In the June 19 edition of The Nation, William Greider, a political journalist, argues (in "Obama's False Financial Reform") that Barack Obama needs to stop running interference for politicians and Wall Street. The proper parties to blame for the economic meltdown and a legitimate long-term fix are two sides of the same coin. Greider argues that Obama's "reform" is merely "kicking the can down the road." Greider pulls no punches:

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama's call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame . . . That is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests.

If you want specifics, Greider's article has lots of them. Consider what to do about Obama's false solution to unregulated mortgage securitization. As Greider explains, Obama's proposed solution is clearly bogus, yet there is a real solution:

Obama's answer is to require the originating lender to retain a 5 percent interest in the mortgage and pass on the rest. That seems ludicrous and innocent of how that cutthroat world actually works. The financial geniuses who created the subprime mortgage scandal could hide 5 percent of the mortgage value with a couple of keystrokes--adding fees, closing costs or other dodges. To hold lenders genuinely responsible, they should be made to hold onto something like 50 percent of liability for the original loan with perhaps the other 50 percent assigned to whatever bank or investment house packages the mortgage security and sells it to financial markets. That would be "responsibility" with old-fashioned force.