President certainly dodged a bullet regarding Whitaker's "masculine
toilet" scam. Stormy made it pretty clear that ol' Don wouldn't need one of those. And, come to think of it, we don't need this Whitaker as AG.
Remember when Trump was going to hire only "the best.'?
I guess, by this point all the best have been hired and fired, or quit, such that those, like this Whitaker, are the "mediocre".
2
White collar criminals have always gotten off easy or rarely punished in this country. Look at Trump. His legacy is a lifetime of con games and grift and now he's president. It's a "great" country.
1
Not only did Obama let the thieving, reckless bankers off the hook he re-hired them. that however wasn't his biggest mistake. His single most important, misguided error he has eve made, was appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. How did that work out for everyone?
1
Maureen Dowd is often criticized for being too hard on the Clintons and Obama. As if her takedowns of these Democrats nourished the right and helped open the door for a Trump. I'm therefore glad that she penned this column, since it answers those charges somewhat.
The Clintons certainly deserve some scorn for paving the way to Trump and nourishing the right. It was Bill Clinton who signed the death warrant of Glass Steagall. Reagan and Clinton were bookends in dismantling the regulatory regime set up by FDR that had kept the banking system safe for 50 years. It was Bill and Hillary who courted Wall Street -- who left the WH "nearly broke" but amassed a huge fortune in a few short years, largely due to the largesse of their friends in the financial services sector.
Obama campaigned with Paul Volcker but governed with Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, and Rahm ("F the Liberals") Emanuel. Yes, his turn away from holding the miscreants of banking accountable deflated and demoralised the Democratic electorate. This gets far too little coverage -- in the NYT and elsewhere -- as a factor in what happened next in election after election, across the country. There's too much emphasis on the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party and Fox news, and not enough on how Wall Street Democrats left their own voters feeling alone and betrayed -- staying at home on election day.
664
@Duncan: Glass-Steagall became pie in the sky with the securitization of what had been bank assets when it was enacted. The "dual mandate" to the Federal Reserve Bank made Glass-Steagall untenable.
6
@Duncan Honestly, what is needed is one policy change: a prohibition on negotiated pleas in financial investigations. If prosecutors have the evidence, take it to court and let the chips fall as they might. Justice Department leaders say that it's too expensive and too uncertain to take cases to trial. I say "Hooey!"
52
@Duncan
Amen.
26
The same experts who didn't see the last financial disaster coming don't see this one coming either, wink, wink, because the rich don't suffer financial loss, they gain from what the poor man losses. Steve Mnuchin, our Treasury Secretary, made a fortune as foreclosure king during the last crisis and he will make even more off of the one that he is creating, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it's no accident.
4
Maureen Dowd has a point.
Perhaps, Obama's administration saved the banks.
What Obama and his team did NOT do was demand that these incredibly irresponsible banks immediately renegotiate their bad homeowner loans as a condition of federal support.
Help came two years too late for millions of homeowners left homeless by the crisis.
Blame the homeowners, but let's remember what the real estate market was like before the big bust.
In 2002, when I moved to South Florida -one of the epicenters of the real estate boom - the market was hot and getting hotter. For the next four years, anyone with a mailing address and a phone was besieged by banks and loan companies, especially Countrywide. They were begging anyone with a heartbeat and a paycheck to take out a variable rate mortgage for homes that a) were ridiculously overpriced and b) exceeded by six or seven times or more what was affordable on a fixed rate mortgage.
This was not a rogue company sending an occasional solicitation. This was an entire industry of legitimate professionals telling prospective homeowners over and over and over again, "You're crazy if you don't get in this market right now."
In the end, none of the leadership was held responsible by a government that was supposed to be protecting the welfare of its citizenry. (Just ask Michael Lewis of "The Big Short.")
Maureen Dowd got this one right.
432
@beth: The banks were relieved from paying interest due to depositors on loans gone bad.
6
beth
While I concede that the banks were crooks, one has to ask, if someone asked you to take/try this poison because it tastes good and has a built-in antidote, would you?
7
@beth. Excellent. Maybe it's time we had a real socialist in the white house, not just "community activists" and "business men".
10
The problem with president Trump is that he does not know what he is doing to our country and its people. And the problem with president Obama is that he knew exactly what he was doing to our country and its people. There is no comparison except both times people with money win.
1
As Ms. Conway is not young, she should realize that the last laugh has yet to be registered. Donald Trump and his family are prisoners in their own bubble. Neither he, nor his family can afford to be out of power, as when that happens, so many shoes are going to fall for the rest of their lives. The only "safe" places for DJT are at his political rallies, and perhaps within the Oval office. He can not go out into public. He can not attend a Press Corps Dinner. He can not attend the awards ceremonies at The Kennedy Center. He can not throw out the first pitch. He knows that if he were to make such appearances he would be booed and hooted out of the space. He is scorned (conservatively) by 60% of the US population. Once he is a private citizen again, this tar, those feathers, will continue to cover him through his death, into eternity. His Don Jr., his Eric, his Ivanka, his Melania, his Jared, his "brand" will turn to rust and dust. It is their destiny.
1114
@James Barth If he becomes a private citizen again. Unfortunately, I fear the possibility now exists that the next "election" may never occur.
29
Most powerful and succinct words I’ve heard about Trump and his destiny. Thank you.
54
@James Barth I, too, thank you for your comment. It soothed me tremendously to read this. I am so weary of T and what has happened to our country that is a relief to read your words of our future. I have no doubt they will be borne out to be true, absolutely true.
53
You neglected to mention that Obama wasn't out of office two weeks before he was shamelessly snapping selfies with a succession of billionaires. Meanwhile, Eric Holder went right back to his old firm Covington, defending the same white collar creeps he should have jailed - and is even considering a run for President! It was always just about Obama with Obama. He folded on Single Payer; bailed out Wall Street; allowed the statehouses to be overrun by the GOP; left millions of homeowners in the lurch with his pathetic HAMP program; but we all got to feel good about ourselves by voting for a black man. Now, he's going to cash in big time, while his replacement, the ogre he paved the way for, ravages the country and constitution.
239
@stan continopleNo president worked harder for the people than President Obama. He could not take care of all of the problems the country had but he did keep us afloat and placed us in a position where the country could move forward. The country is not as far left-leaning as some Democrats would like it to be and the Obama administration worked with what they felt would work for the country as a whole. How many times have Democratic administrations attempted to get health care for the majority of the population?
58
@stan continople
One reason I admire the Carters is that in the recent NYT profile of their current lives, Jimmy said in explanation of their modest lifestyle that being rich was never a personal goal of theirs.
57
@stan continople I guess I missed the business with the billionaires and the selfies, and what exactly is the problem in any case? My understanding is that ten years ago Single Payer was never on the agenda of any political realist (things have changed a lot in ten years), and in any case the president doesn't write the laws (and thank heavens for that, given the one we have now); and that goes double when half or more than half of the congress has sworn to obstruct every- and anything the president tries to do. And Obama "allowed" statehouses to be overrun by the GOP? For shame! How irresponsible! Well, maybe he should have leaned on the DNC to support women running for governor more (at least two very likely candidates received little or nothing at all to support their candidacies, and their GOP counterparts—Christie and Walker—were real horrors).
19
The Banksters got away with trillions and yes Obama should never have caved to Wall Street and the INSURANCE grifters.
But the real mistake was not prosecuting the Bush the Lessor administration and Cheney for the malfeasance and lies after 9/11. The never ending lawlessness of the American elites serves to make hypocrites of you all, you law and order autocrats.
You have no nation. You only have a broken myth to rage across the planet. Would be helpful if you grow up.
372
The banksters should be sharing the cell with Bush and co. You don't excuse one criminal by pointing to another. Reminds me of a third grader who doesn't do homework and tattles on a classmate
21
@Dwight McFee - Establishing a precedent where new administrations focus on prosecuting their predecessors for any perceived or real crimes, is the road to becoming a banana republic. Even the precedent set by Trump to target Obama's policies is destructive and dangerous. Each administration needs to move forward on the policies that won their election, not look backward. Let history do the judging.
15
@Patrick
I don't think Dwight was doing that. He made a salient point and added to it. Lets face it his comment about the "never ending lawlessness of the American elite..." covered the entire crowd and was spot on.
18
Great point, Maureen --- failure to prosecute the banksters made the Dem party’s white blood cell count drop so low that GOP infections could run wild.
Then FOX GOP state media monopoly spread this infection daily across the land, further weakening the voter resistance to manipulation. What is the antidote to this infectious political disease?
Voters were primed for a Con. Trump swam up from the swamp depths. Now other denizens lurk there ready to bring us closer to fascism.
Buckraking Wall St became a norm (disguised as something else) as happens when elections are turned over to the rich for financing.
Dems might have won if Hillary Clinton had not:
Blithely got paid millions in fees from speeches to the big banks.
Then asked for votes of millions hurt by the crash, but refused to tell voters, who had the right to know, what she told the bankers.
Then refused to restore/update the regulations on banks her husband with the GOP had repealed, while she used trumped up excuses of 'shadow banks', immune to regulations.
Hillary said she took the money because the banks offered it. .This is who the dumb Dem Party raised up as their heroine.
Thomas Frank is worth reading. Now the Dem’s supporters argue—should the party turn left, or stay center?
But our center is distorted, warped and compromised.
So we have to redefine the center and not let the rw and Fox define it.
Some house candidates have recently rejected PACs and used small voter donations. A trend?
179
@Meredith
Repeat after me: "Hillary Clinton won the election." I get SO tired of people saying she didn't. The White House residency was given to Trump (and four others preceding him) by the Electoral College. Which was created to prevent the very likes of Mr. Trump.
If Hillary had won the EC, everyone would be patting themselves on the back for having the brilliance to see her strategies. You, too.
13
Please stop the silliness, it encourages normal folks to disregard serious discussions.
If Hillary “won the election” she’d reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. She does not.
7
I voted for Obama twice, donated and volunteered for his campaign but that doesn’t make me blind to his failures.
His justice Department failed to go after the masters of the universe. Yes maybe indicting them would have been symbolic but in politics symbolic gestures matter. He also failed to extend his brilliant campaign to the larger Democratic Party. He fired Howard Dean who had led the Democrats to control all three branches of government and handed it over to Clinton allies who ran the party into a ditch. This as much as anything paved the way for Donald Trump.
What’s ironic is that the banksters were anything but grateful. They despised him for his occasional bursts of populist rhetoric and mild, largely toothless reforms. Perhaps Trump supporters will wake up to to the fact that their guy is about as populist as Louis XIV. Some of them may have done so already and a Democrat will convince voters that he is truly on their side.
If we’re lucky maybe he or she will actually mean it.
12
As someone who lived in Las Vegas, ground zero of the housing crash, any notion that homeowners were responsible for the debacle infuriates me. People who had lived in their homes for over a decade and bought their homes before the run up in prices saw their equity go down the drain. If the losed their jobs too, and many did, they were left under water. Furthermore, salaries have been flat for years and years so people were desperate to make some money for college educations and other expenses. People who can’t make ends meet are vulnerable to fraud.
10
My goodness, who knew there were so many members of the rentier class reading this newspaper! Obama had a choice: Take care of citizens being bilked by the banks, or take care of the banks. We all know what he did, and it wasn't mean Republicans who made him do it. And we have collectively been paying the price ever since. Allowing banks to get away with mortgage fraud on a spectacular scale is what has taken away what had been the middle-class American's most important source of wealth: A home. And that wealth has not come back, and doesn't look right now like it ever will.
9
@Bunk McNulty: Bank lending quality control was much better when banks kept the loans they generated in their own asset portfolios, rather than sell them to Wall Street bundlers to package into securities to sell to private investors playing interest rate and default risk with derivatives.
4
"Kellyanne Conway shrugged it off, saying, 'Haven’t they learned that the president always gets the last laugh? '”
Robert Mueller might know something at which the Mango Mussolini might not laugh.
Stay tuned, Ms. Conway.
Stay tuned.
20
@jbartelloni: The Conways appear to be a role-reversed Mary Matalin-James Carville kind of marriage.
@jbartelloni
That is almost as laughable and pathetic as Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying "There must be decorum at the White House." Since Trump began his term, there has been almost anything but decorum. including Sanders and her comments that are almost as scandalous and nauseating as those of the President.
2
Her (soon to be ex?) husband, George Conway might agree with you, j-bart.
1
Do we ever - let 'em roam free and richer!!!
No mention of Nancy Pelosi--so I will:
Her supporters brag about how much $$$$ she has raised; I question how much of that dough was for the campaigns of the new Blue Wave Democrats? She famously dismissed/dissed the amazingly terrific candidacy of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, who it appears will B a Force w/Which 2 B Reckoned in the coming Congress; in addition, Pelosi has already suggested legislation that will NEGATE the power of this incoming Congress. That seems pretty darn corrupt to this writer.
Here's to Congresswomen like Barbara Lee or Marsha Fudge. I sincerely hope one of them successfully challenges Pelosi, whose sell-by date [ pun intended], like Schumer's,is long past [see TNYT reporting on the FB scandal & the Senator's corrupt deportment]
Barbara Lee is a long-time true Progressive, unlike Pelosi who is falsely claiming the label.
4
@marjorie trifon
How a comment that is totally non germane to the article gets approved is beyond me. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who dislodged a progressive Democrat on ethnic and racial identity politics, is basically a kid with an ideological mind pumped up with Bernie Old Lefty Juice. She has a lot of growing up to do, but I think that she will.
"It also touted a “masculine toilet” to give well-endowed men “peace of mind” by ensuring that their genitals would not touch porcelain."
Whew! I, for one, am mortified that these poor men were in such a state of angst. A modern day Freudian psychosis.
5
And what about Cheney and Bush and their trillion dollar imperial war in Iraq where maybe half a million people died including five thousand Americans?
12
@nickathas: This invasion interrupted a bona fide UN resolution and process to settle the WMD issue peacefully. No wonder the US does not support an international criminal court.
Failure of Obama Administration to pursue and indict the bankers who committed fraud and caused economic destruction of the Great Recession is
Another reason that the body politic does not trust the government.
Both parties are corrupt
The most popular comments in NY Times always bash Republicans-but both parties have failed us.
12
@Tom L: The process of getting elected dominates all considerations of governing in the US.
If Ms. Dowd hadn't spent 2016 trashing Hillary, perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess. And now, put face to face with the horrific, orange consequences, she blames Obama.
21
@Don-E.
Methinks you give Ms Dowd far more credit than she deserves for Hillary's loss.
It Hillary's to lose and she lost it -- with a bit of help from the Electoral College.
@Don-E. She quite properly says Democratic failures helped set the stage for the disaster of Trump. Part of our problem is the unwillingness of liberal Americans to look at our own failings. It is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
But I am not surprised to see that of the comments I have looked at, yours got the largest number of “ likes”.
Exactly. Like elections, Ms. Dowd's non-stop trashing of HRC in 2016 had consequences. She has no business criticizing Trump or Whittaker when she helped bring them to power.
1
Infant orange and the gang that couldn't do anything straight.
2
Nice try Maureen.
Obama didn't go after Wall Street fraudsters because Timothy Grithner, Larry Summers, and Bob Rubin convince him, ok manipulated him, not to risk sinking Wall Street banks any further. Only the multi-headed hydra-aka Goldman Sachs-emerged intact. All others went down in flames.
Was Obama complicit and corrupt?
No.
Was he weak? Absolutely.
But, This voter will take Obama with all his flaws over the Queens vile thug in a NY minute.
At least I never in eight years of Obama endured daily drama and blatant falsehoods.
The real icing on the cake, I think, is having a commie, nude model, and paid escort making WH personnel changes.
17
MorGan. If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance. If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor
Maureen, you can do better than this. Happy Thanksgiving.
6
Banksters must be placed under our shoes. Banksters are lucky Americans are too stupid and too full of faith. In a fair world, they would hide their faces. In America they roam free like a mafia don walks his neighborhoods.
But I see they are naked, and so should everyone else. Have you ever engaged with a bankster? They know nothing and are proud. A morally bankrupt class of individuals who skim off the top of all our hard work.
Look toward Canada (and Iceland) where regulations and laws squelch the "laissez faire gone wild". The 'freedom' is to allow banisters to operate with impunity - they must and should be severely regulated so they only eke tiny profits - like all the rest of us.
4
@Mogwai: The banking industry exists to sell the time value of depositor's money to people who have more urgent need for it.
Oh yes, Ms. Dowd. Thanks for this.
2
“Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
Spoken like a true fiduciary.
4
It wasn’t til the third paragraph she blamed Obama.
Such restraint!
7
Yes it does seem like we have a crime boss as our president since he did look for a Roy Cohn attorney general to protect him and he found a fellow fraudster to do just that. The Trump family of grifters hangs on the sidelines looking for international payoffs from the likes of Jared's best buddy murderer . Not to worry the GOP has their back McConnell has 29 million stashed from his senate salary and his cabinet of fraudsters is ripping off the tax payer. Billion heiress Sec of Education costs us 20 million to protect, the sons Eric and Don Jr. costs us $100 k per foreign trip to promote their hotel biz. They are all at the trough funded by undisclosed campaign contributions as per a corrupt supreme court all sold and bought with tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for the polluters. Our version of Rome to be finished off with another six years of our carnival barker scam artist voted in but our low information voters and Putin.
3
Not to worry. The massive, $22 trillion national debt, along with all the private debt, along with the collapsing Social Security system, will all come to a head very soon. Then, look out! Madame DeFarge is knitting.
2
Yes, President Obama certainly deserves his share of criticism. But the thefts didn't start under his administration.
Richard Nixon gave us a new term for criminality - x____xgate, as in Watergate.
But it was that glorified, empty headed, moron Ronald Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, who perfected the destruction of American society.
They came up with the idea of railing against Evil Democratic budget deficits then cutting taxes and then insisting that benefits had to be cut to reduce the deficits.
Generally, they weren't too successful in reducing benefits, but they did give social welfare a bad name so that over the years benefits weren't allowed to increase as fast as inflation, so there were real cuts. Just look at the minimum wage. And they certainly began the process of huge tax cuts for those most wealthy in out society.
5
@Eugene When the global economy was in danger of collapsing with the possibility of millions in the streets punishing the thousands with poor judgement was not the highest priority. The problem is not necessarily with the smart guys at Goldman Sachs but with their teachers at Harvard and other B schools and the funders of the B schools that failed to insist on the teaching of ethics alongside skills at profit maximization. The system has deep flaws and reforms are needed at the depths, not just at the top. The flaws in the laws go back to Congress for loosening the requirements on the finance system. Someone like Warren could address the systemic flaws. Obama was not in the position to do so. What is the point of flailing Obama now?
I would support severe punishment for bankers and others in similar positions whose decisions to systematically defraud millions, ruin lives, and cause suicides among people driven to desperation when their lives have been ruined by bad decisions by major banks. It is the one place where I would recognize the efficacy of the death penalty. People that have had the best education available and knowingly defraud millions through their carefully crafted plans deserve punishment. The death penalty is typically meted out for violent and horrific crimes. However, those that commit violent crimes are not deterred by the possibility of severe punishment. White collar criminals might be.
I’m reminded, once again, that Gary and his pals really don’t get it... and never DID! To suggest that the borrower was somehow as responsible as the man dispensing the money isn’t just arrogance... it flew right past the gravitatoinal pull of that absurdity long ago.."
No, Cohn’s thinking, along with massive numbers of his Hamptons friends is lethal, and it’s back in vogue once again.. borne back ceaselessly....
4
Listen, Hobbit
Turn to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks to learn how to accept and endure the endless train of viciousness, cruelty, brutality and vile behaviors on the part of our rulers and ruling class. You must become stoic and endure another day.
1
It must be said: Ms. Dowd has found her voice again.
Perhaps she has stopped taking political advice from her family? Whatever, she finally seems to have given up on psychoanalyzing Billary and Obama and correctly emphasizes the existential threat to the Republic Trump and his acolytes in the Trump party represent. She has too talented a pen to have been on hiatus for so long during W and O years.
2
According to Dowd, anything terrible that is happening in America right now, and anything terrible which happened over the last 240 years in America, as well as anything terrible which may happen over the next several centuries in America, is Barack Obama's fault.
A multitude of excellent pieces and documentaries explored the failure of the Obama administration to prosecute the wealthy perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a failure, but Dowd doesn't cover anything not already covered in far greater detail, by far superior journalists, and she merely exploits what's already known. She doesn't care about parsing out who is responsible for what, she wants to punish Obama for everything, even things he bears absolutely no responsibility for.
Dowd attacks Obama for everything he allegedly did wrong as president, but also all the terrible things Trump has done and continues to do. It's ridiculous, especially as it was Dowd who shamelessly shilled for Trump when he ran for president while showing total contempt for Obama, who she constantly called "Barry", or "Spock," or "Beanpole Guy," or "Effete," or a "Diffident Debutante." Dowd actually wants to convince us that if Trump tries to destroy everything Obama advocated for or created, like civil rights or the ACA, it's Obama's fault, not Trump's. Two years after the Obama presidency Dowd still blames America's first black president for everything Trump and his corrupt white nationalist cohorts are doing to America.
