[CitizensTruth] Obama Won on a Populist Surge -- So Where's the Populist Policy? - Jim Hightower

[Edward Rynearson]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/127493/

Obama Won on a Populist Surge -- So Where's the Populist Policy?
By 
		Jim Hightower, 		Creators Syndicate. Posted February 19, 2009.

In no time at all the treasury secretary has reduced Obama's populist bark to a puppy whimper. What are we going to do about it?
		

I don't mind losing when we lose, but I hate losing when we win.

  One
big reason that Barack Obama now occupies the big chair in the Oval
Office is that he embraced the public's rising indignation at the
blatant greed of Wall Street bankers, striking the proper populist tone
in last year's presidential election. After all, these slick financial
elites crashed our economy, yet they kept enriching and pampering
themselves, even as taxpayers were being forced to throw hundreds of
billions of dollars at their failing institutions.
  Having
won and taken office, Obama proceeded to rip right into the bankers'
shameless avarice, denouncing their "culture of narrow self-interest
and short-term gain at the expense of everything else."
  Great stuff! Go get 'em, Barack!
  A
week later, however, the president's treasury chief, Timothy Geithner,
rolled out the administration's plan to add more than a trillion
dollars to the ongoing Wall Street bailout, and -- Holy William
Jennings Bryan -- Obama's populist bark had been reduced to a puppy
whimper! It seems that Geithner and Obama's top economic advisor,
Lawrence Summers -- both of whom have long been cozy with the very same
greed-headed bankers who caused the financial mess we're in -- had been
cooing into the president's ears about the "danger" of "harshly"
punishing executives and "spooking" private investors.
  Thanks
to them, even though populist politics won, populist policy lost. Gone
from Obama's proposal is the idea that top managers of the failed banks
-- the executives who made the foolhardy investments that brought the
system down -- should be ousted (if not tarred and feathered). Instead,
our trillion-plus bucks are to be put right into those same hands! If
ignorance is bliss, Geithner and Summers must be ecstatic.
  The
Soft-on-Wall Street boys also prevailed over those who pushed to impose
strict limits on the pay of top executives whose banks are getting our
bailout money. While Obama's team did put a $500,000 annual cap on cash
paid to the CEO, the restriction does not apply to Citigroup, Bank of
America, JPMorgan Chase and about 350 other banks that've already
grabbed bailout funds. It only applies to those taking money in the
next phase of the giveaway. Also, the executives who do fall under the
cash cap can receive unlimited bonuses in the form of stock payments.
  The
worst part of this political cave-in is not in the details, but in the
principle that was abandoned. Obama hit it on the head when he
denounced "the culture" of executive entitlement that has infested
America's corporate world.
  In the past couple of
decades, the ethical notion that business leaders should be trustees
for the enterprise -- with responsibilities to future shareholders,
employees and the larger society -- has been displaced by a singular
focus on amassing short-term wealth for the few by driving up the stock
price, no matter what shortcuts must be taken to achieve that soulless
goal. CEOs who can jack up those prices, by hook or crook, are hailed
as geniuses and treated as royalty, no matter how much damage they're
doing to their company or our country.
  This
celebration of manipulated wealth has even fostered an absurd bit of
conventional wisdom that we can't get competent executive talent for a
mere $500,000 a year. This stems from the prevailing (and pernicious)
corporate fiction that the best are, by definition, the ones who're
paid the most. Yet 500K is 25 percent more than our country's president
makes, more than our top-rated non-profit leaders receive, more than
most community bankers take and way more than America's finest teachers
are paid. Wall Street conveniently equates compensation with value --
and since CEOs compensate themselves extravagantly, they've come to
assume that they are America's most valuable people. Indispensable,
even.
  It is this self-aggrandizing corporate
culture that must be changed. Sadly, Geithner, Summers -- and Obama --
have instead advanced that culture by failing to hold some of its worst
practitioners accountable for their enormously destructive actions.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/citizenstruth/attachments/20090219/5d290f6a/attachment.html>