By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
A betting man, the morning after Obama’s inauguration, would surely have found odds-on stakes that the new president’s first daring cavalry charge would be an assault on the economic crisis, worsening day by day. Our Wednesday-morning gambler would have found much longer odds being offered on any surprising moves in that graveyard of presidential initiatives sign-posted “Israel-Palestine”.
But there’s been no exciting surprise or originality in Obama’s opening engagements with the reeling economy. His team is flush with economists and bankers who helped blaze the path to ruin. He’s been selling his $819 billion stimulus program on the Hill, with all the actors playing their allotted roles and many a cheering Democrat not entirely confident that the House Republicans may not have had a point when, unanimously, they voted No on the package
America’s economy may be so hollowed out, its industrial base so eroded by twenty years of job exports to China and other low wage sanctuaries, that a bail-out may not turn the tide, Then the Republicans will have their told-you-so’s primed and ready to go in the mid-term elections.
But Obama can scarcely be blamed for putting up his $819 billion pump primer. It was a given, from the moment he got elected, and indeed probably owes, both in its good and bad components, more to Rep Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, than to Geithner or Summers.
Obama’s timid folly comes with the impending $2 to 4-trillion bailout package for the banks, signaled by Treasury Secretary Geithner. If anything can make Wall Street smile bravely through the hail of public ridicule for the way it’s been handing out the previous wad of bail-out money in the form of bonuses, it’s the prospect of getting further truckloads of greenbacks to lend out to Americans already crippled by debt.
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