6
Boy Ms Dowd, you really do have a thing against Obama. Yes, it was disappointing that there weren’t any”perp” walks,like mayor Rudy liked so much when he was mr. Law and order. But the system was in free fall , and Obama’s first priority was to stabilize it, not go after the bankers. And yet, your conversion from fawning Trump gal to anti trumpster didn’t start until after he “won”. How odd? You knew what he was like during the campaign, or were you fooled by that “Trump” charm. What Obama’s administration failed to do to the bankers , is minuscule compared to what Trump is doing to the finances of most people in this country with his bank and Wall Street cronies, so please, spare me the “Obama” outrage.
4
Welcome Everyone! To Maureen’s echo chamber. Her comments and these are great! They are healing and make us feel better. But I’m afraid we’re the only ones listening. If a liberal screams bloody murder in the forest, does a republican hear it?
3
Hilarious!
1
Our government has become trashier than the garbage dump. I hope this isn’t a reflection of us or where our country is heading.
1
Clear spare strong voice, MoDo. Preach...
1
And I thought the Mafia was bad! The Trump gang seems to be full of law and finaqnce experts that are able to find ways to beat the laws, just like the Mafia.
The way I read this column is that once again M Dowd rejects her own complicity in sanitizing Donald Trump for elite opinion, have presented him in her pre-election work as perhaps a rogue and self-promoter but someone who was sensible, reasonable, and self-aware. (Unlike her bete noire, Hillary Clinton.) And instead of going after the swamp that her misjudgment helped promote (mentioning Whittaker only at the end), she goes after her shopworn littany of villains, only this time have sufficient glimmer of embarrassment that she did not refer to the former president as "Barry." I've been a reader and sometime fan, but I think it's time for another book leave.
5
Was that line about the "masculine toilet" supposed to be titillating?
But ... her emails !!!!
1
Laughably pathetic column, equalizing the 2 parties despite the fact they are nothing alike. Look at the policies not the personalities. Sure, i would have loved to see bankers and security raters like Moodys perp walked, but your crusade against the Clintons falsely equivocates the parties again and again. Taxes, guns, the environment, the functioning of government - there is no comparison. How the NYT keeps allowing this drivel to stain its pages is beyond me.
4
~"...we put white-collar criminals in charge of the country — elevating epic grifters to the presidency..."~
Actually, Ms. Dowd, you are part of what enabled this to happen. You could not get enough of an unsecured email server that resulted in nothing, a CIA security breach called Benghazi and Clinton "Triagulation".
In the words of most politicians running for office: Are you better off now than you were two years ago? For some of us what has unfolded was obvious: a grifter. To you, not so much.
3
Those— particularly Elizabeth Warren—who have run on smacking down the criminal behavior of the banks, have already been branded by the media as the “far left” of the Democratic Party that will alienate reasonable voters, while the moderate (“Im not one of those ‘crazy’ Democrats”) Claire McGaskills get voted out anyway.
Hammering the corruption, incompetence and scandals of the current administration are more than enough to defeat Trump.
His own personal behavior is already reviled or disapproved of by a majority of voters, and invites a distracting feedback loop of feces-hurling if the opposing candidates fall for this trap.
The media will collude with Trump’s trolling to create a WWE smackdown between Presidential candidates by demanding a response from the opposing candidate. She or he ought not play this game. (“You’re a puppet”—no, You’re the puppet” , only works if one attempts mano a mano engagement).
“I’ll leave it to the voters to judge his behavior and fitness—its been covered 24/7 for four years. I want to talk about what’s been done by this administration, what hasn’t, what needs to be done —and how we’ll do it.”
2
Obama couldnt kill off the corrupt bankers and wall street swindlers. If you pull out the stones holding up a structure because they were stolen, the whole structure collapses. Yes they were criminals but our economy depended on them. It was a very conflicted and necessary decision.
2
It's been 4 decades since we had a POTUS who cared more about humans, Americans, the planet: Jimmy Carter.
Remember how his White House botched the Iran Hostages? Bush Senior was in charge of that debacle, then he became POTUS.
He tried increasing MPGs and was castrated by the Petro-Chemical oligarchs.
Great column, Maureen! You got everything exactly right. I would have vastly preferred the FDR point of view to Obama's and Hilary's caving to big money. Now we just have a bunch of rich entitled racist crooks.
18
well done maureen
6
The photo on the article speaks a thousand words.
6
There's no gratuitous snarky comment about Hillary Clinton in today's column. Let us be thankful.
2
You go, Maureen Dowd.
Right on.
7
Go after Trump Dowd!
Focus, focus, focus.
Don’t follow his lead - he is a master distractor, albeit an insecure one!
The lol part in this Whitaker toilet company story is that his product would have been too big for Trumps needs.
7
What will ultimately destroy the semblance of this democracy is universal greed, that couldn't be contain.
1MDB Fraud Scandal is unfolding on WS with the cast of usual suspects, here is the headlines...
Goldman Sachs Ensnarled in Vast 1MDB Fraud Scandal.
WHITE COLLAR WATCH
Goldman Blames Rogue Staff for Its 1MDB Scandal. That May Not Wash.
Once again greedy shysters shifting the blame on some rogue bankers, pretending they didn't know what was going on, and once again no one will be jailed.
Country that is not build on justice will never be democratic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/business/dealbook/goldman-sachs-1mdb.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/business/goldman-sachs-malaysia-investment-fund.html?module=inline#commentsContainer
5
@faivel1: Governments can use their entire economies as "reserve funds" to meet needs like pensions and health care. This is why "pay as you go" funding makes more sense to government than speculating in financial markets.
Now you tell us, Maureen. You did as much as any single person to poison attitudes toward Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then let your brother Kevin do a Trump victory dance in your column. No one cares anymore what you think.
22
@Tom. Speak for yourself. I never cared much for Dowd, but she is right in this particular column. As for her stupid brother, it is useful hearing from that side once in a while, if only to learn how they think.
Many Democrats seem unwilling to listen to any criticism. That is bad in itself and it also helped bring us Trump.
"There must be decorum at the White House" ....... somewhere.
1
“Who broke the law?” Cohn asked, adding: “Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
I assume that hypothetical waitress lives in a duplex with the Cadillac driving Welfare Queen of Ronald Reagan’s imagination.
9
Certainly Whitaker has "said" things.. But what has he done? NOTHING!
Democrats keep pointing to smoke- but where is the fire? If the Democrats want to square circles then they should start by upending Bill Clinton's Presidency- when he preyed upon a vulnerable intern.
What say you.. #MeToo ... ??
Crickets Chirping...
2
@Aaron: Who can hear anything with all the infants bawling that somebody else did what they do first?
@Aaron No fan of Marbury v. Madison, eh? But enough Consitutional fiddle faddle... instead, congratulations on the composition of your brand new 2019-2020 Congressional delegation. Enjoy!
@Aaron: Earth to Aaron. Bill Clinton hasn't been president for 18 years. And it's so typical of kooks to equate (consensual) sex with an intern to destroying the economy. Is that the best you got?
And Dubya? Does he get a pass because he is so cute and goofy?
6
The banker was stupid Mr. Cohn in thinking that the good loans would cover for the bad loans when all the loans were bundled and sold to the foreign investors. All those bundled instruments became toxic, and virtually worthless.
And if the bankers weren't just plain stupid then they were complicit, take your pick.
5
@Bear: The regulators were stupid to count hedged assets as bank capital. Hedging is an ongoing cost just like other term insurance premiums.
You endorsed the most criminal President. Why complaining now. There is no surprise here. You wanted a criminal administration. You endorsed them all. I suppose your brother is still in love with them.
8
"...easy to see the neon line leading from Barack Obama’s failure to punish Wall Street scammers to the fact that Republican scammers are now infecting the entire infrastructure of government."
Actually, Ms. Dowd, it is far easier to see the brighter "neon line" between your girlish, giddy, head-turned columns about lunching "The Donald," and the current infection in our government. Your flush, breathy presentations of Trump went a long way to serve him up a a viable candidate. All of it was filtered through an unabashed and deliberate determination to undermine "Barry" and Hilary Clinton.
So now it's an infection? You were patient one, Maureen. We won't forget, Maureen.
10
“Who broke the law?” Cohn asked, adding: “Was the waitress in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income, was she reckless and stupid? Or was the banker reckless and stupid?”
problm is you have to find specific individual criminality to send an INDIVIDUAL to jail.
The banks WERE fined "hugely" and they paid back reaping large profits for Uncle Sam.
That waitress was probably individually guilty of fraud.
The grifter-in-chief and his fellow greedy and immoral and unethical comrades - have to be found guilty of specific charges in a court of law.
Sadly -They haven't even been found guilty in the court of public opinion where the average american thinks cheating on their taxes (or mates) is no big deal
Only the scale is different! -Viva run-away capitalism!
1
President Obama's Wall Street crook bailout (right after his first nap in office) had to have fomented some lifelong contacts for the ex-prez. But any excuse to get rid of Jeff Sessions — and James Comey (not my homie) — is a good excuse.
1
@C: James Comey is the most gets-off-Scott-free phony in the Trump public sting operation.
Good column, Maureen.
3
We aren't Icelanders. Lawlessness is in our DNA.
Our bankers and other rich people aren't only rich, they're charmingly seductive.... Rapists, if you will. Offering candy to the children in the form of opportunities to steal.
And our money-soaked politics (Citizens' United.... thanks, SCOTUS) makes it so, so difficult to punish them.
Much better to close and lock the doors BEFORE they run off with the loot.... Queue, Elizabeth Warren.
stumpy is us.... Let's hope our long look into the mirror will stir both revulsion and a reawakening. Yes, morality is strategic. Yes, a commonwealth is better than a jungle. And yes, voting is about the lesser of evils.
Amen.
4
A multitude of excellent pieces and documentaries have explored the failure of the Obama administration to prosecute the wealthy and powerful perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a failure, but Dowd doesn't pretend to cover anything not already covered in far greater detail, by far superior journalists. Further, Dowd is merely exploiting what's already known. Dowd doesn't care about parsing out what the Obama administration is responsible for; she wants to punish Obama for everything, even things for which he bears absolutely no responsibility.
True to form, Dowd attacks Obama for everything he allegedly did wrong as president, but also all of the terrible things Trump does. Lest any forget, it was Dowd who shamelessly shilled for Trump when he ran for president. Dowd twists everything Obama did into a pretzel, constantly calling him "Barry", or "Spock," or "Beanpole Guy," or "Effete," or a "Diffident Debutante." She can't help but insist that everything terrible Trump does is an indictment of Obama. 2 years after the Obama presidency Dowd still needs to blame a black man for what Trump and his white nationalists are doing to America. It's increasingly impossible to see Dowd as anything other than a racist. What she writes is indistinguishable from classic American racism, and disturbingly parallels German writing from the 1930's which blamed Walther Rathenau for everything wrong in German society over a decade after he was assassinated by the Nazis he opposed.
9
Clown car of corruption
1
Ms. Dowd: after years of frustration with your ‘cutesy’ style, I feel gratified that you have gone on the attack...
3
Maureen Dow's, once again, cannot resist the urge to trash President Obama. Maureen, stick to the current clear and present danger.
7
Maureen this needed to be said in 2011.
4
"It takes a crook to catch a crook."
Herein lies the magic of Donald Trump. He attracts crooks, grifters, manipulators, and conmen like flies to a cow flop, and welcomes them with open arms. At least the wealthy ones.
Our legal system has been geared to focus on "little" thieves. A bank robber here, a burglar there. Meanwhile, the "big" thieves keep gnawing at our core. Under Trump, the bites are getting bigger and the cheats more brazen.
As a country, we need to borrow another perfect line:
"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
7
Fine column,
1
These banksters were completely non-partisan, buying off on equal terms Republicans and Democrats.
Obama's reign of ineptitude was the direct results of our current reign of Trump's seamy overlordship.
And in Congress, the likes of McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi, etc are still wielding power and dancing to the tune of Wall St.
The non-reform of our financial system is the greatest crime of the 21st century to date.
11
Another false equivalency and by now Ms. Dowd should know better.
Comparing what Obama faced on his first day in office to what Trump faced on his first day in office and focusing SOLELY on Obama's failure to jail bankers is journalistic malpractice.
Think of the bankers in 2009 the same way a cop thinks of a confidential informant: someone who deserves punishment but is more important not punished for what he can offer to resolve other issues.
Comparing the Tea Party to OWS as opposites of the same issue is laughable. The Tea Party was funded and promoted by the wealthiest Americans and today, rebranded as the Freedom Caucus, they pretty much run the Republican Party and control the caucus.
OWS lived in pup tents and relieved themselves on police cars.
Restructuring the banking industry? Wasn't that what Dodd-Frank did? And OF COURSE Obama changed the economic direction of the nation: From MINUS 8% GDP to plus 3% in one year.
I wonder if Dowd ever read the Wiki leaks of Hillary's Wall Street transcripts. She admonished; she did not endorse.
OTOH liberals were more concerned with "RELEASE THE TRANSCRIPTS" than they were with "RELEASE THE TAX RETURNS."
FDR said "I welcome their hatred." Easy when you have 71 Democratic Senators behind you.
Obama said "It's my economy; I own it."
And I must have been absent from the day in 8th grade when they taught that the president can pass banking laws all by himself.
32
We in Canada don't seem to know much about Pompeo, but the three other stars - Mnuchin, Whitaker, and Wilbur Ross - pictured with him are class acts in corruption. What will these guys, each a poster child for the American Dream, ever do with their stash? They must have left their hearts of gold locked in Fort Knox so that not an iota of kindness seeps out to aid the homeless, the starving, and the dying.
As a Canadian, the punishment meted out to Conrad Black, the Canadian newspaper publisher, in 2011 for fraud seems to me full of irony. With his $25 million home in West Palm Beach Florida, and glitzy properties in New York and London, Black never made it to Goldman Sachs category. He got six years in federal prison.
Who will lock up the Trump administration crooks? Where is Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris? NY Attorney Preet Bharara did a great job helping to put behind bars the likes of moneyed Rajat Gupta and the Sri Lankan Rajaratnam, who were both South Asians. But then the machinery of justice seems to have run out of steam.
Or has it? Maybe there's hope on the horizon with the likes of Ocavio-Cortez and other newcomers to the House of Representatives.
7
Perhaps Trump won because many voters were riled up about government’s easy treatment of rich crooks. But what stoked their discontent?
It was the hugely successful propaganda machine of a handful of dubious billionaires. This machine defines reality for 40% of America, who won’t believe their own eyes unless Fox News says it’s so. Because this machine controls so many voters, the GOP is now beholden to the machine and parrots whatever it asks them to say.
Goebbels did it largely on his own. Now the Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, the Uihleins, the Spencers (and a few more) have engineered the same thing.
13
To imply any resemblance between Obama’s and Trump’s economic policies is like comparing a mountain to a mole hill.
President Obama inherited an economy going off the cliff and threatening to take the world economy with it. His main focus was to restore confidence and despite pressure to “let the banks fail” along with “ let the American auto industry go under”, he got the economy moving again along with a health care policy among other achievements.
For me, Obama was the best president of my lifetime and Trump is the worst. It’s not to say Obama was perfect; far from it but he did it scandal free over two terms while Trump is a poster child president for incompetence and corruption.
18
@JT FLORIDA
Except for unconstitutional DACA, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS political targeting and the cover up that followed, the Libya intervention Disaster, the Iraq pull out disaster, Benghazi, Domestic Spying lies, Trump campaign targeting, insecure bathroom email servers, and unencrypted top secret security clearance files disaster.
Why jail them? Wouldn't making them give up their mansion and live in a tiny home be more humane?
5
@Anton Kaye
I don’t know about more humane but it might be more effective as a deterrent to others. Michael Milliken after his prison sentence pointed out that the threat of prison is no deterrent on Wall Street. It is a remote out-of-sight possibility that can’t happen to them personally because they are especially smart. The Special People don’t fear it. What they fear is being ordinary, common, and poor.
A more effective punishment would be to strip miscreants of their wealth and make them have to work for a living. Better yet, sentence the especially high flying and well known bad actors to selling pencils on the steps of the NYSE as a visible example.
Barak Obama was a vacuous fraud. There was no change and people lost all hope. Donald Trump is his legacy. People who voter for Obama twice; voted for Trump.
Eric Holder said "due process is not judicial process" to a room full of reporters and no one called him on it. Clinton betrayed the Democrats constituency and Obama followed suite.
Trump's odiousness does not make Obama good.
2
Obama lost Dems, Republicans, and independents when he failed to prosecute banks after the housing crisis. Bankers profited and walked, while we the American taxpayers paid. It was a major disappointment at the time. Although not quite as disappointing as Obama's subsequent "buckraking"...what a phony he turned out to be.
4
Brooksley Born. Frontline’s “The Warning.” I’ve cited it every time this subject comes up. She was shut down by Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers under President Clinton, on whose watch Glass-Steagal was neutered, too.
5
Although I Dowd's perpetual hatred of Obama and the Clintons is infuriating, in this one case she is right. Had Obama simply gone after, prosecuted and jailed corrupt bankers and those who committed torture during the Bush years he would have shown that the rule of law prevailed. His failure to do so is the lasting stain on his legacy.
4
I still can’t believe Trump and his gang are preaching “political correctness” — criticizing Acosta for asking hard questions (“decorum”), and criticizing football players for taking a knee (“patriotism”).
What happened to the Trump who cried out against decorum and civility for the sake of “political incorrectness”? Why are we listening to a Trump who’s now acting like the “elite” he used to despise?
7
I want to point out that FDR was a white man and Obama was a black man. Furthermore, Obama was the first black President of the United States of America. Perhaps Obama was particularly cautious because he understood the magnified scrutiny of everything he would do because he was black and the President.
I think it is insulting to his legacy to criticize Obama for not pursuing every ideal that Democrats would like to see realized. He was in a very difficult situation. Yet he was a great president, he was never involved in scandals, and he was a moral person who wanted everyone to have a better life.
15
@JKM
Being moral is not enough. Carter, Clinton and Obama were naive about all things economic and financial; they were easily manipulated. For some reason, we choose Democratic candidates that are weak in economics and finance. Ultimately, it undermines Democracy, as Maureen points out. It sends the message that those without a moral compass get a free pass to prosper in ways that are socially undesirable. Take Facebook for example.
My favorite insult from that time was the incredible argument from these clowns that the criminal bankers could not be imprisoned was that 'losing that talent was too costly'
So, that lofty talent, which had practically driven the world economy into the ground, were given huge bonuses from the public bailout money.
Of course Iceland is laughing.
6
@Plennie Wingo
I recall an interview with one of the old Dons of the previous generation of Bankers, those WASPs who inherited their positions rather than being promoted as Wunderkinds. He said of the fancy financial instruments that orovided the illusion of removing risk thereby creating the unstable structure that collapsed in 2008, “We would have never done that because we weren’t that smart.”
In other words, the Wunderkind Masters were too clever by half and getting rid of them in favor of people who focused on traditional basics of sound banking, which does not require any rare genius, would have been an improvement.
You can't accept $500K/speech gigs from bankers and be taken seriously as a champion for the little guy. Hillary Clinton should have known that. Barack Obama apparently doesn't care that he's also helped to convert the Presidency into a resume builder for membership in the plutocracy.
2
White collar crime has become fashionable in the U.S. of A. The crime has become a mark of accomplishment among the 'elite' and our toady politicians. A teenager burgles a store with no weapon and gets 1-3 years in prison. An executive robs millions--if not billions-- and gets a fine, a 'house in the Hamptons' and invitations to all the best parties.
White collar crime is lucrative, and is rewarded in this nation as though it were a fine business expertise. I wouldn't be surprised if colleges began offering courses in it.
6
@FJG
“Never steal less than a million dollars.” Was the rule in the 70’s. Now it is ten million. Well connected lawyers cost more.
1
Okay, so Barack Obama was not as much of a heroic demi-god as we wish he had been. He should have taken the Bush Administration to task, legally, for their criminal actions regarding the war. He should have tangibly punished the miscreants on Wall Street. He should have told the blindly partisan, unpatriotic and stubborn Congress to "Stick it" and signed more executive actions. He should have never ever allowed Mitch McConnell to bully him, period. He should have stopped the Russians when he had the chance. (I could go on and on.) But the problems that he inherited from the Bush Administration were like the multi-headed Hydra on Disney's "Hercules," and since Obama was only human, he couldn't keep up. He still made a noble Herculean effort to do the best he could within the limitations of the Constitution and his role as President of the United States, and there are many of us who would still rather have him in office than the increasingly-demented clown that we have there now.
9
Obama and his administration gave us Trump. Every bit as duplicitous as the Trump administration except done with eloquence and aplomb.
