The Kool Aid Has Finally Worn Off

for this commentator, and he doesn't like what he sees in Obama, with the Obama administration's clear pandering to Wall Street:

As everyone who has ever read anything I write knows, I am a big fan of Barack Obama, an absolute yellow-dog Democrat, and much quicker to defend anything any Democrat does or says than to criticize it.

But I have to say that I believe that Barack Obama has chosen the wrong people for his economic team and needs to rectify this mistake quickly or risk losing the public support he needs to accomplish what he intends. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke have got to go, and go quickly.

I would suggest replacing Timothy Geithner with Robert Reich, Larry Summers with Paul Krugman, and let them pick Bernanke's replacement.

See, Summers, Geithner and Bernanke are striving to rehabilitate the existing system that has failed. We need a fresh team, a team without ties to the Wall Street of the last two decades, to create a new financial system that is better suited to the realities of the times in which we now live.

These guys (and members of Congress) talk about taxing the bonuses of executives of bailed-out corporations at a confiscatory rate, or banning those bonuses outright. Why is this limited to bailed-out corporations only? Why not confiscate or ban them throughout the entire economy for all American businesses? They are NEVER fair, they are rife with cronyism and nepotism, and they are the source of a lot of the difficulties we now face. For example, take AIG (in the immortal words of Henny Youngman, "Please!"). The "performance" that triggered the receipt of these bonuses involved smooth-talking agents selling snake-oil investments, and the more persuasively deceptive they were, the more customers they bilked, the more likely it was that they'd get the big money. And this is true throughout the whole system of investment banking and insurance, not just AIG.

We have GOT to stop rewarding that kind of corruption. It is not good for our national health.

With the announcement of today's ADDITIONAL $1.2 t-t-t-trillion in stimulus from the Fed, that's ANOTHER two months of EVERYBODY'S pay. It brings the cost of this bailout to FIFTEEN MONTHS of the salary of EVERY AMERICAN WORKER'S SALARY COMBINED. How stimulative would it be if we just gave everybody a lump-sum check for a year and three months of salary?

I am afraid we are following in the footsteps of the Weimar Republic. And I am afraid that Goldman Sachs is the Obama administration's Halliburton.