Could you ever imagine George W. Bush scolding credit card companies for "ripping off" and "abusing" American consumers? Barack Obama is proposing to do away with the fine print and to do away with profits that depend on misleading hard-working families by hiding fees and penalties. He wants to sign a bill reforming the industry by Memorial Day.
More proof that the conservatives are intellectually bankrupt: Instead of using valuable air time to discuss one of the many critical issues of the day, they mock President Obama for his request for dijon mustard on his hamburger.
Sam Stein at Huffpo published this impressive list of Obama's under-publicized accomplishments during his first 100 days. Some of these items are truly remarkable. As I reviewed the list of ten items, I kept thinking "it's about time." Consider the new hospital records system, for example. The Bush Administration had 8 years to clean up this big mess but didn't get anything done. Under Obama, a new system is already underway. And, of course, he has done wonderful work starting to repair the sullied image of the United States around the world. It's a lot better to have good international relations than to taunt other nations and threaten wars.
One of Obama's main points today is that we can't go back to what we have been doing:
[W]e have to realize that we cannot go back to the bubble-and-bust economy that led us to this point.
It is simply not sustainable to have a 21st-century financial system that is governed by 20th-century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy. It is not sustainable to have an economy where in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, over-leveraged banks and overvalued assets. It's not sustainable to have an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent has skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their incomes decline by nearly $2,000. That's just not a sustainable model for long-term prosperity.
For even as too many were out there chasing ever-bigger bonuses and short-term profits over the last decade, we continued to neglect the long-term threats to our prosperity: the crushing burden that the rising cost of health care is placing on families and businesses; the failure of our education system to prepare our workers for a new age; the progress that other nations are making on clean energy industries and technologies while we -- we remain addicted to foreign oil; the growing debt that we're passing on to our children. Even after we emerge from the current recession, these challenges will still represent major obstacles that stand in the way of our success in the 21st century. So we've got a lot of work to do.
In today's NYT, Frank Rich is reminding us of the sordid background of one of the architects of Barack Obama's economic recovery program. These are sad times, indeed.
Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
[P]erhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution [Harvard]would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time.