1
Obama was put in a Catch-22 by W and Co.'s lax regulations and economic recklessness. As George Stephanopoulos put it: "Obama could not have been dealt a worse hand when he came into the presidency." Obama came to the rescue and did what he had to do.
Who would you have preferred at the helm during The Great Recession: W, Obama, or Trump?
8
Every time I read something like this, I am reminded of what a naïf Obama was to take the bait to run for president in 2008. He was hung out to dry by the people who had backed him after he beat McCain.
1
Yes, Obama made two huge mistakes in his attempt to move forward and not look backward. His Wall Street bailout with with no criminal punishment set a terrible example that was followed by his equal unwillingness to punish those like Dick Cheney and our now head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, for torturing "enemy combatants." But the leap to Trump is imperfect. What Trump has done is: (1) enrich himself and his family by thumbing his nose at the Constitution's "emoluments clause" with the help of his willing accomplices in the Republican Congress; (2) stock his cabinet with oligarchs or petty thieves (aka wannabe oligarchs) like Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, and currently Ryan Zinke; and (3) pass a massive tax cut for the rich including corporations run by the very billionaire bankers that stole money from the middle class to pay for it by capping their tax deductions for state and local taxes (the real SALT in the public wounds). As for Acting Attorney Matthew Whitaker, he's the petty thief who shilled for a fraudulent Florida patent company that recently was convicted, liquidated and forced to pay back almost $26 million by the Federal Trade Commission to those would-be inventors it fleeced. And when asked to return his fee, Whitaker was the only board member to refuse. Now he's in charge of the Mueller investigation as Trump's thug and the very F.B.I. that's investigating his active participation in the fraud including threatening clients who complained. Decorum is impropriety.
3
"...Kellyanne Conway shrugged it off, saying, 'Haven’t they learned that the president always gets the last laugh?'”
The voters did to some extent get a laugh or thirty seven (House seat lost by GOP so far) during the midterm elections.
Let's hope Mueller gets the last laugh.
5
It wasn't just a fold, it was an epic fold. How Barrack Obama managed to make it to a second term only points out how corrupt the political system was/is. That a huckster like Don the Don can co-op the underclass so easily shows how dumb they/we are. Personally I was dumbfounded. That a sniveling Larry Summers would straight face his comment about not abrogating contracts when the push was to deny the AIG seamsters their bonuses pretty much summed it up. "We don't abrogate contracts": how many times with the native Americans, aka Indians, US soldiers shot down WWI vets in the shadow of the capitol when we abrogated their contract, failed to protect freed slaves from former insurrections, locked up US citizens simply because they were Japanese. And pundits still wonder why the "forgotten" man turned against the party of the people. I would have thought the moment of the fold would have been enough. Guess not.
The phrase 'How long, Oh Lord, how long?' came to my mind reading this - I thought it was from Shaw's Saint Joan but it's actually from Psalm 94, and is eerily appropriate.
“Too Rich to Jail?” Of course!
When the transactional mindset of the commercial classes becomes the dominant mindset of a society, everything is for sale. All relationships are transactional. “Truth” is whatever increases a product’s marketability—whether that product is toothpaste or a political candidate. “Virtue” is whatever separates the “winners” from the “losers”. Honor is nonexistent.
The U.S. is now a “competitive authoritarianism”. Our political system retains the trappings of democracy—but trappings are no substitute for substance. Too many government officials in the two competing parties abuse state power. They seek above all else to aid their plutocratic donors, to manipulate their respective bases, and to disadvantage their opponents.The actual preferences of the majority of citizens are ignored and abuses of state power go well beyond those associated with mere patronage.
The GOP-Trumpublican leaders, up to this point, are obviously the more ruthlessly effective competitors. They are far more “purely” self- and donor-centric. They are viciously devoid of concern for the common good.
President Trump—the No-Account in Chief—continues to disregard ethical and constitutional norms. “Self and family first” is True North on his "moral" compass. GOP-Trumpublican leaders provide no checks on Trump’s unbalance.
GOP-Trumpublicans are utterly shameless. For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, their demagoguery and venality are beyond dispute.
2
Eric Holder was the worst Attorney General since John Mitchell, who was Nixon’s AG. Hundreds of bankers should have been sent to jail and he failed to do that.
Big banks making their own rules and profiteering like pirates on the seas of old. The money golden Goldman Sachs and kindred spirits is a cancerous seed planted in the modern body politic. The object is not good government; it is responsive government where tax laws can benefit the rich, strip the middle of any breaks, and ignore the poor. One thing we can bank on, if one pardons the expression and condones violation of trust.
1
This is a bunch of malarkey. Over-simplified and missing key data points and backstory as to WHY the economy was in meltdown when Obama became president. Incomplete. Try harder.
5
Maureen can't try harder -- she is so consumed with her hatred of Obama that she willl make every Obama action equivalent to Trump. -- I completely lost respect for her years ago!
2
Too powerful to fail, too rich to jail.
Isn't that the way it was during the administration of Louis XVI in France ?
We all know how that turned out. Can't happen here ? Don't bet on it. Instead of pitchforks the unruly, unwashed now have AR-15's. There could some day be a reckoning. History has a way of repeating itself and it's not always pretty.
Just look at the picture at the head of this article. Self absorbed, smug, greedy men feeding off the system created by a government that, like so many, has always been led by Self absorbed, smug, greedy men.
For ten years I've been decrying Obama's failure to ride the populist wave that rose from the financial crisis. The political vacuum that he left was filled by the Tea Party and the cynical money behind it. It's taken till now, and the utter insanity and depravity of Trump and his administration, that may finally put an end to that period in American life. Ms. Dowd wrote, years ago, about how Obama's personal history made him just the wrong man for those times. She was right then, and she is right now. We are still paying the price for his failure to lead.
154
@Harold Obama didn’t “fail” to ride any waves. He successfully stood as a bulwark against a mighty populist wave of both left and right leaning anti-banker antipathy. As Obama told the bankers himself, “I’m the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks”. Obama never failed to lead, he simply chose to side with the bankers against the American public.
7
@Harold T. It is completely insane to claim “the political vacuum of the populist wave” was filled by the Tea Party. The Tea Party has absolutely nothing to do with “populism”. It is nativism at its core, through and through. The televisions in their living rooms are all tuned to Fox News night after night after night.
8
@Harold T
But every one saw how colored brown Obama was. And they judged accordingly based upon USA past and present. Obama could never be seen as half European.
7
Mario Puzo's Vito Corleone was right. "You can steal more with a pen than with a gun." His whole novel was an allegory of America's obsession with money and power. His cover was of a puppetmaster holding the strings. He saw the hypocrisy and duplicity in the so-called upstanding leaders of America. How they finessed and exploited the rules and laws to work in their favor. IQ45 is right about one thing: The system is rigged.
157
@Tim Lynch
Nonsense.
Blacks were enslaved and made separate and unequal by both guns and pens used by Europeans.
We are not you. And you are not us.
7
Indeed, hindsight is 100%. We all knew Obama needed training in how to be president. One year as Senator didn’t provide the political grounding he needed. He had other gifts and they served him (and us) well.
But he needed help and he found Geithner, who interpreted his job as saving the financial system (Maureen appears to be on the side of those who say—that hindsight again—he shouldn’t have).
To perdition with hindsight. At this point we need to assess what we’ve got and deal with it according to what we need, not unlike any other pragmatic decision that needs to made. Maybe it feels good to be right, which is mostly what ideology gets us. What we really need to do is get off our ideological bandwagons.
7
@rjon: We need to stop corrupting the meanings of words. Liberals liberate, conservatives conserve, and reactionaries react unpredictably, but usually badly. If what they do is misaligned with what they say, don't believe what they say.
When a fire is approaching your town, you must do everything to eliminate the imminent danger. It is an emergency. And in that emergency, you utilize all those who can help, even if they had some responsibility for the conditions that enabled the fire disaster.
When the fire danger is over, then you look at rebuilding and how to prevent the next fire. Like sweeping the forests.
Letting the fire burn with the idea of rebuilding the destroyed communities is irresponsible.
Could the Obama DOJ been more aggressive? Yes. With the laws in existence at the time, would there have been more perp walks? Maybe.
The real culprit is not Obama or even Trump. It is the diseased, dry and dead underbrush of $$$ that needs sweeping right out of our politics.
18
@Rita Yes. It seems as mostly everyone, including Ms. Dowd, forgets how dire the Great Recession was. Obama saved the economy! The Tea Party was formed with the support of millionaires to supposedly rail against deficits, for which they are now silent as deficits are going through roof under Trump. The Tea Party was a racist organization formed to take down President Obama---even spitting on black Congressmen during the ACA fight.
Decorum, n., behavior in keeping with good taste and propriety.
-- Merriam-Webster
Decorum, n. (var), see sycophancy
-- Donald J. Trump
Mr. Trump has guaranteed America genuine growth in the number and variety of criminals from which to select representatives to imprison.
Until and unless we actually put some in jail we will continue to foster this dystopian cadre of grifters. Perhaps we can commission Armani to make nouveau orange jumpsuits.
144
@Douglas McNeill
Of the 2.3 M locked up by USA 40% are black as Ben Carson. Even though only 13.3% of us are black. USA has 25% of the locked up and only 5% of humans. Blacks are persecuted for assume to be equal to any European.
3
@Douglas McNeill
Agreed: orange silk with black piping and a black pillbox hat to cover up that symbol of doom.
3
@Douglas McNeill
Trump together with his cabinet ought to be fit first for those Armani nouveau orange jumbsuits. It will complement his hair.
4
Obama had grossly insufficient experience when he entered the White House. If he had spent two terms in the Senate with the Republicans, he would have been a lot more cynical, a much better detector of lies and bad faith, a lot more brutal to his enemies, a better negotiator and a lot harder to gull. He could have been a great President, given his intellect, his dedication to the public good, and his basically good character. It was time to elect a black President but it was not *his* time yet. He was not ready. It was clear enough at the time and has become much more painfully clear since. Had he waited, everyone from Mitch McConnell to Putin and Jarvad Zarif would have found him a much more formidable opponent than he was. It's too bad. Great future opportunity was squandered and much damage was done when the crooks didn't fear the cop.
7
The opportunity for the failure came when Clinton allowed Greenspan and his cronies to repeal the Glass Steagall act. Without this repeal the financial crisis would not have occurred. Until the act is put back in force the opportunity for another failure remains. Easy fix if Congress has any backbone which it does not!!
10
Obama came into office when the banking crisis already had this nation wobbling. Had he not been able to inject capital into the system, we might not have had this ten year stretch of job growth. Personally, at that time, I wanted banker's blood greasing a government guillotine, but I'm not so sure revolution would have had the nation's best interest in heart as much as Obama's measured response. If you wish to assign blame, look past Obama to those gutting regulation. He stands like a rock amongst presidents past and present rushing to do the bankers' bidding.
17
@Lawrence Zajac: The "crash" of 2008 was a liquidity crisis that snowballed as all the interest rate swaps and other derivatives, amounting to many times the global economic product, triggered huge financial obligations among these speculators, far beyond the usual cash flow.
A lot of bad things follow from failing to devote monetary policy strictly to stability of yield curves and apply fiscal policy to regulate employment levels. This policy makes "hedging", otherwise known as gambling, uninteresting.
Yes, Ms. D. President Obama could have done a little better. I agree about banks and the bankers be held accountable not to mention some other things. I wish he'd have done better. but compared to wackos who came before after him, he was great.
16
Of course. This is what fueled the Bernie Bros, essentially, splitting the Dems and making Clinton and,Bush indistinguishable except on social issues. Think about that on the tree of woe. Or should that be work-fare?
3
Obama saved a sinking ship that was going to take down everyone on board. If a few rats were saved in the process, so be it. But for gods sake save your ire for Reagan, W and Trump. Obama was dealt a worse hand than Roosevelt: not only a looming worldwide depression, but two disastrous ongoing wars of choice. That he did as well as he did, given the republicans’ stated goal to do nothing but obstruct his presidency, is a testimony to his ability to recognize the perfect should never be the enemy of the good and to move forward in a less than perfect world. That Trump is enheriting the legacy of 8 years of Obama bringing the country back from the brink and claiming credit, even as he seeks to abolish the ACA, is as sadly ironic as you can get.
20
"Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven, but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind."
Tom Paine
1
Amen Maureen. You got it right. It was really sad to see Obama not just hold banks responsible for their major disaster but also keep forgiving them. Perhaps the leftover Clinton team misguided him. This has been one of the biggest factors leading to the inequality and chasm between the wealthy and the poor in this country. Not only are corrupt money making practices legal here, they are also encouraged by an unbridled capitalist society that favors the CEOs, board members, over employees and workers, disproportionately. We saw it happen during Cheney years and Enron days of golden parachutes, and the hi tech bubbles that made tech companies and start ups instant multi millionaires, overnight.
8
I wonder how many commenters, not to mention Ms. Dowd, have actually worked on Capitol Hill. I’d venture to say none. The armchair Monday morning quarterback nature of the article and responses suggests a willful ignorance of how Congress works. I will grant you Obama never had the support of a majority determined to thwart him at all costs. It’s easy to say he should never have sought consensus with such a group of openly hostile, unpatriotic, party above country miscreants. Except that’s the kind of guy he was. He was a consensus-builder. We knew it and we elected him and then put into place an opposition legislative body determined to shut him down.
21
Let's remember that while Ms. Dowd was rich beyond most American's imaginings in 2009, most Americans would not have survived the collapse of the International banking system that may have ensued if President Obama had proceeded differently. He made a difficult choice that provided a financial life boat to millions of Americans including some very fortunate culpable bankers. I'm pretty sure Ms. Dowd has never faced such a difficult and consequential decision.
12
President Obama shares responsibility for the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Two strikes: first, the failure to prosecute white collar bank crime (the crime of a millennium) and second, the failure to adequately awaken the nation to the Russian interference in the presidential election resulting in a Trumped up white-crime presidency.
The bankers should have been prosecuted, let the pieces fall where they may. The ethical imperative turned into a sell out of millions of financially and psychologically devastated victims.
Not warning America with a full throated alert to Russian aid to Trump and more than telling Putin to "stop it," was a very costly timidness. Who cares that Sen. McConnell would not approve a united, nonpartisan announcement of Russian interference? Who was president? McConnell was/is a known Obama hater and thwarter. And President Obama should have fired FBI Director James Comey for his election interference. Who was Comey protecting - but himself.
Sure Republicans would have cried foul for punishing their big donor/owners, for ignoring McConnell, for firing Comey. They would have cried that President Obama was using his office to sway the election (of course they haven't been concerned that Trump has devoted his presidency to outright trashing Democrats to influence the midterm elections) but President Obama would have done the right thing in pursuing justice and national security on behalf of America.
Doing the right thing is always the right thing.
5
The Democrats had left the workers long before Obama and the big recession both in the US and in Europe. End of the 80ies, beginning of the 90ies. The left lawyerized, forgot where they came from, collapsing national support for unions, support of the big companies over workers, internationalism, consumerism... Schroeder, Blair, Clinton.
3
There is some truth to what you argue, but please go back to 2008 and tell me how small homeowners by getting easier mortgages leading to a default rate that was about 5% rather than 3% brought the whole thing down. Everyone including the NYTimes blamed the little guy for the collapse, when it was massive, innovative over leveraging by Banks, all legal. Now, you are saying that the system was illegally rigged? Not so. It was legally rigged. The restrictions on large commercial banks was the remedy. We run our whole economy on self-interest, Greed by any other name. We encourage Greed, (50% off, buy before its too late, On Sale), and we have even conned people into buying and wearing commercials. Our people are unwitting grazing Cows in pasture to change grass into milk (money). Enlightenment would be devastating.
5
It's like coming upon a car wreck... ghastly, but I can't look away.
2
For those who think Ms Dowd is once again being unfair to Obama, I direct your attention to an April, 2011 NYT article:
"Two Financial Crises Compared: The Savings and Loan Debacle and the Mortgage Mess
A comparison of prosecutions related to the savings and loan crisis and the current financial crisis."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/14/business/20110414-prosecute.html
From April, 2011 until Obama left office nothing much changed.
The Obama administration's abject failure to prosecute any of the major "banksters" probably did not lead to Trump's election but what it did do was solidify the idea that the game was rigged in favor of the 1%. It reinforced a deeply held cynicism about the notion of a government "of, by, and for the people".
7
President Obama did what he had to do to keep the banks from failing. It wasn't that he was protecting the foxes who were in the henhouse, he was literally holding this country together with absolutely no help from any Republican. He kept this country and possibly the world from entering into a world wide depression. He had to pick up the pieces from the previous administration who had let the foxes into the henhouse in the first place, with a little help from Clinton and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Ms. Dowd do you think for even one New York City minute that had Donald Trump been in power when that financial crisis hit, we would even be standing as a country? I don't. We had the right person in power to get us through that crisis who had the maturity and intelligence to save our economy. If you are looking for purity in politics, you are naive. The best you can hope for is decency. Obama is decent.
We do not have a shred of decency in this present administration. Trump thinks he is king, and his wife apparently now thinks she is queen and can fire those on his staff. Trump also thinks he can thumb his nose at the Constitution and put Whitaker in place of Sessions to be his "Roy Cohn". His fellow Republicans remain silent about his abuse of power.
Our country is adrift. Our leader is a man with no moral compass, and no spine. President Obama stands head and shoulders above that buffoon. How I wish he were still President.
Sanders wants decorum? Then leave.
14
Until their personal possessions come in line first instead of let their business share the bulk of their ineptitude and arrogance nothing will change.
This attitude of privatization the profits and sharing the losses is killing many nations, USA too.
3
I wish the photograph could include other cronies of this administration. The 4 shown rise to the top, but there are so many more grifters in this administration that just 4 does not do justice (oops, used the wrong word, as there is less of it in the so called drained swamp). Such a blatant and big con this administration has done, and American public has still not realized it. Not sure what else could. Feel discouraged at the state of affairs.
2
While I completely agree with everything written here, I was hoping for Maureen’s take on Facebook. It’s very possible the company and its top employees have done nothing criminal, but one wonders if they would be prosecuted or even investigated.
4
Ms. Dowd, this is what you wrote on Nov. 5, 2016, 3 days before the election of Donald Trump, your final statement regarding the two candidates before the voting started: "The problem with Donald Trump is: We don’t know which of the characters he has created he would bring to the Oval Office. The trouble with Hillary Clinton is: We do know. Nobody gets less paranoid in the White House." Why do you keep pretending you have nothing to do with this Trumpian Moment? Do you think that if you keep attacking Obama and Hillary that somehow we all will enter your distorted world and think that Trump might not be as bad as Obama and Hillary?
14
Republicans and democrats look and act different but in reality they are just the two sides of the same coin. Every election we do the same thing by voting for democrats or republicans and expect something to change. Both parties are owned by the 1%. Obama will be remembered as the The to late to little President. Too late he saw the danger and then he did too little to protect us. He knew the Russians were interfering in our election yet did almost nothing to alert the rest of the country or to stop the Russians. I hope the 2020 election is a full out battle. I hope it’s as ugly and dirty as possible. Only if the democrats and republicans destroy each other can the country be saved.
1
Our president, those who serve him in the White House and and Executive Branch, those who continue to enable him in Congress, and those who continue to support him in MAGAtville, ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. For they constitute yet a second resurgence of racism, ignorance and stupidity in America since slavery was defeated in the Civil War.
Racism and the profound ignorance and stupidity underlying it reemerged among white Southerners embittered by their loss of slaves and whites everywhere angry at they idea of having to treat black Americans as equal human beings. I had thought that after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s finally put an end to racial discrimination in education, housing employment and voting, racists and their enablers would decline into insignificance. But the Republicans and their "Southern strategy", Willie Horton fear-mongering, and election and continuing GOP support of Trump show that we are in the midst of a second resurgence of racism. So don't be surprised if Trump, his toady Whitaker and Republican enablers in Congress and on SCOTUS, and his white supporters, don't stop at their efforts in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, suppressing minority voters, and burying the remnants of affirmative action.
Now that the rest of America can finally seek truth and justice, I foresee Trump starting a war in order to retain power and to avoid prison. Things will get ugly before that human menace to democracy and decency is gone.
5
The only rich guy I know of who's going to spend the rest of his life in jail is Bernie Madoff. It isn't easy but the rich and sleazy are just as vulnerable as the rest of us. However it can be done.
1
So is Jared Kushner too rich, too pretty and too connected to jail?
5
God this woman is flaky. In the US we have something called due process (this is how Acosta got his pass restored) and the chances of putting any of the top bankers in jail was zero. If Ms Dowd has new evidence that would convict any of them I suggest she takes it to the NY AG who could proceed under the Martin Act.
In 2008-10 the government (Bush and Obama administrations) were in a Catch 22 situation. To rescue the financial system and thus the entire economy you had to rescue the bankers. The one attempt to depart from this process (Lehman Brothers) was the stone that released the avalanche.
Ms Dowd spent years trashing Hillary Clinton and now she is appalled at the consequences.
14
The government could not have gotten any convictions, and they knew it. Once Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were acquitted in 2009, they realized that anyone who was a significant player had a solid defense.
The government could have taken over the failing banks and thrown out existing management, but that would have required action by Congress, and involved a lot of risk. They preferred forced mergers and workouts.
If their only goal was to keep the financial system from collapsing, this was probably the best course. Having Angelo Mozilo and Kerry Killinger go free looked really bad, but there was nothing they could do.
11
@Jonathan
I tend to agree. But perhaps a few very public attempts at prosecution might have convinced the American people that Congress needed to pass legislation making criminal negligence in financial institutions easier to prosecute.
7
@Rita - Yes, but I do think that the reforms they made to the banking system were pretty good. They have largely stopped depository institutions from taking excessive risk, and forced them to increase their capital base.
There are still excesses, like leveraged loans and companies with hollowed-out balance sheets. The next recession won't be pretty. However, most of the riskiest assets are held by hedge funds and retail CEFs, so the losses will be borne by risk-seeking investors. They won't be bailed out.
1
@Jonathan
Don’t bet on hedge fund guys not claiming the same as the bankers...the risks have simply shifted names, and they now know their shell game works.
Jail is the only real deterrent.
3
It's simpler than this.
Most of the country has been getting economically for decades, as both left and right working people have seen. The prophet Reagan said government was the problem (and thus corporations are good), and so government is the cause of these problems for working people on the right. On the left, the cause is understood as unbridled corporatism, but the need for so much money to compete in politics requires Democrats to get cozy with big corporations. As a result, money wins again because big money owns the process regardless of which administration is in power.
6
My hope is that journalists continue to see themselves as a crucial element in great experiment. Good article Mo, keep going.
12
All that is written here reminds us of the harm done by Citizens United. For some time we have not been a country of one man, one vote. We have turned into a country of "one dollar, one vote".
Citizens are no longer "united" by common goals, but rather united by the size of your wallet.
27
@sbanicki
That court case should be renamed “corporations unbridled.”
Thanks Maureen for pointing out that that idol who was our president from 2008- 2016 had clay feet. Not that Trump is any better in how he acts but at least his deeds and his tweets align.
3
One could go back to Bill Clinton to see the Democrats changing from a social democratic party that had been shut out of the presidency to the Corporatist structure that controls the party establishment. Obama was criticized for not doing more for the people who had their homes foreclosed on and giving the country Quantitative Easing which was a huge Fed giveaway to banks. The Tea Party and their hard edged misguided austerity forced Obama and Bernanke to pursue Quantitative Easing as the only way to put money in the economy in the recession. The worse decision Obama made was to follow the advice of John Brennan. The neo con alliance with liberal interventionists in the Obama Administration created a cascade of blunders that left 100000s killed and political chaos in its wake.
4
@c harris: The Evangelicals who now back Trump helped take down "born again" Jimmy Carter. These folks make strange character judgments.
2
I love every inch of this column. Why punish Wall Street when you can benefit from it? Why attack major corporations for monopolistic practices when you can be their lobbyists when you're out of office. Alexander Hamilton created a strong central bank in order to make the US stronger and protect investments. The Founders were men of wealth who wanted to invest as they wished. They had no idea of the amount of grift that would develop in the modern world. Yet, the political right continues to push the message that corporations are people and it is completely Constitutional to deregulate. Nope!!
17
@Anthony: Hamilton grasped Keynesian economics a century before Keynes.
3
“Haven’t they learned that the president always gets the last laugh?”
This has been the hallmark of the last two years. So far there's been no act too egregious, no line too far to cross. Worse, there've been no consequences to the administration's grifting, let alone criminal acts. Tom Price and Scott Pruitt may have been fired but they were not otherwise punished.
There's been no reason to expect a call for accountability thus far from Congress. We can only hope that Mueller's findings and the newly installed Democratic House will both demand and implement punishments for those who believe they can flagrantly violate their oaths of office and the laws they were sworn to uphold.
Let's keep our respective digits crossed.
31
I seldom read Ms. Dowd’s column from start to finish. Even less frequently do I find much to agree with. She is completely on target here so here’s my credit as it’s certainly due. You can rattle off a long list of individuals who should be behind bars today. Angelo Mozilo is the poster child of greed and excess but he was not alone. Many others were complicit and benefited from bad practices (Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch) but probably didn’t understand what was going on, just let it happen and took the money. The core problem is incentive compensation. Risks taken with other people’s money without personal consequences should not be allowed. The housing finance risks starting in the early 2,000’s were known by anyone with an IQ over 100 but financial reward starting with loan officers and including the referenced waitress, should have been known. They were all playing with other people’s money with no risk. The Obama team of non-business liberals doubled down by provided debt relief sponsored by other taxpayers. Beneficiaries were portrayed as collateral damage but as they had no skin in the game (0 down payments) they were playing with what turned out to be taxpayer money. They were renters, not owners and should have simply moved on with an economics lesson in their pockets. Mozilo? He should have been stripped of all financial assets and the fines used to pay the costs of his incarceration. So what should we do? Change the incentive compensation models.
27
In the final analysis. its the "Money in Politics" that is crushing democracy in America. Regardless of political party, it takes Tens of Millions of Dollars to mount an effective political campaign and win a seat in Congress.
The Citizens United SCOTUS decision has both legalized and supported this factor. Unless and until Congress overturns this decision through legislation, little if anything will change. When the person contributing these Millions is more important than the hundreds of thousands of one's constituents, we no longer have a representative democracy.
Welcome to America!
39
Republicans have been on the road to corruption since the end of the last Republican President with ethics: Eisenhower.
Unfortunately, Democrats have been on the access road of the same road the Republicans are on. I cannot think of the Clinton's without becoming ill at my stomach (I am a "Democrat").
Obama certainly had his eye on the moneyball from the moment he entered the White House, and, as you note, his first speech, post residence in the White House, was to a Wall Street bank for $400,000.
Maureen, do you think, perhaps, that this is actually just a fundamental limitation of "Democracy"? Look at India.
Perhaps we are just witnessing the end state of the great American experiment that began with people who had been under British rule and wanted to insure that approach did not happen here? But, nobody is that well read today, and, nobody remembers what British power and corruption was/is like.
Lastly and alas: Nobody can tell that's where we almost are again.
17
@Michael We as a nation ARE being tested exactly as you state. I'm old enough that I probably will be dead in time. However, for the children and grandchildren, it's a serious matter and consideration.
15
A lot of the left were also furious that Obama didn't go after the war criminals who led us into the worst foreign policy decision in our history, war in Iraq. He could have turned up the heat on Wall Street for sure. It felt like left Elizabeth Warren was left twisting out there alone, when they finally established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the GOP resisted an appointment to it. In fact the GOP doubled down and turned their attention laughably to the debt crisis once again.
Axelrod has a point too, would we have passed the ACA if the administration had picked those fights? We'll never know. What we do know, is the current GOP is as corrupt as they come, led by The Don.
54
@M
Obama helped the GOP death cult turn the national attention back to austerity or the fake deficit crisis again, Obama, not the GOP created the Simpson- Bowles committee, or it’s official name : “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform”. That Presidential committee, stacked with bipartisan deficit hawks, was Obama’s pet project that he created over the objections of his own party. It’s kind of mind-blowing to think about now in 2018, especially after Obama’s has been deified by nogstalgic Democrats, but in 2010, in the mist of a horrible economic downturn, amidst a period of unrivaled government largess for criminal bankers and a foreclosure crisis Obama choose to focus his attention on austerity for common Americans. Real ‘man of people’ eh? The ‘Cat-food Commission’ as it was called by its detractors was Obama’s baby. An astonishing fact which has been forgotten by almost everyone eight years later. I wonder why some of Obama’s two-time voters switched sides and voted for Trump? Must have been racism.
1
A very high tax rate for incomes over let us say 300 K, inheritance as well as a wealth tax of a few percent of assets would make it impossible for financiers to make dynasty creating money. With the incentive gone the best and brightest could consider other ways to serve society other than on Wall Street.
47
@as
Yes, a progressive WEALTH tax is a very good idea.
Nobody should allowed to be as rich as
Trump, the Koch brothers, Jeff Bezos and the like.
15
how much better if in the first place the'big' banks had been allowed to fail.. now we have Quantitative Easing fallout which will be around a while...
6
more facts like these, please!
until even the last [common] person on earth
gets outraged enough to put an end to that kind of crime.
the 99% should be camping on wall street, permanently.
until the day.
i know, i'm dreaming. but still. we can't sit still!
- my country's new finance minister appointed the ex-CEO of goldman sachs germany and switzerland as his right hand.
- he also opposes int'lly. taxing financial transactions, of course.
- and [just as outrageous] he still calls himself a social democrat.
culprits count an people's short term memory.
and on their mindset: "i'd do it too, if i were rich enough."
are we secretly complicit, then?
2
Obama was always a corporate Democrat. One of his biggest failures was not prosecuting the banksters. His promise of “putting on comfortable walking shoes” and walking the picket line never happened, not in Wisconsin, not in Michigan. Not a sound from him- crickets. While I don’t think it’s fair to draw a line from Obama’s failure to prosecute to the sociopathic grifter currently occupying the office, Republican Lite was never a viable strategy ( how many Republican votes did he get for his Republican Health Plan?) Hopefully, the Democrats have learned a lesson- sometimes “pitchforks” serve an important purpose.
330
It is all right to be a corporate Democrat. Corporations provide job, create peripheral businesses, and often spur development of parks and other amenities.
Business is not synonymous with "corruption." When they are corrupt, they must be punished.
I'd say, lower the corporate tax rate. But tax the CEOs much more than we do now -- and more like the way they were taxed in the 1960s -- and in such a way that they can't hide their winnings.
An aside: And don't tax a New York City dweller making $200,000 at the same rate as someone making 2 million or 2 billion. Those numbers might look the same to people making $50,000 a year, but they are not. (Disclaimer: I never made $200,000 a year; not even close.)
34
@Stew
So was Clinton. The last Dem POTUS who represented the American people rather than banks was Jimmy Carter, but Bush Senior--at the top of the CIA at the time--made sure the Iran Hostages would not come home on a financially left leaning's POTUS watch.
13
Obama was a man too young, pulled in over his head by dark money and false flattery that always chooses to back the Democratic candidates in primaries whom it expects to lose general elections.
6
Thank you, Ms. Dowd. This left-of-center voter has had it up to his eyebrows with the Obama hagiographies. To be generous, Obama's politics might be described as merely weak tea, but in fact he directly betrayed the people who put him in office. Most unforgivable was his unwitting tilling of the soil in preparation for the giant Trump hogweed that was to come.
Anyone with even the slightest lean toward progressive policy should ensure that no associate of the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosi, or Schumer is ever allowed the Democratic nomination for the presidency again.
16
@corvid: Negativity alone never leads to progress. Bernie Sanders was puffed-up by the same people who plucked Obama from obscurity.
2
The power of Wall Street is not Republican or Democrat, it is the money to be made. Paying fines and pleading no contest is part of doing business. More regulation is not needed, putting the guilty in jail is what is missing.
21
@Ricardo de la O: The shareholders always pay the fines these interlocked directors, who are rubber-stamped onto corporate boards, incur.
America is starting to emerge from it's cloud of ignorance and indifference. Voters have shown that they are no longer satisfied with the crumbs of tax cut bills while the wealthy enjoy the cake. No longer do candidates need to kowtow at the feet of lobbyists bearing mountains of dirty money due to the emergence of online fund raising. We are ready for emergence of a true populist who is fearless and will unrelentingly attack our income inequality problem. Will that man or woman arrive in 2020? Let us pray for that.
20
He came in 2016. Bernie.
@jonr: Quit praying. That is what doped this nation into this mess.
1
Ms. Dowd, at 66 I have been reading you for years. You just don't get it. Carl Ichan is still rich. My retirement is still destroyed. 2008 was a disaster. And Republicans still cheat in GA and NC. But our son and daughter in law are doing well. We are doing well because we have played the puzzle well. Get out more. Meet the people. Learn. Peace.
6
It's probably just as well that the rich hide behind their wall, protect their children in private schools and avoid the unwashed in their daily lives. If not, surely some revenge would come their way. Times are changing. Technology is improving. Walls are what they used to be and the mood of the country is changing.
4
I'm not claiming to be an expert on this but I thought the evil genius of the 2008 scam was that everything the grifters did had been made legal under Bush II (or whoever ran the country in those years). So please enlighten me. Exactly what crimes were left on the books that could have been used to charge the Wall Street types? What would have been the likelihood of conviction? And how much time would they have actually served?
20
You are right to include the Democrats in this indictment. From my view, the Reagan Restoration ran essentially uninterrupted through the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for they are not democrats but Rockefeller Republicans in sheeps' clothing, putting a sly hustle on America, too.
Sure, they weren't as egregious with tax policy - which actually was to Wall Street's benefit in the long run - but they were co-enablers in financial deregulation and lax enforcement. And why should there be any surprise? They were assigned Wall Street monitors like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin (incidentally, at the very top of the DOJ line prosecutors' list that got suppressed by Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, both really just on sabbatical from Covington, the banksters' firm, while at DOJ).
The big money and dirty money have their way, no matter who's in the Oval Office. That's the brutal and sad reality. Things are so lax, Lloyd Blankfein can assert with a straight face in a Senate hearing on derivative fraud and other shenanigans that Goldman is "doing God's work." And hardly anybody bats an eye. The country is fatally corrupt, I think.
Btw, nice photo of the Mugs' Row. None of those guys should have been entrusted with their departments.
13
@Rocky
"fatally corrupt" There's a phrase that we will be hearing more often. Alas.
1
Little known/discussed Section 2634 of federal ethics law known as a certificate of divestiture. Tax exemption on investment sales, for members of the President's Cabinet. It's overwhelming what spoils are being enjoyed by these people.
12
The criminality was in the bailouts. Totally unconstitutional -- as is the Federal Reserve itself, who not only printed trillions in bailouts to both domestic and foreign banks but created the real estate bubble in the first place with their reckless (and political) easy money policies.
The Federal Reserve has enormous powers over our economy and they have proven themselves incompetent for over 100 years. They are the source of the endless cycles of bubbles & busts and they are mainly responsible for the growing wealth disparity. And yet most of the citizens of this country don't even know what it is that they do. Even more sad is that most of the men and woman in our congress do not understand what they do. Not a surprise that the fundamental problems with our economy are only getting worse!
6
@Lisa M
Time for the Chicago Plan?
They had a referendum in Switzerland. It failed for the time being. Check it out.
1
I thought Obama spent too much time worrying about what people would say about the first black president. He knew that there would be a backlash and anything he did to upset the right wingers like jailing their favorite grifters would invigorate the hate of the right. Of course, his being black was enough and it still apparently is. I thought he should have jailed the criminals, but I understand the argument against. I always felt he should have done the right thing no matter the consequences to the democratic party. He didn't see it that way. I thought they should have gone to a national healthcare rather than the ACA, but there was likely no support for it among the moderate democrats who are really just republicans. Which is likely part of the calculus for not jailing the criminal bankers, it would have sent the moderate democrats over to the GOP, they are barely democrats as it is.
There were many times when I felt Obama was worried about being the black guy doing things to white folks. In the end it didn't matter because the racist right wingers got all riled up anyway. Trump is not particularly different than most people in the GOP. He simply has never had to be sneaky about his true intent, although, he may not have the intelligence to be sneaky. In his actions he is a common man among GOP politicians. His cabinet are similarly common among the GOP and thus their overwhelming support among the GOP controlled senate.
21
How rich it would be if some of Trump’s miscreant appointees end up in privatized prisons in which they hold a financial interest.
23
@Quoth The Raven That's money right there.
1
I'm glad Ms. Dowd mentioned Eric Holder. He invented the idea of a deferred prosecution when he was in the clinton administration, before going back to Covington and Burling which represents these white collar criminals. Talk about conflicts of interest. Read Judge Rakoff's piece in the NYRB that simply says the failure to prosecute was simply inexcusable and at the least was an act of spinelessness. There are the dots that lead from Obama's detachment to Trimp's engagement for bad purposes. #HealthcareNotWealthcare.
7
Maureen, usually when you get Obama or Clinton in your cross hairs you set my teeth on edge, but not this time. Obama was a good president - not great, but good. But, he did not use his power sufficiently when he had it - not in reigning in Wall Street, and not in providing a public option in the ACA. He kept thinking he could build bridges to the Republicans, but they had already stated publicly that their only goal was to discredit him. He should have fought them.
32
@earlyman Yes, but I think Obama adhered to the old-fashioned system of trying to be everybody's president.
3
Kellyanne Conway said: “Haven’t they learned that the president always gets the last laugh?” Yes, but of late it is a feigned and nervous laughter of the president hiding the fear of being investigated and punished for crimes committed before and after the election. The recent mid-term election has shown that one cannot fool all the people all the times. People in asylums laugh too when they cannot handle reality and they recede into a delusional world of make believe. Yes, the president will have the last laugh indeed, but the mindset would be different for him in the other gated house provided free of charge by the American public.
8
Couldn't agree more with MD's smackdown - trouble is, the referees (Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and a few dozen others) added numbers to the down count, helped the fallen barbarians to their feet and declared the losers winners on points. For Mr Whitaker; Sir, I have a working Tardis for sale...any suggestions?
4
The Guardian-- “The 2017 CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 312-to-1 was far greater than the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965, and more than five times greater than the 58-to-1 ratio in 1989”
Nancy Pelosi cited the distorted pay ratio in a speech last year, but now this has to be discussed in our media---by NYTimes columns and on cable TV news.
Explain how in our past generations, the middle class was secure and expanding, unions were strong, state college tuition was low, corporate taxes were high, and employees had rising wages and secure pensions.
Once, jobs stayed here, yet business was profitable. This contradicts all the excuses given by the elites today for our economic imbalance.
When will a NYT columnist do more than bash Trump, but also start analyzing that contrast with today on all counts? How will it also reflect on Dems? Is that the problem that makes the media avoid the topic?
15
There must be decorum in the White House. No pointed questions about the caravan or white nationalist. That would be so gauche, so improper. No, uphold said "decorum" by appointing a corrupt stooge as AG, and tweet out a doctored video of Acosta asking an important question -- just to keep it classy. So classy, in fact the 5000 soldiers won't be able to see their families during Thanksgiving because Trump needs them to defend us from a looming caravan. Or maybe a better idea would be to send the troops to the Camp fire where they would be needed.
10
Generally good analysis, but you have forgotten one of the key aspects of the "bail-out" of Goldman came before Obama was elected. Treasury Secretary Paulson let Lehman fail and said "NO more government bailouts." The next day he was visited by Goldman's CEO (Paulson had most of his net worth tied up in Goldman) who told him that the US had to bail out AIG because Goldman had so much exposure to AIG had it gone under, Goldman would have gone under, too. The next day the US bailed out AIG. This is not a disputed story. What is shocking is how few journalists know or remember this story and how many politicans have deliberately forgotten it!
21
"President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook . . . ."
No, they didn't make a mistake; letting the bankers off the hook was the first part of a quid pro quo that now has Obama raking in the Wall Street bucks.
Ms. Dowd references Thomas Frank's "Listen Liberal". This book should be essential reading for every liberal, progressive, and Democrat in the country. Barack Obama sold out the Democratic Party so he could join the oligarchy, just as Bill and Hillary Clinton did before him.
And Eric Holder's failure to pursue real justice against what Ms. Dowd calls "the miscreant bankers" places him, in my opinion, right down there with the other worst attorneys general in modern history: John Mitchell and Edwin Meese.
11
The "dual mandate" imposed on the Federal Reserve Bank, to patch over the monstrous incompetence of Congress at fiscal policy with monetary policy, wrecked traditional banking, and created a derivatives casino ridden with insider trading.
Let's play Lotto, let's play Risk. That's the American Way!
6
Trump really does want decorum at the White House. The only problem is, he thinks decorum is what happens when you throw a ball between two rugby teams.
1
Let's keep in mind that President Obama had no legal power to "punish Wall Street scammers".
Or am I missing something?
That well is so poisoned that throwing even a dozen Wall Street CEO's to the alligators back then would simply have resulted in a dozen new ones who would have been back to their old tricks in no time.
And I love Thomas Frank, but he's wrong about his "white blood cell infection" theory.
Obama got elected to a second term.
Yes, we did infamously get crushed in the 2010 midterms, but that was a result of the the ginned up, "fake" Tea Party movement, not because of some terminal Democratic blood infection.
Sure, in a perfect world, some of those crooks should have went to jail.
Let me know when we get there.
9
@JayK
that's "should have GONE to jail", bud. Tenses, tenses.
Yes, the bankers getting away with destroying the economy and the quiet shoring up that Obama did with these same bankers made me sick. And if only something had changed. When the average person is one month late on a credit card payment, the heavy handed responses begin post haste. Different rules for us.
10
Greed and inequality will be what kills our nation. It's more than just 'taking other people's money' which is what the top dogs do. Greedy powerful people who do not seem to ever have enough, who rig the system in their favor and punish the little guy is causing us all to be cynics.
Yes, Obama failed by not holding these bankers accountable. It certainly drained me of hope. He also refused to hold W and Cheney accountable for secret renditions and torture. Those two things increased my cynicism and I went from 'Hope' to 'Nope' pretty quickly. On a personal level, I adore Mr. Obama. But he did not stick to the values he espoused in many of his fateful decisions. I don't like to think why he chose as he did (post presidency connections that he didn't want to burn?).
Now Trump has conned too many of us and my cynicism should be complete. But I have found some light and hope in the midterms, in the millions of women who worked so hard to elect many women to Congress, and take back the House. If that kind of movement can continue and we take the Senate and presidency, I hope that the banking industry will be put on a tight leash with lots of oversight and regulations to make sure we 'little people' are not taken advantage of again.
Greed and inequality. If things don't change, greed and inequality will cause the decline of this country. And, really, who wants that? Even the uber rich who benefit the most from this country will be hurt.
11
Serious crimes and misconduct in the banking and financial industries deserve serious consequences. These were not forthcoming in the wake of the GFC.
The only thing these crooks fear more than losing their money is jail time. Letting them off with zero accountability and bailing them out with public money was morally wrong and a tragic mistake. Now emboldened, the perpetrators are at it again with more vigour than ever.
It's beyond maddening that the average person can see this clearly without the power to act; yet the 'smart' people with the power to act refused to use it.
Obama is a decent man who did a good job in many respects, but I and many others are disgusted he did so little to deter the rampant greed and deceit of Wall Street and its cronies.
Now we are all at the mercy of an even more corrupt financial system. Those who believe that the Democratic Party lost its soul and mission in this disgraceful episode are absolutely right.
7
Who--and for what-are we to punish?
Just hating those with more doesn't get anyone very far.
And as for last laugh, it has not been laughed.
Stay tuned.
3
OK, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight (always perfect), Obama make mistakes in letting Wall Street and big banksters off the hook. But at the time, the very survival of the US economy was at stake.
And Obama didn't create the 2008 financial debacle-- George Bush and the Republicans did. (Yet Bush's name isn't mentioned a single, solitary time in this article!)
The idea that Obama is somehow to blame for Republican financial mismanagement, the current climate of corporate and government criminality, and Trump is simply laughable!
Jaw-dropping misinformation here. Only surprised that Ms Dowd somehow didn't blame Hilary Clinton too!
15
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
And a lie, by either a democrat or republican, smells just as foul.
Our center is lurching from one extreme to the other, yearning for justice and fairness for the common man.
But we are betrayed and swindled either way.
As WB Yests... The Second Coming .. would say:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
3
This is all true, but it's also all old hat. Big money (corporate, banking, individual) started its acquisition of American politics (now a wholly owned subsidiary) with thew formation of the Business Roundtable in the 1970s and created a complex even more powerful than the military-industrial one: the government-finance-corporate complex and its two capitalist parties playing politics for the media and folks: our bread and circuses. Yet the NYT endorsed HRC enthusiastically in January of 2016. Only the "radical" left and libertarian hotheads wrote books and articles, but the virtue-signaling "best and brightest" did nothing. No way to replace the fraud with a real people's democracy anymore. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become. The young progressives will usher in a change? Sure, when Goldman Sachs turns itself into non-profit.
4
None of this is ‘Breaking News.’
Just another day in the swamp (or cesspool) that Washington has become.
Call it kakistocracy, call it cronyism, call it whatever you like.
It didn’t just happen and it’s not going away any time soon.
Unless,
Bob Mueller For President.
7
"President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. made a terrible mistake by letting the miscreant bankers off the hook rather than saying, as F.D.R. did, “I welcome their hatred.”
Obama welcomed no one's hatred, and it cost us all dearly. It was a colossal mistake to allow the bankers to walk away unscathed. It set the tone that "too big to fail" was, indeed, "too big to jail".
To those who want to blame the "little guy", remember that due diligence is the duty of lenders, not borrowers. Most borrowers were people who had never taken out a mortgage before and were naive. They lost everything.
I know what bankers told them because I was told the same thing. Not being my first rodeo, I said no thanks to a loan I thought would be too much despite the reassurances offered that the value of the property would only rise (until they all fell). Bankers were not offering loans to qualified buyers; they were selling a risk they understood to people who they had reason to believe probably did not understand it. The "liar loans" were being pushed by the banks.
Would someone please tell me how many - both number and percent of loans written - were to "waitress[es] in Las Vegas who had six houses leveraged at 100 percent with no income...." If there were any, wasn't it the bankers' responsibility not to loan to people without income? It is their duty to check on employment.
So Wall Street still wants to blame their victims? Cry me a river, crooks.
8
The US is still a place where you don't get sent to jail unless you are convicted of a crime.
Only the Queen of Hearts pronounces sentence first, trial afterward.
So please do us the favor of letting us in on the secret of what laws the "corrupt bankers" and "scammers" and "colluding elites" and "grafter" and "economic royalists" broke.
So far as I can remember, a baker's dozen or so of individual financiers faced charges from the SEC and maybe from the NY AG as well. They were duly tried and just about all of them (apart from "Fabulous Fab") were acquitted -- if not in in trial court then on appeal.
Can Dowd please tell us who deserved to go to jail for what? I haven't exactly ransacked the news reports, but I followed the aftermath of the financial crisis quite closely. Here is what happened? A lot of people placed wrong-way bets and lost big-time. And when I say a lot, I mean probably 50 million -- from all walks of life.
Quite simply, almost everyone -- from garbage collectors to investment bankers -- thought home prices would keep on appreciating. True, once the crisis broke, charlatans came out of the woodwork in droves claiming they had predicted the crisis. But you could count on the fingers of two hands the real prophets. And some of them went on to lose bundles on other bets.
But it is a professional deformation of journalists that they can't understand the operation of the economy except in terms of scams and conspiracies. Let's have the real news.
5
I don't know Icelandic law, but here it is difficult to criminally convict an individual when the entire system failed, as it did with the 2008 banking crisis. Current U.S. laws are not ipso facto--the bank failed, so all the top guys go to jail. You need an act and a law that proscribes that act. The general notion of taking too much risk taking was not, and is not currently, against the law.
What people should be upset about is that the U.S. taxpayer funded the bailout of a number of banks whose excessive risk taking led to their downfall. Gary Cohn seems to accept no blame and doesn't see what leaders of the financial system did as even morally wrong, let alone criminal. Likewise, Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers, has never accepted responsibility for what happened to his bank and pretty much blames everybody else--politicians, the Fed and investors.
We all understand that once a couple of banks imploded (e.g., Lehman and Bear Stearn, with Merrill Lynch perilously close) action was required to keep the other dominoes from falling. But the attitudes of guys like Fuld and Cohn, as well as high fees and mediocre service, are why many people have moved away from traditional banking toward low cost, on line banking and securities trading services.
I don't know anybody who actually "trusts" Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs or any other bank like them anymore. This is the biggest threat to the banking system. Most people don't want to use their services.
5
“The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street rose up as opposite expressions of anti-establishment rage, nourished by the sense that colluding elites in government and business had got away with a crime,” George Packer wrote in The New Yorker. “The game was rigged — that became the consensus of the alienated.”
Nourished also by vast infusions of Koch Bros money, never forget, or again fail to mention.
6
A glaring omission is of course an account of how the conditions for the financial crisis as well as the collapse itself occurred prior to Obama's presidency.
The bulk of the article concentrates on the blame placed on Obama for failing to punish the grifters, plus some head shaking about how we're back to not just 'grift as usual' but an oligarchy of grifters.
If the trump administration sets up conditions for another collapse, followed by a Democratic president tasked to clean up the mess just as it reaches its nadir, will it be another 'rinse and repeat' of the same blame cycle?
5
America makes what rich want legal, and what poor need illegal. So there is no surprise that in the name of saving the banking system the crooked bankers and Wall Street thugs got away scot-free.
Unregulated capitalism as advocated by Trump and his supporters makes inequality in all spheres of life inevitable.
Obama didn't push for punishing people responsible for the financial crisis because his priority was to save the economy. Existing laws favoring white collar criminals, and Americas love and respect for rich and powerful never help to make the country fair and just.
5
America is the cow that gives us milk. Some decided that the cow would be more profitable if food was withheld. Others sold the barn and left the cow out in the cold. Still others decided that their dairy products would go better with some nice roasted meat. The cow began to have chunks carved out of her.
The cow isn't giving milk anymore. The butchers are ready with their knives; ready to carve more flesh off the cow, and to use those knives to defend against the angry starving villagers. How much longer until that cow topples over dead?
3
The rich get away with everything. Oh, occasionally an outrageous scam artist like Bernie Madoff winds up wearing an orange jump suit. But, for the most part, wealthy bankers aren't going to do any perp walks or face any serious jail time because Obama chose to look the other way. Nothing to see here. Move on, move on.
3
With President Trump appointing Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General and sending troops to the border to ward off a non-existent “invasion,” he has now officially qualified the United States as an Acting Banana Republic. Trump has already surrounded himself with Russian-style oligarchs, i.e., very rich business leaders with political influence who are, indeed, “too rich to jail.” Trump’s best friends on the international stage are prominent dictators, such as Putin, Xi and Un. Now all Trump needs to do is rig his next presidential election and we can drop the “Acting” to become a real Banana Republic with all the “decorum at the White House” fit for a king.
7
The current White House has never been filled with so much dark money and crooks. President Obama’s inability to put the Wall Street swindlers behind the bars, was an example of the capitalism run amok. Now that we have a real swindler as the president why any one would be surprised by the appointment of Whitaker. America is unique in the sense that it does not allow to hate the bank, Wall Street and real estate swindlers. Almost every administration has managed to make people believe that people who racked the economy are too big to punish. No where else in the world someone pay a billion dollar fine and not admit any wrong doing.
8
America is genuinely rotten to the core these days. And, yes, Obama let the crooks who perpetrated the biggest fraud in the history of the world off the hook. But the calculus was not about the financial system somehow collapsing if the criminals within it were prosecuted and jailed. It was all about Obama needing Wall Street money if he was ever to win a second term as President.
As Bernie says, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. And today Americans are carrying more debt than right before the financial crisis. The casino will shortly turn upside down again, but worry not because we have a corrupt casino magnate running the country!
America has become a bad joke. We are the laughingstock of the world, both amongst our enemies and our friends. Nothing short of another revolution can right the ship. Our founding documents and laws are completely antiquated and insufficient to ensure honest governance of this country. We need to start over as a country. Is that possible? Will that happen? I sincerely doubt it. I'm afraid America will just continue to decline even further. Where is an FDR when you need him?
7
Really, Ms. Dowd? You had to look for another cheap shot at President Obama? You really think that Obama righting our economy without taking punitive action against wrongs done under his predecessor, is comparable to Trump, a crook surrounded by other crooks, who has been deregulating business without a thought for the destructive long term consequences?
6
It was unfortunate that the former President didn't want to enter the frey and get his hands dirty in pushing Congess.
The Republicans have no fear of that. As I recall, the Democrats allowed themselves to be pushed into supporting the Iraqi war because the Republicans we're calling Democrats Un-American if they didn't support it.
As far as draining the swamp. It has expanded exponentially.
Also paid lobbyists should be outlawed for both parties. All it is, is legalized graft.
5
Too Rich to Jail?
I was wondering if this column might be about Zuckerberg and Sandberg lying to Congress without any consequences.
6
The Obama apologists here need to find their courage and take a harder look in the mirror. What they will see are hypocrites who are unwilling to hold Obama accountable for his failure to hold Wall Street even a little bit accountable for their crimes. There was a lot more going on there than fear that they might make the whole system tumble. In fact, they were unwilling to untangle the democratic establishment from the beautiful golden calf named Wall Street.
4
Trump should have been thrown in jail for the drippingly fraudulent "Trump University". His contributions to the NY state Democratic bosses were excellent investments.
The legal technicalities that protected the Wall St. gangsters, were written by legislators wholly in the thrall of those same gangsters.
5
You're preaching to the choir, Maureen.
The part of it you leave out is that the banks & mortgagers rigged all the laws in their favor so they were next-to-impossible to prosecute, AND Shrub's regulatory people were in bed with them.
If you want to name people who should have gone to jail but were untouchable, it starts with Greenspan and goes down from there.
These people weren't just too rich to jail, they were too rich to even inconvenience.
8
I would cut Obama some slack. His top priority was to untangle a bank crisis that threaten to freeze the nation's credit and doom the economy already in free fall. To fix Wall Street required the cooperation of the very banks responsible for the market collapse to rebuild a functioning banking system.
It was multiple massive wildfires during a prolonged drought and with high winds blowing. Catching and punishing both the intentional and accidental arsonists while trying to put out the wildfires with their help became Obama's Sophie's Choice.
He chose the economy over indicting the bankers. Part of what informed that decision was the failure of juries to convict bankers who had been indicted on criminal counts in at least two instances. The complexity of proof, evidence and the reasonable doubt standard in a criminal case involving high finance -- defended by the best Harvard, Yale, UChicago lawyers at white shoe law firms with no shortage of firepower -- made it a double moral hazard. Not pursuing criminal convictions creates moral hazard but having indicted bankers acquitted by juries can only triple moral hazard by vindicating the guilty.
Also there's a fine line between criminal intention and bad risk assessment or bad business decisions.
All this points at the folly of banks too big to fail being also banks too big to hold accountable.
Moral hazard -- that is greed -- is a defining feature of American banking.
Too big to jail is too big to not bust up.
505
@Yuri Asian
I agree except for "He chose the economy over indicting the bankers. " Everyone seems to think that putting some bankers in jail will somehow damage the institutions they lead. Somehow putting a bunch of Goldman Sachs execs in jail will somehow cause the bank to fail. Wall Street and the big banks are institutions that will shrug off the loss of a few greedy criminals. After all their a plenty of greedy criminals left to run the institutions.
Even if you might not convict them not trying is a worse message.
38
"When Wall Street does it, it's legal." The actual problem is that what most people intuitively understand as a crime is perfectly legal in America. That's the problem.
You cannot put someone in jail when the theft has been legalized.
18
@Hondo I don't know, A zillionaire banker going to jail has to be frightening to someone living the high life. Seeing someone like that go to jail is chilling to the well to do. Jail is no picnic.
15
Reflecting back ten years, I think it is important to remember that the entire financial system was in peril in 2008 and 2009. And its failure would have resulted in economic trauma exponentially higher than that which occurred. The bail outs were not simply about protecting the banks, but preventing us from the devastation that would have taken place. This by no means suggests that Mega Banks, Wall Street brokerages, and the like were not complicit in the panic. Moreover there is a chard of truth in the allegation that a kind of greed infected much of the population during the housing bubble. Wall street laid the foundation, but average Americans helped construct the flimsy structure that collapsed. So while the story certainly involves critique of banks too big to fail and executives who came away unscathed, it is importantly about how interconnected we are as a people and that our tribal instincts should be modified not heightened by recalling the Great Recession. Of course as Maureen points out, it has had the opposite effect.
5
I keep waiting for someone to tell us what the crimes were. What I have read is that there simply were no specific laws that bankers violated. Geithner, in his book about it all, goes into detail about the Fed's efforts to come up with something to hit the bankers with, and kept running into just that - a lack of laws to pin any charges with. Sure, you could say Geithner was just one of the same crowd but I dont buy that line.
So the failure there was Congress's failure to write laws that constrain dangerous behavior.
13
After a number of exhausted, terrified, and, hopeful political years, I am utterly resigned to the fact that with a Supreme Court lost forever to the billionaire class, this dark turn reflects the nation's culture, breath, and life. Like other third world nations, we have learned to be poorer, and expect much, much less from our government, and each other. I cling to the steady, average, America in my neighborhoods, cities, and suburbs. If we wanted more, we would fight the corruption, at every turn. But, we do not. Each billionaire owns our children's future. That is the quiet deal lurking in the air every day. We pay the bills and they pretend to leave us alone. They are the World Party and will always enjoy subservience from the Republican Senate and White House. This system works exceedingly well for them. The rest of us watch, complain, accepting their disdain for the law, and the status quo. On occasion, they throw in a few more LGBT rights, a few more pennies for military pay, keep Social Security solvent, and we are perked for another few years. America's expectations of raging income inequality is the same as the value of our work; very very low. No one cares. America's attitude fuels the billionaire class with powerless labor and weary lives.
25
@purpledot: so THEIR strategy seems to be working.
the rich & powerful few might grin, ever so slightly,
every time the dissatisfied 99.9% leave the streets
and return home ... disenchanted.
when they form a caravan and march northward ...
they are quickly painted in the most frightening colors
which makes their fellow [wo]men fear them - deeply -
INSTEAD OF SOLIDARIZING. we could stand SOLIDLY
instead of falling for the traps set to divide us, every time.
1
One question I have, as I read about tax cuts for the wealthy, and proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the subsequent deficit, is: Why do Republicans think we pay taxes? To underwrite defense spending that enriches a handful of elites, like Dick Cheney? Or maybe to bail out big banks when they fail because of their own recklessness? In other words, conservatives don’t want to be there for us— that would be a handout. But they want us to be there for them, to the tune of billions of dollars in bailouts. My other question is: what exactly are conservatives conserving?
39
@Anne-Marie O’Connor -- I'm sure you know what they are conserving: their wealth, privileges, and power.
@Anne-Marie O’Connor:
tentative answer #1: their wealth.
[but i guess you knew that.]
tentative answer #2: our gullibility
i.e. our lack of courage to fight back
i.e. to hold them ACCOUNTABLE!
1
@Anne-Marie O’Connor
Their POWER and PARTY
Party over country and people!
We are sick and tired of reading yet one more opinion piece, dancing around the main issue without the author having the courage to identify the huge elephant in the room!
Everything described in the article neatly falls in to place once realised that the shocking events are natural corollary to any country that’s swears by laissez-faire Invisible Hand economic model.
The beautiful idea of the Invisible Hand enraptured economists as well as many political thinkers for more than two centuries. It is more a loose metaphor for the way markets may work than an ironclad law. The Invisible Hand is believed by economists to demonstrate that markets where goods and services are freely exchanged will result in the greatest benefit to buyers and sellers alike, and as noted direct investment where it is most useful, enhancing the rate at which the economy can grow. All of this takes place without any outside government intervention.
Successive American administrations, notably from Reagan have made the Invisible Hand the basic foundation of their work. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. Government efforts are seen as harmful.
The Invisible Hand is an approximation, usually not applicable in the real world without significant modification. Dependence on it leads to major policy errors, most of them having to do with restraining government intervention.
13
@N.G. Krishnan But what alternative to free markets would you prefer. Government control of the economy has been tried.
One commentator once said "What is the difference between capitalism and communism? The difference is in how they answer the question "Who will stay up all night with the sick cow?"
In capitalism, the answer is - the owner of the cow.
I detest the way that power has concentrated to the top in our form of capitalism, but what kind of govt power would replace it?
@Fletcher: There is universal agreement outside US that America has been afflicted by an ideology that doesn’t work.
Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals.
American tunnel vision on economics is perhaps due to “Among the members of the upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely. This is a very comprehensible human reaction.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
We all admire and even idolize Obama now, compared to Tsar Trump and his courtiers, who have no regard for ethics or duty to the public. But Obama didn't fight hard enough for financial regulation or affordable health care for all. Maybe he was naive, or didn't have the background and techniques to fight.
Obama put Geithner and Summers in his cabinet, to 'smooth the runway' for the bailout of Wall St. The public didn't get such support. Many economists say the banks are bigger than ever, and we're headed to a new crash.
The American flaw is that both parties must vie for Wall St mega donors for campaigns. Someone has to pay for the onslaught of campaign ads that flood our media and manipulate voters.
Many other democracies ban paid ads on their media during campaigns, so their political discussion isn't dominated by special interests. Just imagine the ripple effects of that totally different political atmosphere. The mass of ordinary citizens might actually have some influence on their elected govt to make laws in their favor, and regulate the super rich to maintain some balance in their politics.
50
The irony is that even with millions of Americans now making small donations, and actually eclipsing the big-money donors in absolute terms, who do you think Chuck Schumer is going to pick up the phone for, one of a million schmoes who each donated $20 or an exec from Goldman Sachs who bundled $ 2 million? Until there is a real cap on campaign financing, the small donor will always get short shrift.
25
@Meredith
It's not that Obama didn't try hard enough as you say. He was thwarted at every turn by republicans sworn to oppose him. The fact that he achieved as much as he did is miraculous.
So let's not blame him for the current mess. He has ethics and intelligence:
Qualities completely missing in the trump criminal cabal in White House.
7
Republicans fought for the banks and tried to destroy Obama.
Not that bankers weren't jailed, but that regulation, a return to Glass-Steagal, failed. There was also talk of cc interest charged to be a maximum of 15%--what happened to that? Elizabeth Warren was not allowed to run the Consumer Protection Agency--the bankers pushed back thru their bought and paid for Republican (and NY) legislators.
At one time crooks may have been the first choice of Trump and Pence (he hired them) to run the agencies. Now it's the only people that will work for them.
35
Although everything Dowd wrote is true, the people of fly-over country have been left behind economically and were shattered by the financial crisis. Their pain elected Trump, not their anger at bankers. Had Democrats shown more empathy and made economic equality the main issue of 2016, they might have won.
29
Yes. The Democrats could champion a living wage with a unified voice, and not simply preside over years of low minimum wage that transfers wealth from workers to business owners and shareholders.
22
In response to Socrates
"Sure Barack Obama could have done things better."
No. Reality check. Follow the Money
Below are the top 5 campaign contributors, to Charles E Schumer, leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the de facto leader of the Democrats. Note: This his career average, not a picked year to make a point
Top Contributors, 1989 - 2018
Contributor
Goldman Sachs
Citigroup Inc
Paul, Weiss et al $
JPMorgan Chase & Co $$65,000
Credit Suisse Group $56,669
You can not jail Wall Street bankers unless you are willing to take on Charles Schumer, a wily politicians who has not lost a SINGLE election since he entered politics, full time (no side jobs) in 1998. That is twenty years ago - and not a Single Lost election
Obama was is in no position to do so - lest he was willing to enter an all out fight between the Wall Street Wing of the Democratic Party and its Left Wing
At some point Trump critics need to admit that the Democratic Party, too, is in the pocket of Wall Street
59
@Woof, what are you talking about? Schumer does not have authority over the FBI on it should investigate nor does he have the power to control DOJ investigations. He can have as many big money donors as he wants. Unless those donors are paying off investigators and judges, then it's a moot point. It is on Obama. The idea that if you jail bankers then the entire system collapses is a bridge sold to the American public to protect campaign donations to both parties. Frankly, I wonder if the statue of limitations has run out so those criminals can be put behind bars.
3
@Woof...yes our system legalizes corruption since it makes both parties compete for rich mega donors to run for office. Jimmy Carter said we veer to oligarchy since it costs millions to run for any office.
And our judicial system is compromised when in most states judges have to run for office.
Some other democracies ban the paid campaign ads during elections that flood our media, manipulate voters and cost a fortune. They aim to keep some balance of political influence on lawmakers. Here, that's gone out of fashion.
In fact Maureen Dowd doesn't grapple with it, nor do other Times columnists. Campaign finance is a topic avoided in our media.
A few candidates recently rejected PAC money, and raised small donations from voter. Could this be a trend in future?
1
And why wasn’t Obama ready to do so? Roosevelt would have.
1
Our elite has evolved into an anti-democratic culture in which it has become acceptable to pay workers unlivably low wages while rewarding business titans with grotesquely bloated salaries and bonuses and virtual immunity. For years, greedy plutocrats were rewarded with admiring media coverage while critics of this strange value system were dismissed as cranks or marginalized as “socialists.” When in fact, the pooling of resources at the top is socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor.
Obama didn’t create this tidal wave of entitlement, and only collective moral courage can turn it. Until then, people will live in a hardscrabble America where honest work is not rewarded, basics like health care and public schools are neglected, and drug company profiteering has fueled drug addiction.
66
"But it was just another Trump con. . . . Trump’s White House started off like a branch office of Goldman Sachs"
True. There is no defense for that.
Still, American politics has a bigger problem, of which this is just one part. Our elite, and specifically Goldman Sachs, owns all of our politicians. There are no non-Goldman choices on the ballot.
Hillary's advisers were also from Goldman Sachs. She gave her infamous secret speeches to Goldman Sachs for upward of half a million dollars, and dared not let the public know what she'd said to them.
Then of course Obama also cashed in even bigger, $400,000 for just one short speech. That comes with the look of payoff after he'd assured them in 2009 they were quite safe from justice. The Democrat's Justice Dept would not trouble them. Who would abuse the Justice Dept that way? Trump would. Yes, he's as bad.
Why would a good man like Obama do that? He is a good man. He did do that. Therein lies the real American political problem.
Trump is awful. If you remove your rose colored glasses, Hillary too was truly awful. But Obama was good, and we got the same from him.
The problem is that we have not had a choice other than Goldman Sachs. That is far more important than just attacking one bad one. They own us, our political system is bought. Their small change, fractions of one guy's bonus, is enough to buy all the candidates and pay for their campaigns too.
86
Until corporate officers are held personally responsible for financial crimes committed by their companies, the purchase of political loyalty will remain a cost of doing business.
26
Until Citizens United is somehow countered with honest campaign financing reform, with bipartisan support of course, safe from the fangs of the Roberts Court, the situation will persist.
That decision was one of the worst ever. When corporate wealth can buy politicians under the guise of free speech, it simply continues the process of a brazen transaction that hurts the little man: you fund my campaign and ill everything to help you prey on consumers and make fast bucks in a free-wheeling economy.
And when said economy crashes, you can't punish us or we'll m ale sure you aren't elected.
Greed and money dominate the political system, which is why corporate crime is so often ignored.
9
@Mark Thomason Well, they own the political system, but they don't own "us." The Second Amendment ensures that.
1
Does all this naysaying about the rich and privileged in this country suggest a recasting of the French Revolution in 1789? Could be you will not find much argument about the positive nature of such a repeat of international history. Trump turns around and hires Wall Street for his cabinet with a few soldiers thrown in for spice. The Trump administration makes Obama’s failures look like those of an authoritarian. Wall Street is running wild.
24
One of the first things Obama did after he was elected was to give Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, architects of banking de-regulation, "seats at the table", the Economic Council table. That was the first ominous sign something was out-of-sync. Later, he would call Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, one of the smartest bankers he knew. Yet, Jamie Dimon's bank also had to be bailed out by non-elite tax payers
Obama seemed to prefer the company of elites no matter what their stripe.
Sometimes the "smartest guys in the room" can't see the forest for the trees with disastrous results for the rest of us.
38
From the Washington Post on July 22, 2010 (for everyone floating on the river of false equivalency):
"President Obama launched a new era in the relationship between Washington and the financial world when he placed his signature Wednesday on a massive bill to rewrite the nation's financial rules.
Inside a building named after a Republican president who championed deregulation and praised the "magic of the marketplace," the Democratic president signed into law the most ambitious overhaul of financial regulation in generations, saying he was acting to protect ordinary consumers and to "rein in the abuse and excess" on Wall Street that pushed the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse.
The landmark legislation, which came after more than a year of legislative wrangling and intense lobbying, grants broad new powers to federal watchdogs -- and places great faith in them to prevent another crisis."
That - and cutting unemployment in half and rescuing the economy from a Bush-Cheney freefall - doesn't seem to earn nearly the respect it should.
349
... but his administration didn’t lay a glove on the perpetrators of one of the biggest frauds in US history. Obama’s failure to prosecute those responsible for the sub prime mortgage scam that almost brought down the economy has created a cynicism and lack of faith in the justice system, the costs of which are incalculable.
5
As an alumnus of Harvard College, which has a pipeline to Goldman Sachs, and as an alumnus of the Public Integrity Section of Main Justice, where Eric Holder was his first 12 years as an attorney, I completely agree with Dowd's take: the elite of the US is rife with manufactured & manipulative personalities - which is often how they obtained their elite status - who are in major part engaged in predatory schemes that often have a fraudulent element. This is a significant part of the Wall Street culture. The white shoe attorneys - of which Holder was one (at Covington) before he became AG, are handmaidens to the financial elite. Of course, Holder was not going to go after the fraudulent bankers with any vigor. Holder was establishment through and through with a patina of social & civil justice activist dusting his veneer. Obama also, while commendable in many respects, was much more a creature of the establishment than his election rhetoric promised (David Bromwich's LRB articles are trenchant on this point).
Trump's con was to harness the legitimate anger and alienation so many Americans rightfully feel with the political and financial elite. The celebrity and consumer culture, which are intertwined, have a stupifying quality, and their penetration of daily life now runs so deep that most of the population doesn't have the education and time to plumb the depths of corruption in this country. They rightly have a sense that something is deeply wrong . . ..
167
I’m an attorney too. My comment: very astute.
8
@William M. Palmer, Esq. Makes one almost prefer predictably crooked Republicans than endure the frustrating hypocrisy of "Democrats" who talk the talk, then walk the financiers' walk. I haven't voted FOR a president yet, four decades now.
3
@William M. Palmer, Esq. definitely something very rotten in the US...and not at all clear that the stench is going away.
5
From 1945 to 1972 GNP went up. 100% and the median wage went up in lock step with it, as did each segment: poor, working, middle, and upper classes.
Since 1972 GNP has a gone up another 150% but the median wage has been flat - for 45 years! That means all those gains have gone to the 1%. Furthermore, some groups such as health and tech workers wages have improved, which means two generations of the working class have had to live with declining expectations for the sake of the 1%. This is simply unsustainable - sooner or later some monster like Trump or worse was bound to come along and exploit this situation.
This 45 year trend was not sustainable without the help of democratic elites.
Worse most Democratic elites are still down with this. I watch Richard Haas and a litany pundits, left and right, talking about how the global trade system has been great for America. Yeah, for the 1%. For the rest, not so much. It’s not a big deal for a person to vote to ruin things if their livelihood has been in ruins decades.
The only candidate advocating demand side economics in the last election was Bernie Sanders, and the effete media elites, including at those at the Times did a media blackout on Sanders until late December 2015.
Don’t like Trump? Look in the mirror and vow to vote for those candidates that campaign to shift bargaining power back to the working class and raise wages all the way around.
119
@Tim Kane The USA of 1977 that I first visited has nothing to do with the broken, defeated, angry country it is today. Everywhere you looked there were proud Americans of humble origins who did good, lived righteously and held their heads high to the wind of freedom. Low tuition, affordable housing, living wages and a path to the middle class were all bright and present. Today your choices are Wall Street scoundrel at 80 hours a week, Silicon Valley surveillance bro at 100 hours a week, or Starbucks. There are absolutely no middle class "roles" or wages in the pipeline. All have been or are in the process of being replaced by artificial "intelligence" running accounting systems, trading platforms, manufacturing plants, customer support centers, journalistic and entertainment media, and even health centers and hospitals. The future looks bright.
18
@Tim Kane....wages flat for 45 years is exaggerated. But it's true we lag other countries in economic mobility and middle/working class security. Our union membership is very low vs abroad.
Antidotes to this imbalance wasn't well debated in the election, as the NYTimes columnists denigrated and insulted Bernie Sanders. They seemed to see him as a threat to the nation.
There is a trend for some candidates rejecting PAC money in favor of small voter donations. The Times and other media has to stop avoiding that whole issue of campaign finance reform which most voters and many in congress want. Big money campaign finance is the biggest block to any progress.
15
Much of the work in Silicon Valley is really financialization of of markets, rather than true technology. So-called AI is knowledge arbitrage, surveilling users to train their virtual replacements. The problem, however, isn't that robots will do all the work. The problem is that only a few people will own the robots doing all the work.
22
If Obama had tried to punish Wall Street, the Republicans would have used this to split the country. He was already a Kenyan, a community organizer, a Socialist, someone who was not really American and who was out to destroy America. The fact that the president was the wrong color meant that America was already falling apart.
Obama did not want to split the country even if his side could win. Such a struggle would have been uglier than Trump and would have left the country bitterly divided. And since Republicans already had no regard for facts, truth, or consistency, and were masters of the political Big Lie, the split would have been blamed on him and he would probably have lost. Jailing some top financial figures and leaving others to run their businesses the same way would do little, and making them run things differently would be communism.
Maybe he should have tried. But success was by no means guaranteed, and a nasty gridlock of trench warfare (which is what he eventually got) or a successful Republican counterrevolution were also very possible. Also, his heart would not have been in it because this was not who he was or how he had presented himself to his supporters.
They went low, he went high, they threw mud and worse at him from below, he was dirtied but not dragged into the mud, and he was not a one-term president.
The idea that he could have fought and won is a comforting or infuriating (why didnt he try) myth, but has little to do with reality.
118
He advertised ‘hope’ and ‘change’. There was no change, and the hope faded. By the way, the Democrats were in control of both houses of Congress too. Time to knock Obama off his pedestal.
2
sdavidc9,
The everyman in the USA made a simple calculation in 2016. The finacial catastrophe was the bankers going greedy reckless. They should have been jailed or at least fired. If I messed up at my job that way I would have been canned! Trump "says" he's going to fire the bums. I'm in!
@sdavidc9 Obama was no socialist, as he proved beyound a doubt. He does have a pleasant personality.
1
Apologists for the Obama presidency would have us believe that the administration’s response to the crisis was pragmatic and the best possible under the circumstances. On this point, it’s worth reading economist Joseph Stieglitz’s discussion of the bailout in “The Price of Inequality.” As he notes, the bailout was condition-free, enabling the bankers to give themselves bonuses rather than to serve the economy by doing more lending. Other paths were possible, he contends, but the Bush and Obama administrations did not pursue them. The upshot was a “perception of unfairness,” and it can be argued that that perception helped fuel the rise of Trump. An unwillingness to reckon with the misjudgments of previous administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, only ensures more economic hardship and the emergence of future Trumps.
36
Yeah, now that Trump’s lacykeys have eviscerated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and removed the restraints put on banks and the financial markets by the Dodd-Frank Act, I feel so much safer.
37
@Miriam Chua
Criticism of Obama or of previous administrations is not tantamount to an endorsement of Trump.
2
@Ann - hindsight is always a day late.
1
Of course! It's Maureen Dowd, and before she expands on the issue with some righteous comments, she ignores context and humanity to ...
Blame Obama!
I'm sure she would have done better had she been president (not).
69
@Susan Anderson
Dowd always fails to draw distinctions. She sees little difference between the characters of the Clintons and the Trumps (including the offspring0 and gives Obama little credit for the real financial reforms instituted under his administration, including Dodd-Frank, which the Republicans have tried to eviscerate.
2
Susan Anderson,
Seems Mo got an awful lot right too.
1
She at least would have put the bankers in jail where they would still be.
1
An even worse nightmare scenario: The indicted, arrested and tried bankers are acquitted. The burden to demonstrate intent of fraud, the burden to demonstrate deception and intent to damage could have been nigh impossible in a nationwide dynamic like the housing crisis. Particularly in light of the fact that the 'victims' were willing participants in the fraud. Many new home owners had to have known they were getting in way over their heads. The simple math that they were going to go belly up would demand that the fraud was bi-lateral. The people who ended up on Main Street were there because of their collusion with the people of Wall Street.
13
@Richard Mclaughlin
To blame the victim of the housing debacle is like asking the bank robber, "Why did you do it? ... Why, because they made it so easy!"
1
@Richard Mclaughlin The bankers have millions to spend on advisors. The average home owner? Please spare me your disingenuous prattling on.
The Wall Street execs and 'wizards' who orchestrated the "financial innovations" that led to the big crash should have paid a penalty. If their company is "too big to fail", and the consequences of a default and bankruptcy would be too dire, meaning a government bailout is needed, there still needs to be a penalty. Since every one of those Wall Street execs and 'wizards' grabs the bonus eagerly when their schemes and "innovations" produce the big profits, they need skin in the game on the downside. Here's my Wall Street financial reform proposal: If a Wall Street bank or 'financial services corporation', insurance company, or major financial institution gets into a position where a government bailout is necessary to protect the overall economy from dire consequences of it's business failure, then the executive team leading that bank, insurance company, or 'financial services corporation' go to prison. The prison time is proportional to the size of the bailout - for every $10 million of bailout, they get a month's prison time. Further, their entire personal net worth is forfeit to the bailout - and they are banned from ever being an executive or officer in any corporation, for life. Now, all the Wall Street execs and 'wizards', go ahead and be just as risk-taking and 'innovative' as you want... with those consequences for failure, should you set up a risk to tanking the economy.
34
@Jim Brokaw I grew up in Pittsburgh when Regan and Schultz destroyed the unions and a way of life. Lives were lost. These bankers should not suffer monetary loss. They should suffer life in prison. But hey, like Trump they are the leading lights of the greatest city on earth. Take down.
3
Unchecked Capitalism is the basis of the United States of America. It is more of a religion than Christianity is in this country. I was raised by ardent Republicans who believe and taught me that it is the only way that works, and all other styles of government will fail because you are going against human nature.
I am a Liberal for the most part now. However, I believe in God and that Jesus existed. And I believe that the tale of the second coming of Christ is closely tied to the end of the barbarity, the deviltry, as it were, of unchecked capitalism and its evil against the majority our fellow humans. And I believe that Progressives and their designs to improve the life of all of us are tied to a revolution such akin to the second coming and the vision for widespread good on Earth.
20
@Jay Sonoma - Point taken. As a run-of-the-mill lapsed Catholic who occasionally ponders things Revelatory, I will add, what better adversary to act as a catalyst for said movement than a guy who owns property at 666 5th Avenue?
2
@Jay Sonoma and Ernie saw his shawdow and when back in his burrow. Spare me. Your buddies disagree with you. Just watch MSNBC advertisements. All the dreck prattled on by Rachel and the cohorts is offset by reality. Wealth and entitled privilege pay the bills. Your christiantism will no doubt please the Anti-Christ. Or is this too unpleasant a thought to entertain. Like the southern Evangelicals who are deluded to the right. You Sir are deluded to the left. The mother will judge. Sorry for subjecting your heightened NYC sensitivity to this rant. Try getting out of your burrow into the real world and not some Trivago delusion payed by your Daddy. Look at the mess in England, Brexit is engendered by the wealthy class just as Trump is. Soon I’m going to cancel my NYT subscription. The beer is pretty good here. Fortunately.
Democrats should soon have tent revivals...
1
Sure there perhaps could have been some prosecutions. There were however massive fines paid by almost all the big banks and investment banks, many firings and careers ended, and some miscreants put out of business (ie. Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Insurance, New Century Insurance) and many others restructured under Government aegis and with some payback (ie. General Motors, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). So Obama not only literally saved the Nation from possible financial ruin, he also did punish and try to clean out the wrongdoers ie. "drain the swamp"). That's alot more than we can say about the Tea Partiers (who are mostly former George W. Bush supporters) who have brought us Trump who, as Maureen has pointed out, rather than draining the swamp, is poisoning it perhaps to the point of no return.
55
@Brainfelt Many of those "massive fines" proved to be illusory - like the purported $500 billion mortgage settlement. Furthermore, to the extent that the fines were levied because of behavior that had tangible harms to specific individuals, there was no distribution of proceeds to the individuals who had been harmed. The government also failed to use information it had to help those harmed.An obscure example: a company named DOCX was found to have forged millions of documents necessary to use in foreclosures; in the orgy of minting CDO's, banks often did not get or lost notes, mortgages, transfer documents and the like. The president of DOCX got one of the rare prison terms meted out - but victims were never notified or given information that they could have used to seek redress or contest their foreclosures. Instead, the government simply pocketed some fines, jailed one person, and moved on. This all happened on the watch of Obama and Holder. Obama is reputed to have stated or felt "they took out reckless loans." Probably true, but the government spent trillions (not just TARP, but the much more important TALF) to help those who made the improvident loans, but virtually nothing to those who took them out. Short-term, low interest loans to underwater borrowers - mirroring those to the banks - would have enabled millions to eventually recapture their equity.
25
@Brainfelt -- So executives and traders take the risks, reap the bonuses, and when the fines come in the shareholders get stuck. I think any fines for financial misbehavior assessed should come from the executive leadership as well as the shareholders. Or maybe the other way around - if there is a great profit made from the risks taken by the executives, it all goes to the shareholders, not to the executives, who get only the salary their shareholders agree to by a binding vote each year. Since the shareholders are taking all the downside on the fines, they deserve all the profits from the business's operations. The executives are otherwise gambling with other people's money, and keeping a big chunk of the winnings while paying out none of the losses... If you're an executive, that's a perverse incentive for not following the law and taking unreasonable risks. We've already seen where that game leads.
10
Of all these fine and sanctions, I wonder how many were ever even paid? I was disheartened when reading some of the NYT coverage of housing and real estate violations in NYC to read that, while there was great publicity about fines and people being held accountable, many were never collected because well-lawyered companies were able to litigate or delay so long that statutes of limitations kicked in or government agencies just didn't have the resources to implement the laws and regulations.
I suspect these practices are widespread in banks and other businesses. Much easier to go after low hanging fruit like code violations or tax errors.
2
Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and many more Democrats are weak just as Trump says. That may be the only truth I've heard from him. The woman, Hillary Clinton, portrayed a dignified reservation in the face of the brutally minded sinister Trump. And still, Democrats have not learned. Immediately after winning back the House, the weak dignified motherly figure Pelosi clamored to the top to reclaim the leadership. And Trump said he could work with her? That was a mighty big clue to Trump's real goal of winning over her. Trump is probably laughing at how weak the Democrats are.
Despite my past cynicism towards Democrats because they are so weak, I still got out and voted for them only to have my hopes dashed by Pelosi's surrender of the power of the new House majority when she started the baloney "Bipartisanship" hopes in the face of a cutthroat Republican party. Democrats will lose the House again in 2020 for repeating the same mistakes. Gone are the Kennedy Roosevelt domineering types that used to bring strength to the Democrat party. Now it's a party of the weak, themselves and who they represent.
I don't think it's wrong to defend the weak. I do it all the time. But to have the weak defend the weak is a losing strategy. Democrats need strong bold male leadership to fight for the weak among us. You must fight strong corrupt leaders with strong righteous ones.
Trump and his gang are highly dangerous formidable foes, and women and weak men are no match in the ring.
12
@Shakinspear - So a guy who reflexively uses the term "Democrat party" and states here that the Dems will "lose the House again in 2020" and denigrates women as "weak" is trying to convince us that he voted for Democrats in - which year? Last I heard it was Mr. McConnell cowering to a live mic in an empty chamber about bipartisanship.
Your prose is undefined.
And your definition of "weakness" is dead wrong.
10
@Shakinspear
I had a mother who could have taken on the Trump's and their GOP quislings with one hand tied behind her back. We don't need "bold male" leadership pal. We do need bold, smart, forward thinking tough leaders who can craft a vision of an America that works for the 99% as well as the 1%. We need to work together and women will surely be in these necessary leadership roles. I am not particularly enamored of Pelosi but I detest Schumer so it will be interesting to see who emerges. Staci Abrams strikes me as a natural leader and she has the brains and drive to get things done. She was cheated out of a Governorship and we need people like her now.
36
@Shakinspear. I agree that we need strong leaders. However, I take offense at your assertion that only men are strong political fighters. And, I think you misread Nancy Pelosi, who is tough, smart, and battle-hardened. Trump's offer to work with her is pure posturing, and I'm quite sure she is not, and will not be, taken in by his attempts to manipulate her. Of course she -- and all in Congress -- need to seek bipartisan cooperation, but that doesn't mean she'll concede an inch to Trump.
36
Not a very mathematical analysis. As annoyed as she may appear to be, Dowd misses the point that the economy was then able to build itself up again. Compare to the UK policies of Austerity and you see a country teetering and sputtering along. She may not like Trump and his comrades, but his rise has nothing to do with Obama. In fact, her bashing of Hilary may have had more to do with Trump’s victory than any well thought through policy Obama enacted.
33
Um... the rise got its solid start during Obama’s watch and the trend line is straight between the administrations. Obama gets too little credit and Trump too much.
11
@Sara Klamer,
Oh really? Vibrant economy. I've been living in a gig economy for 20 years. I've been swindled out of my retirement and watched while pawns of the rich claim the taxes I paid in social security is really an entitlement doled out by the government. Just try and kill social security. I, and others like me, engineers and scientists will be coming after you. We're the creative slice of society you really don't mess with. We built the F16 and other expensive weapons: this genius can to turned against the rich and their pawns.
1
@Sara Klamer
I disagree that allowing crimes to go unpunished is the trade off we need to pay for a strong domestic or world economy. That is a myth perpetuated by the very people who profit from their misconduct.
2
The inherent failure of our Country was the pardoning of Nixon. If Nixon had gone to prison for his crimes, we wouldn't have dealt with a series of Presidental crimes (Reagan, Clinton, Bush) over the past 40 years.
This concept that Presidents are above conviction is a horrible precedent. The worst aspect of Presidential crimes is the correct perception that those at the top aren't held accountable.
How can we expect those of lesser socio-economic status and power to follow the law when we don't hold the top of the pyramid to the rule of law?
We can correct this huge error by enforcing the law today!
55
"When I was in Reykjavik in August, Icelanders were bragging about putting the corrupt bankers who ravaged their economy in prison."
All four of them? How many bankers are there in Iceland to begin with, corrupt or otherwise? They could all probably fit into an apartment building in Manhattan.
Small countries, relatively speaking, with democratic (and not authoritarian ) systems of government do put corrupt bankers in prison. There are fewer of them, and it is easier to do so.
As the banking system is also smaller in such countries, regulatory agencies and supervisory agencies might have an easier time catching the corrupt. The rot of corruption (assuming that the government is not corrupt to begin with) in these smaller countries tends to spread less. The bankers do not represent an entire social-financial class and they are less altruistic in sharing their corruption with their fellows.
So Iceland, Ms. Dowd, is not a serious comparison.
18
@Joshua Schwartz
Even a big country like the U.S. can put corrupt bankers in prison. Just ask the savings and loan executives who were jailed by Reagan.
Reagan? Yes, Reagan. Even the king of unbridled capitalism knew corruption when he saw it. Obama and Holder did not.
2
@Joshua Schwartz not sure but the number was around 70 watch Micheal Moore's Where to invade next for the details. It was more significant that ALL those jailed bankers were men and the only bank not to fail was run by women. The difference was the will to punish the bankers, let the banks fail and let their European investors lose their money. Thus Iceland remained in control of their financial fate.
1
@Joshua Schwartz bankers also have disproportionately more influence in small countries.
Eric Holder represented some of the offending bankers in private practice in the years immediately preceding his tenure as attorney general. I have often thought that he was the wrong person for that job at that time. Bernie Sanders continues to warn us about too big to fail banks and too big to jail bankers, and tries to take corrective action. Unfortunately, he is routinely disparaged by the know-it-all elites as just some crazy "socialist" who doesn't know what he is talking about.
36
Let us not forget that when Barack Obama became president, this country was on the verge of a second great depression. It turned out to be just The Great Recession, than goodness. The big banks have the best lawyers. And what laws did the big banks actually break? They were very careful to stay within the lines, protect themselves from litigation. Even smaller financial firms, like Countrywide Financial, managed to stay within the law while taking advantage of homeowners with subprime loans. This was not Barack Obama's fault. He inherited the mortgage loan crisis and the Great Recession.
122
@Jeff
The laws that the banks violated are too numerous to list. Suffice it to say that there are laws that require honest accounting and accurate financial representations. The banks covered up the default rate of their loans and made loans beyond their authority. They failed to have sufficient reserves by misrepresenting their financial picture. And to top it off when they got the bail-out they did not use the money to fund loans but to reward themselves with raises and bonuses. The accounting firms that were held to audit standards changed the audit rules so they were not and never could be held responsible. The role of government was subverted by the failure to hold them accountable.
21
@Harrystc
Your comments are all very general. The biggest culprits were actually in the shadow banking industry, beyond reach of federal regulations. And I think I am correct that the big banks knew exactly what they could get away with.
9
@Jeff
You have identified the real culprits! Bank of America and Chase stayed out of subprime lending but were contaminated with their acquisitions of Countrywide and Bear Stearns after the crash.
A number of good books documented the complex “supply chain” that pumped out and sold the toxic mortgages. The Big Short by Michael Lewis is perhaps the most effective in explaining all the bad actors including Bear and Lehman but also AIG, the rating agencies, greedy brokers, et al.
The complexity and opaqueness of the shadow banking system and the lack of regulatory oversight (looking at you, Chairman Greenspan and George W) made it impossible to understand or prosecute those responsible. The few who went to trial were acquitted.
Nearly all the damage was done before Obama took office but the spread of toxic securities globally was almost impossible to assess and isolate. Obama did the right thing ensuring stability. Dodd Frank, while not perfect, has put US banks on much more solid ground than their European peers.
Maureen Dowd never misses a chance to sneer at or smear Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This “what aboutism” got us Trump, the King of Debt.
3
One president needed to maintain some stasis in the financial markets to rescue the George W Bush economic freefall and begin recovery - successfully cutting unemployment in half during his term. The other president has stolen everything from tuition money to birth control from low and middle income voters while giving a massive, deficit-exploding tax cut to the very wealthy, violating the emoluments clause, and spending 80 million taxpayer dollars on golf course trips, just to add insult to injury.
If you're going to point fingers to manufacture false equivalence - make sure your aim is true.
244
@common sense advocate
Why do people here keep saying an ethical financial system and economic growth are mutually exclusive?
Must be because its true.
2
The problem is simple.
The 1% are simply NOT making enough money - they have to steal some of it too.
If the 99% were willing to share more generously, it would not be necessary for the 1% to steal.
73
I believe it's the monarchy of 0.1% stealing from the 99.9% peasantry.
“There must be decorum at the White House.”
Yes, there must be decorum as they try not to laugh at us behind our backs for buying into the lies, the scams, and whatever else they've done since Trump got into office. Or maybe since 2008 when everything fell apart and they got away with it.
I think that the lesson all of us need to learn from this is that being rich does not equal being virtuous. Paying taxes IS the smart thing to do because it's the only way to have a functioning government that is capable of doing its job. The other part of this is that no one, not even the president or the president-elect is above the law. Trump has been allowed, by the GOP, to get away with inciting violence, attempting to use the Department of Justice as his private law enforcement agency, using ICE and Homeland Security as a way to carry out his prejudices against certain nationalities and religious groups that want to immigrate to America legally, and using his position to further his own business.
Will America wind up becoming Trumperica? Or will we awaken from our stupor and vote the bums, all of them, out so we can have our country back and rejoin the rest of the civilized world where health care is a right, access to a good education is a right, and corporations don't dictate government policy? Nah, that's asking way too much.
42
I just reread this column three times, Ms. Dowd, and the strangest thing is missing from your column?
Somehow you forgot to mention W Bush, you know, the guy who was president for 8 years, the guy who rammed though 2 tax cuts for the rich, when a surplus was left behind by the previous Democrat president.
Somehow you forgot to mention that W Bush managed to blow up the housing market.
Somehow you forgot to mention that W Bush and his Treasury Secretary Paulson put together a one page $700 billion dollar taxpayer bailout of the corrupt bankers.
In case you forgot, there were no strings attached.
Obama, Clinton, "liberal" Democrats -- looking at you Chuck Schumer and your complicity with the behemoth Facebook -- are part of the economic problem, but it's odd that you left W out of the mix, Ms. Dowd?
There is something rotten in our country, Goldman Sachs, the thread from Larry Summers to Sheryl Sandberg, the bottomless greed, the banks lobbying and writing our banking laws, the parking of money in the Cayman Islands, the attempt to privatize all government so the rich can profit even more, the current criminal administration using taxpayer dollars to enrich themselves, Trump and Kushner getting away with evading taxes and not one Republican holding them accountable.
President Obama didn't throw the crooks in jail, but would it even have been possible for him to do so?
And now we have Trump, who is W on steroids.
The corrupt Republicans are the real problem.
1020
@V Not to be forgotten is the SEC rule change under the Reagan Administration that allowed unlimited stock buyback.
30
@V
She was too enthralled with W's paintings to disparage him. They bonded over his artwork.
20
@V Obama didn’t even try. Maybe he should have. Reagan went after them in the S&L crisis.
7
As usual this subject gets the same comments despite the evidence.
Very few commenting here have read the reports, the court findings, in particular:
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: Home
https://fcic.law.stanford.edu/
The Commission concluded that this crisis was avoidable—the result of human actions, inactions, and misjudgments. Warnings were ignored. “The greatest .."
"The warnings of Brooksly Borne who was forced out of the White House economic advisors by Alan Greenspan,
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-warning-brooksley-borns-battle-with-alan-greenspan-robert-rubin-and-larry-summers-2009-10"
So look where the real responsibility for the crisis was and do not forget those house flippers who falsified their mortgage applications trying to get rich quick. No one held a gun to their heads and made them try to game the systems.
The majority of opinions here are just that,no objective evidence, and that is the core of our current problems now. Opinions treated as facts, theories treated as hypotheses. Yes several bankers did not say enough, but it was their boards and stockholders that wanted more, are you going to jail them too? Bankers do not act independently, you forget all those voters and politicians demanding easier credit for home buyers, and Bush bragging about it.
The real blame is you, the public that wanted more and thought you know what you were doing, you brought it on yourselves.
16
@David Underwood Capitalism unregulated is nothing but a runaway con game. The banks were not required to explain the terms of their loans or mortgages prior to the great recession. If many consumers didn't understand how subprimes worked whose fault is that? If someone offered you a loan even with bad credit and no job would you turn it down? Whose side are you on pal? Even today every time I walk into Bank of America I keep my hand on my wallet.
@David Underwood
The public did it. Obama did it. Democrats did it.
And poor bankers lost their shirts.
OK.
@David Underwood
Lord have mercy.
Peak full of self.
Well Maureen, over the years, after seeing so many of our leaders on the Left coopted, framed, self destruct or murdered I personally think its nothing short of folly to expect some sort of Liberal Wunderkind to suddenly emerge to lead us back to a mythical promise land of Progressivism.
If history is to be believed lasting change ,in this our constantly changing and roiling democracy, is usually a result of the efforts and sacrifices of many individuals and groups who are willing to set aside their differences long enough to form coalitions which can work effectively enough together long enough to push through legislation that reflects what they value most.
So no, instead of looking for leaders who represent Liberalism or Progressivism in its purist form and are free of private stain or weakness, lets look for people who are coalition builders, and who know how to get things done within the parameters we are dealt. Leave the super heroes to the comics, where they belong.
29
For those of you that do not read, the facts are in the Angelides Commission report.
It was not the bankers that sold those unpayable mortgages, it was some mortgage companies, that sold them and certified them as investment grade. The banks scoopt them up and packaged them to investors who were clamoring for them. They were rated investment grade by the bond rating companies who wanted the business and were willing to give those ratings. When they were sued for this, the courts ruled it was a matter of opinion, even though those rating were required by the FTC to sold as bonds.
Then the mortgage companies went and found anyone they could to refi and to flip homes. Most of those buyers were convinced they could get rich quick and signed for mortgages they could not pay.
Now which bankers did what, which ones broke which laws? You want to jail them, them provide objective evidence. I am not defending the bankers, some did leverage their finances far to high, and their banks failed. The bankers are an easy target, but it was the get rich quick mentality that caused the real melt down.
The banks were given extra reserves to prevent a 1929 style run on them, that saved us all. Too much emotion here and little facts.
44
@David Underwood
You are ignoring the ample reports of bank employees filling out fraudulent mortgage applications for people who didn't understand them or couldn't read them or were lied to by the employee. You are ignoring the ample reports of false mortgage payment demands from banks that didn't even own the mortgages, or for mortgages that were paid off. There is plenty you're ignoring.
37
@David Underwood The bankers knowingly securitized loans without doing proper, or any due diligence, and then misrepresented the quality of the security.
18
The banks were screaming for more mortgages to package so they could collect huge fees and pass the risk to the buyers of the MBS’s. They were accommodated by a mortgage industry that was more than happy to collect their own fees (10 points) while selling unplayable loans to the greedy and naive.
15
When discussing financial misconduct please remember, it's not just the bankers who have ravaged and are ravaging our country; it's the healthcare insurers ravaging the insured; the healthcare institutions who refuse care based on ability to pay and instead use the money they save for never ending expansion; and finally the ravaging of workers' wage increases for corporate salaries and bonuses must not be forgotten.
Former President Obama did appoint Elizabeth Warren who identified the financial misconduct of banks. Because of them we know who did what to precipitate the crisis.
We know they were effective because the gops incessantly attempt to minimize the historically significant abilities of both former President Obama and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Banks, health insurers and health institutions, corporations, it's all the same behavior by them, greed expressed through financial misconduct.
It's true Ms Dowd, when we are able to see it and prosecute it as criminal misconduct, we have a fighting chance at better life for far, far more people.
38
Follow the money.
26
Maureen Dowd's points are well taken and informed. As a woman, I am happy to have Maureen "on our side."
But with all due respect - sincerely - where is the illumination? The insight? The inspiration - or aspiration -in this column?
We can all kevetch and complain (I'm using my nice words here) about Trump and his administration until we are blue in the face...and beyond. The inundation of our 24/7 news cycle takes care of that.
Offer us something more Maureen; we need it. Especially from one of the leading female columnists of the New York Times during an era when the rights of women are in serious jeopardy, as is our democracy...and our nation.
46
Obama did not fail to prosecute bankers. What the bankers did was not illegal. The failure is this: It's still not illegal. The bailout could have had strings attached. Consumer protections and new bank regulations could have been built into the bailouts. Immediate firings of the CEOs who made those disastrous gambles was not even considered. TARP should have been mandatory, not voluntary.
167
@Ken I agree completely. Why is it the general thinking is there was all this skulduggery and malfeasance when in fact no laws were broken? Wall Street "regulations" are written very carefully and we all must understand.
17
@Ken False. Misrepresenting the quality of securitized products is illegal under the Martin Act. It is still illegal. The banks paid millions in penalties. No one went to jail. Dodd-Frank made the regulations against this type of malfeasance. These protections have been diluted by Trump. But there is no question that the banks broke the law.
21
@Ken...the banks didn't commit fraud in bundling and selling subprime mortgages?
11
We have become a society in which not only are the ultra-wealthy "above the law," but the law itself has become untethered from any reasonable notion of justice. We need laws that strive for fairness and proportionality rather than nonsensical cookie-cutter formulae. The idea may be termed "Valjean principle."
When an infraction is nonviolent, done in desperation, relatively "victimless" and committed on a humane motive (e.g., Valjean, a loaf of bread, a starving child), punishment should reflect these factors. On the other end of the spectrum are heinous violence and wanton cruelty, and economic crimes committed from perches of enormous wealth.
As to the latter two categories, we are "good" at punishing the first, but abysmal on the second (typically fraud and corporate crimes). In an exact mirror-reverse of the "Valjean" scenario, the richer you are and worse your impact, the milder your punishment, which never stings.
A simple formula would be: If you commit a significant crime despite your wealth (no mitigating hardship or desperation), 1 year in jail for each million you have. Then negotiations from there on a settlement combining jail time and "paying the debt" in cash, to the point penalties sting as much as for poorer criminals. The economy and society's fairness level would soar compared to what we have now.
23
My point is to focus specifically on the interconnectedness of non-accountability among the ultra-wealthy, their de facto immunity, & the grotesque concentration itself of (largely unearned, by any reasonable theory of earning or "merit" that doesn't boil down to literally making a religion of Adam Smith reconstituted, refracted, by Darwin-- a religion -called 'neoclassical economics'- faithful to neither author's actual perspective/insights) wealth that is dangerous, destructive, altogether inimical to democracy & the rule of law.
As I posted earlier, "If you want account balances that reach into the heavens, live like an angel or give up your fortune."
We must change incentive dynamics to say the standard you're held to will reflect your wealth, thereby rewarding humility & modesty rather than arrogance & greed (cardinal virtues in the aforementioned religion) as we do now.
This approach is one step toward satisfying T. Picketty's challenge concerning "Capital in the 21st Century," when we lack the political will and imaginiation to reverse a process of concentration that should never have been permitted in the first place, & only occurred because certain economists hoodwinked so many with their snake oil religion they themselves (Richard Thaler, e.g.) are now disavowing.
This "Valjean principle" is a small step, but formally, explicitly implementing it is the only way legally & culturally to start fixing the problem.
7
Indeed, the strength of the aforementioned religion's hold on folks can be tested by altering the proposal to give any such criminal a "grace"/exemption on $5 or $10 million (perhaps even $25 million!), only applying penalties to wealth beyond that amount, and determining support for the idea.
If our community can watch practices fundamentally undercutting our political system, rule of law, and democratic principles, and consider it too draconian to expect anyone guilty of that behavior to surrender their fortunes (or even a substantial percentage thereof) exceeding these suggested thresholds, then our society has repudiated any sense of fairness and justice and given over its soul to the golden calf. After all, poorer criminals' lives are destroyed for far less, ROUTINELY, and we consider it cruel or excessive to expect a (duly convicted) executive to live on 5, 10, or 25 million dollars. If that is indeed the case, America is beyond hope and deserves to be buried with its golden idol. However, I ardently hope (against the overwhelming evidence) that is NOT the case.
12
@Andrew Maltz One month in jail and no time off for every million you stole and returned, would be more realistic.
2
Mo, if the Democrats nominate another "go along, get along" candidate in 2020, they might win an election, given the Trump awfulness factor, but will ultimately only end up having to fight a more terrible battle later.
We need to restore a sense of basic fairness to American society - and the simple fact is that "go along, get along" Democrats and Republicans refuse to bite the hands that contribute to their campaigns year-in and year-out.
The Sanders campaign was an expression of the disgust that many of us felt about our "go-along, get along" politics, a politics that immunizes the wealthy from punishment while subjecting the middle- and working-classes to the death of a thousands cuts. But IMHO, Bernie was ultimately a placeholder.
The great lesson that disillusioned Americans might take from our current politics is to never steal anything small. Rick Scott was the CEO of a company that swindled the Federal government on an epic scale, and he not only got off without a scratch, but was able to use his ill-gotten gains to get himself elected Governor and now Senator.
Donald Trump executed one business or tax scam after another for decades, while lavishly contributing to politicians of both political parties, and his crimes went undetected until it was too late to do anything about them.
We need an authentic reformer and change agent in the White House in 2021. We need a President with the chutzpah to send the guilty to jail. We need Elizabeth Warren as President.
82
@Matthew Carnicelli You got that correct. A former neighbor of mine spent a year in prison because he stole a measly $196,000. If it were $196,000,000, he wouldn't have a served a day behind bars.
27
As to Mr. Sanders being a "placeholder," I'm afraid I regretfully agree, as I'll explain-- for some perhaps unusual reasons.
Like me, Mr. Sanders attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, having transferred there from a NY public university known for preprofessionalism and a highly pragmatic grade- and career-oriented student ethos, and ethos understood, tacitly supported, and used (for motivational and efficiency purposes) by faculty. Chicago was designed to intellectually arm to the gills students in such a way they could and would bring vast learning to and problems and challenges faced later in life, including vast readin in Smith, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Riesman, Merton, Tocqueville, Freud, and a hundred other writers who cumulatively provide a fairly comprehensive (ok, extensive, not comprehensive- tending to over-represent dead white males at the expense of others) set of perspectives (and that's just in the "social sciences" curriculum, excluding humanities readings) on "how we got here," including explicit and implicit ideas on "what to do about it" for students to consider, compare, ponder. And these readings are just the common corel preceding what the student does in depth in his major.
What I discovered is that Mr. Sanders openly claimed these readings were unimportant and "irrelevant" (his word!) compared to the activism (marches, freedom summer etc.) he -to his enormous credit- participated in, explaining that these courses and readings were...
4
[first, clarification: both of us started at NY public universities, transferring to U. Chicago]
......unworthy of his time and effort compared to marching & voter-registering.
THAT is a tremendous problem for me, & in my view a huger one for Bernie and the rest of us, ultimately, in terms of how Bernie failed.
Few can appreciate what Chicago offered better than a transfer student in a position to compare universities & curricula (not to mention libraries & informal learning opportunities). In my view, Mr. Sanders was OBVIOUSLY COMPLETELY WRONG about his assessment of the curriculum (consider the list: what could be more relevant??? The courses were in fact entitled "Wealth, Power, Virtue" & "Self, Culture, Society").
Mr. Sanders should have made the most of his opportunity at Chicago rather than (by his own virtual admission) squander it. If he'd done all the work, he'd have trounced his opponents in debate rather than simply repeating his slogans about the 1%. He showed no intellectual depth, the precise kind U. Chicago is designed to cultivate. Had he armed himself with the resources he was lucky, so incredibly fortunate, enough to get access to, he could have steered our politics toward real solutions & deeper societal self-awareness. Instead, we got treated to Trump's victory pathetic "battle royal" for the swing rust-belt block, won by Trump in the context of Hillary's obliviousness ("basket of deplorables" & venality (Goldman Sachs etc.). Sanders wasn't prepared.
4
That's quite a collection of hoodlums in that photo. You are correct, Maureen, many of us (including me) who got hammered in 2007 were sick about Obama's cowardice.
He must not have spent enough time around them. For example, the people in that photo are some of the most despicable humans you could ever meet. I would not allow any of them in my garage. The Bourbons also thought that their toilets didn't stink, and by the time they figured it out their heads were on the way into peach baskets.
If the Democrats don't reclaim their souls, the Republicans will rise again, because the people will rightly conclude, as Carlin said, that the game is rigged. 2020 Democratic politicians must make a choice, between more money (post career lobbying gigs, dark money) and what's left of their self respect. If they don't make the right choice here, we all go down, from global warming, war, and greed.
149
It is great fun to attack Obama and others for not pursuing the bankers, but please identify what specific criminal statutes they violated. Their was a lot of bad behavior, but most of it was not criminal. Maybe a few show trials would have been good for the national psyche--until jurors returned acquittals.
9
@Mike Roddy
One problem is that the deregulation of banking made much of what was done completely legal.
Another problem is that white collar crime is never pursued like other crimes.
6
@Eric
I don’t buy that since the process began with the nomination of Tinny Tim Geitner to head Treasury even as the committee discovered that he had cheated on his taxes but agreed to give him a pass as long as he said he used Turbo Tax. I was taught in high school freshman Vocational Agriculture about the need to declare and pay income and social security taxes in non-employee income. So the government put a obvious tax cheat and liar who clearly violated specific statutes in charge of the system. Corrupt from the start.
I am guessing Obama's deal with bankers was made before inauguration, look at the donors and appointments to related positions.
18
It isn't just that you "let the corrupt bankers who ravaged our economy roam free with bigger bonuses, more lavish Hamptons houses and fresh risky schemes. ... put white-collar criminals in charge of the country — elevating epic grifters to the presidency and powerful cabinet posts." It's that there is a culture of wealth worship in your country that keeps people in thrall to the Church of the Almighty Dollar even as they are fleeced of their hard earned shekels.
To wit: The trial of Paul Manafort. Part of the opening salvo by the defense lawyer was to extol the virtues of his client by offering his client lived a life of extravagance and opulence the rest of us can only dream of. The implication being, who among us would turn down the opportunity to live such a fabulous life? What's a little white collar crime anyway? Just don't get caught. Or work for a boss who's about to.
Right now, in the middle of this borrowed boom, are millions upon millions of middle class people who are working their buns off, clinging to the wisps that are left of the American Dream in the hopes they can hang in there and make it.
Until those hopes are completely dashed don't expect too much from 'the pitchforks of an angry public."
A few obvious scapegoats will be strung up by their neckties and the rest will continue as they were. The same as it ever was.
59
@Memi von Gaza Actually it was the prosecution in the Manafort case that described his rich lifestyle.
1
@Dan Backus
I beg to differ.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/paul-manafort-trial.html
“Paul Manafort travels in circles that most people would never know,” his lawyer, Mr. Zehnle, said. “He lived a lifestyle that most people can only dream of.”
1
The "unintelligent" Sir Alan Greenspan who let the criminal Greenwich Connecticut crowd of Long Term Capital off to be free and rich and wealthy started the recent trend of letting the bankers off and we still have not learned or adjusted.
Sadly, our nation and politicians do not understand crime and criminals...like downloading a record illegally verse walking out of a store with a CD or record? The book "To rob a bank, own it" covers some of this. The reality is there is no "Rule of Law" functioning in the United States. There is much classism and racism and cronyism embedded in deeply.
24
Remember how Trump said that only he, as a political outsider, could end corruption ('drain the swamp,' as it were)?
Remember how Trump said that he was the candidate of 'law and order'?
Remember how Trump said that Hillary Clinton was too close to Wall Street to be trusted?
Turns out that being a sleazy businessman made Trump just as corrupt as any politician, that his idea of the long arm of the law meant he and his cronies were out of reach, and that he could staff his administration with Wall Street CVs and again deregulate the financial sector, so long as he looked for public distractions, like the immigrants. Trump knows well the abuses of power; he cashed in on them from the first and will never stop.
69
Trump did drain the swamp, but he refilled it from the cesspool. Sad for our country
2
When customers of the patent company that employed Matthew Whitaker complained, he would threaten them with legal action, brandishing his title as former U.S. Attorney General of Iowa to intimidate them. He was a low-level scam artist for a crooked enterprise set up to defraud patrons, not unlike an employee of a crime family. And his legal opinions fall into the crackpot category. Now, he is the top guy at the U.S. Department of Justice. If Trump gets away with it, people will lose faith in our system of justice which is the lynch-pin of our democracy.
193
@Whole Grains
Loosing faith in our justice system is a feature, not a bug. The more the oligarchy can convince us that "government" is the problem, the easier it is to pick our pockets and do as they please without consequences.
26
He wasn’t the U.S. Attorney General of Iowa—he was U.S. Attorney—a federal, not a state position.
5
Arrogance and over confidence are not crimes. Stupidity is also not a crime. Also the bonuses were contractual obligations of the banks. Getting the banks sued for default on the contracts was not a financial burden the administration wanted to add to the banks' other problems. Finally these businesses are so big and spread out, finding individuals who actually broke the law was all but impossible.
During the S&L crisis of the mid 80s, the self dealing and conflicts of interest were easy to find. Not so with 2008 problems.
5
It took 40 years for the GOP to bury FDR’s new deal. The Reagan revolution’s genesis was 38 years ago. The next recession, after this last sugar high of Trickly down Economics, will be the death kneel for the supply siders who’s let them eat cake arrogance will finally be exposed for what’s it is. Unamerican.
29
But Maureen, you fail to understand Keynes' dictum that " reform is the enemy of recovery."
4
Anyone who says "crime doesn't pay" has never visited America. Indeed, here, it seems that if you don't commit a financial crime, you don't get paid.
77
Everyone interested in what went wrong in 2016 should read Listen Liberal. Thomas Frank basically predicted the 2016 election outcome. Sadly, too few Democratic leaders, if any, read it at the time. But it's not too late!
Frank, by the way, was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
24
Interesting title, complete with the picture of the rogue’s gallery beneath. Too big to jail or too much power to curtail? When the participants in the greatest heist in American history also run things, who exactly would be able to charge them? Remember Bernie Madoff? He was big but chose to go solo. This story is about is a cartel with global tentacles.
I don’t understand the constant revisiting of the Obama years, mistakes may have been made, but no scandel has been reported. Trump, on the other hand, is mired in it. Surrounded by greedy profiteers, he continues to monetize the office, as they look on approvingly. This is seriously in need of being brought to an end.
50
Obama was, indeed, a thoroughbred. He was part of the Michelle thinking: "When they go low we go high." So Obama "went high" to save the bankers.
However, and this is VERY important, the economy was about to go over a cliff. So, as a peacemaker, he enlisted all who had created the financial meltdown to work together. He saw no point in prosecuting them at that terrible time for the country. It was a killer for his reputation as an non-elitist, though.
But, that being said, he should have found a way to bail out homeowners who were underwater, or in major debt or a bankruptcy situation. Let them stay in their homes, or let them renegotiate their mortgage, or give them some kind of break.
Obama, as brilliant and articulate as he was, was always a peacemaker - non-confrontational - before he was a strong voice for Democratic principles.
111
He did find a way to bail out the homeowner. I have a 3.85 percent mortgage rate, made possible by refinancing though an Obama era program. This rate was unheard of before the great recession. Over the course of my 30 year loan it will save me and my family hundreds of thousands of dollars.
73
@Tryingtobemoderate. But only a relatively small number of people were eligible for this money — and THAT was the problem and the “sin.”
3
As an interracial child of separated parents of course he was a peacemaker first. Peace is what millions longed for after the brutal, sad, destructive Cheney years.
3
Obama not only gave Wall Street a pass, he refused any question of investigating the Bush administration for its criminal invasion of Iraq, its collusion with the telecoms to illegally spy on Americans, its rampage of kidnapping and torture. He (and other Democrats) caved to the moneyed interests on a public option for health insurance. In these instances and others, he did what the Republicans advocated, and they immediately demonized him as an extremist for it.
The Republican craziness not only helped Obama keep the loyalty of his base after betraying them, it set the stage for selling a sleazy con-artist like Trump as a reformer. As always, the Democrats looked like hypocrites because they advocated reform and then sold out. The Republicans advocate selling out & corruption as their version of reform, and then rake in the cash. And they apparently get by with this because their voters can identify with foul-mouthed, entitled billionaire but not with someone who has actually made something of themselves. Strange country.
29
Ms Dowd you act as if all the Govt needed to do was simply charge these bankers with crimes and they’d all be in jail by now. Prosecutors in places like the Southern District of New York certainly would have gone after these guys if the evidence and law was on their side. No better ticket punch for a big firm partnership than a big Wall Street scalp on one’s resume. The problem was proving criminal intent when all these deals were blessed by lawyers, accountants and other professionals. These were set up to be intent-proof. Combine that with defense lawyers creating reasonable doubt re criminal intent and clients who’ve never been in trouble and these were tough cases to make. It’s simply lazy and too easy to say “oh you should have just charged them all.”
63
Baloney the fix was in and they chose not to charge. Had they charged at the very least someone might have flipped and the cases would have kept the light shining on the corruption.
10
@Rick Ficcorelli:
The "banks too big to fail" and similar financial companies could have been temporarily nationalized and their shareholders wiped out. That would have cost the bosses some money. Then they could have been split up to end their oligopoly. There was no attempt to do that.
7
@Thomas Zaslavsky
Like that could have ever happened. The cry of socialism would have been made so loud that Obama would have been most likely impeached by the republican congress.
That is one of the most foolish ideas I have ever heard. Reality needs to be accepted not denied.
3
I have long held the opinion that large American financial institutions -- the Goldman Sachs's, the Wells Fargo's,
the Chase's, the J.P Morgan's, etc. -- are far and away the most
corrupt of their kind in the world and do everything possible to keep my few dollars and shekels out of their hands.
28
Impunity was a right of aristocracy, and is always a demand of antisocials, as well as loyalty and secrecy. Thus the rich, our corporate leaders, and our law enforcement have created a two tier justice system in which they are rarely convicted and even more rarely incarcerated, while the poor serve life sentences in woeful conditions for non-violent drug offenses and mental illness.
23
Agreed, things weren't handled very well.
Going forward...May we all keep our eye on the ball and try to do better. That is all we can do.
A Happy Thanksgiving to all.
14
"When I was in Reykjavik in August, Icelanders were bragging about putting the corrupt bankers who ravaged their economy in prison. In America, it works somewhat differently. We let the corrupt bankers who ravaged our economy roam free "
Well, Ms Dowd, not always. After the Savings and Loan debacle, that cost the US taxpayer $132 billion, more than 1,000 bankers of all stripes were jailed for their transgressions.
That was then under Republicans lead by McCain
Forward to now.
To understand why the Obama administration did not jail a single banker consider this lunch time remark of Paul Krugman to Martin Wolf of the FT
"Look, with even a few mild words of reproof, Obama has lost a huge funding source from Wall Street."
Paul Krugman May 25, 2012
https://www.ft.com/content/022acf50-a4d1-11e1-9a94-00144feabdc0
Politicians do not bite the hands that feed them - McCain excepted. That why we miss him - with all his faults
56
@Woof McCain? Savings and Loan crisis? Are you serious? I first became aware of John McCain when the bank in which I held my childhood savings account, Lincoln Savings and Loan, collapsed. I equate the name of John McCain with Charles Keating. We can identify many positive things McCain associated himself with, but the Savings and Loan Industry was not one of them.
10
@Woof
Where did you get your misinformation about McCain, who was part of the notorious Keating Five?
4
@Woof
Good lord!!! Talk about alternative facts! McCain was caught up in the S&L scandal of the late 1980’s but on the wrong side. He was caught interfering with regulators on behalf of convicted criminal banker John Keating, a major McCain donor.
I will give you partial credit on bringing up the S&L crisis though, because it happened undered a Republican President (whose own son was implicated no less!) and yet bankers still went to jail. Different times indeed. Rule of law used to count for something in the United States. Monied interests still had undue influence 30 years ago but they were not entirely above the law as they are now. Libertarian deregulatory agendas and the steady river of corporate cash into our electoral process along with revolving door regulators have lead us to where we are now. The Republicans largely led under Nixon and especially Regan, but the Democrats were quick to catch up, they did it together, and here we are. The progressive legacy of the New Deal is dead and lawless, neo-feudal oligarchy has taken its place.
1
When in doubt, Maureen, always kick your favorite black punching bag.
Sure Barack Obama could have done things better.
But context matters.
The repeal of Glass Steagall was part of a 1999 law called the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act; three Republicans wrote it and Democrat Bill Clinton signed it.
The 2008 Great Depression was ushered in by seven years of Bush-Cheney-GOP 1% tax-cut welfare looking for a roulette wheel to slosh around in, a total lack of regulation of derivatives, and the Bush-Cheney Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's (OCC) preemption and override of states' anti-predatory state laws.
In addition, the criminal ratings agencies certified collateralized debt obligations that were worth pennies on the dollar as AAA gold.
For seven years, Bush-Cheney and the Grand Old Pyromaniacs threw fuel on their reckless financial Wall St. bonfire until it burnt down the nation.
Then Barack Obama and the Democrats stepped in to clean up the Republican excrement.
The Democrats passed the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform with zero Republican support and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has returned $12 billion to 29 million consumers.
And in 2018, the Trump-GOP repealed parts of Dodd-Frank and castrated the CFPB in their relentless efforts to burn down the country again.
It would have been nice to see Wall Streeters go to jail, but every one of them owes their grand larceny to 'free-market', deregulatory, Republican-sponsored 0.1% anarchy.
1754
@Socrates
"Sure Barack Obama could have done things better."
Not for Wall Street he couldn't have done things better.
For the rest of us...not so much.
33
@Socrates, you are glossing over the responsibility of Obama's administration. Goldman Sachs ruled. No Wall street banker faced the consequences of the profligacy or possible criminality. In fact they are on their way, if I can believe the reporting to do one better than their 2007/08 plunder.
Obama could have taken a hard line but unfortunately for him, his "buddies" in Wall street funded his outsize Presidential campaign financing, he just "paid" them off. BTW, I voted for him twice only for the ACA, I knew he was a center right candidate, one of the current Democratic establishment. It was a glass half full vote from what we had before.
Just look at the people he hired to "fix" the crash, one of the people, Geithner: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/11/wall-street-thanks-tim-geithner-service
62
Give it up. The sooner you realize that both parties are controlled by money'd interests, the sooner you'll see straight. Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans for the fact that we're now an oligopoly, and no longer a democracy. Obama failed to prosecute, and jail criminal bankers. He also failed to pass single-payer when the Democrats held a majority of Congress, to the detriment of hundreds of thousands - like me - who could not afford the exorbitant costs of catastrophic insurance with huge deductibles, and then had to pay tens-of-thousands of dollars out of pocket when medical catastrophy occured. But why would he or Congress pass single-payer, or jail criminal bankers? The finance, health insurance, and pharmaceutical industries contributed hundreds-of-millions of dollars to his and their campaigns. Democrats mouth a lot of verbiage about standing up for the little guy, but when push comes to shove, they show their true colors. Money in politics is the reason we lost our democracy, and why every branch of government has been tainted with its stink.
100
We all hope that Mueller can make a convincing case against the Trump crime family. However, nothing will change long-term until we get big money out of politics.
It's one thing to complain, yet another to take action that saves the Republic...
78
@pjd Get big money out of politics, unfortunately, we won't. But one could hope for limits on contributions & sunshine to show us who's donating to whom.
12
@pjd. The now solidlyConservative SC will never let go of the fiction that corporations are people and are thus entitled to spend money on campaigns and lobbying just like any other human billionaire. When money is equated with speech, bankers can interview and question Trump and the Congress, but reporters lose credentials and standing.
6
Thank-you for your article...all this with research needs constant amplification. And, yes, Obama was good maybe is good, BUT, he was too soft in many areas especially money distribution and hopefully he will mention this in honesty in his book (from which he will make astronomical moneys up front).
Everyone can and does make mistakes. One has to listen well, hear well to sometimes hear what mistakes one may have made. One has to be brave and not fear the consequences. The consequences need take into account as much of the circumstances as we can including the culture at that time.One, each one of us, it seems to me, needs to learn and try over and over again. The less you do the less mistakes you might make except for the grave mistake of not having done enough.
8
@Stanley
Obama and Holder's handling of Wall Street was 100 percent intentional. There was no mistake about it.
1
@Mark Shyres
Agreed. The mistake is not being aware sufficiently to see the fuller and/or longer consequences for the majority of Americans.
Thank-you for reading and considerations.
As I recall, many of the Wall Street scam artists who brought us the Great Recession and then profited from it could not be prosecuted because technically, they did do not break the law.
Let us dwell on that for a second or two.
A millionaire perp walk a day would have sent a message though, even if every one of them walked.
Then tougher laws, including Glass-Steagall to rein in large banks from "growing" into high-stakes financial casinos.
96
@GreenTech Steve
“ ... could not be prosecuted because technically, they did do not break the law.”
Yeah, that was the apologist narrative, and that’s what Obama told Jay Leno, but it was a lie. Deliberate fraud is always illegal. Read William K. Black or search “Fraudulent Conveyance”. The Sarbanes Oxley act of 2002 was passed in response to multiple corporate accounting frauds, like Worldcom. Sarbanes-Oxley contained multiple provisions which could have been used to prosecute executives who made false or misleading statements regarding their companies finances. The famous “Timberwolf and Abducus” scams at Goldman Sachs spring to mind as being particularly odious. Not to mention the Goldman execs perjured themselves under oath before Congress. They actually locked up Roger Clemens, a baseball player, for that, but Bankers get a pass.
No one was prosecuted because there was no political will. End of story.
1
But at least bonuses should not have been paid with taxpayer TARP money to financial execs whose behavior caused the crisis.
35
@david
Is this true? Please supply references/sources. I'm forgetting an increasing number of things every day but I'm pretty sure I'd have recalled such a distribution of TARP money if it had in fact been reported in august journals such as the NYTimes.
Thanks!
7
@Tom Benghauser, some of that was reported in the Times.
3
@Tom Benghauser
It actually happened and was reported on at the time.
2