There's Just No Pleasing Some Robber Barons

The flight from reason that now marks
American public discourse came home for me last Friday when I found
myself on public radio debating whether Barack Obama is anti-business.
The "news hook" for KCRW's "Left, Right & Center" show, which I
have co-hosted for 15 years, was an absurd spate of charges from
Obama's former big-business allies that he had become their enemy. If
only it were so.

One of those who has been complaining is
billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman, who now finds in a White House he
once supported "hostility" to the business culture he credits with the
country's greatness. I assume he is not talking about the belated
efforts to hold BP accountable for the cost of the oil spill that our
pro-drilling president once thought not possible.

And then there was Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of
General Electric and once friendly to Obama but now alarmed by new
regulations. He was one of the many CEOs cited by Fareed Zakaria in The
Washington Post as evidence of "Obama's CEO problem." General Electric
is a company that got into deep trouble when it stopped worrying about
making better light bulbs and came to devote much of its business
through GE capital to fancy financial products. With GE having been
saved by the taxpayers, one wonders what the conglomerate has to
complain about. Or Wall Street donors now stiffing the Democrats and
claiming Obama is hostile to them.

All this comes at the very time that Wall
Street lobbyists stand poised to win a sweeping victory preventing a
reversal of the radical deregulation that made the banking debacle
possible. The "Volcker rule," restoration of the New Deal-era barrier
between investment and consumer banking that Obama had pledged to
support, is gutted. As a disappointed Paul Volcker told Louis Uchitelle
in an interview for The New York Times, he would rate the reforms just
a B and not even a B-plus. Leading Wall Street economist Henry Kaufman
told the Times: "The legislation is a Rube Goldberg contraption, and
there are long timelines before the Volcker rule is fully implemented."

Game over, Wall Street won big-time, and
the Bush-Obama policy has made the financiers whole while largely
ignoring the deep plight of the true victims of the economic collapse,
the unemployed and the foreclosed. The argument that Obama is
anti-business is nothing more than the old propaganda trick that the
best defense is a good offense, so blame the victims for your crimes.
The high-tone intellectual argument for that position was supplied by
Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, a transplanted Thatcherite, at the
same Aspen, Colo., gathering where Zuckerman spoke.

At a conference on ideas paid for and attended by the rich and
well-positioned, Ferguson argued that the high rate of unemployment is
not due to the Wall Street high rollers whose funny-money games wiped
out 8 million jobs but rather the extension of the government's
unemployment insurance program:

"The curse of long-term unemployment is
that if you pay people to do nothing, they'll find themselves doing
nothing for very long periods of time. Long-term unemployment is at an
all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a
misconceived public policy."

Yes, except that the public policy that
was so terribly misconceived was that of radical deregulation, launched
by the Reagan Revolution and implemented by President Bill Clinton, not
the pathetic palliative of unemployment checks.

Notice that the attacks on Obama are not
about his having followed George W. Bush's example of throwing money at
Wall Street, the cause of the meltdown and the run-up of the national
debt, but rather the much smaller amount spent on ameliorating the pain
that the titans of finance caused for ordinary citizens. And of course
there is never a word of self-criticism on the part of folks like
Ferguson, Immelt and Zuckerman for their own roles in having cheered on
the radical deregulation that made this mess not only possible but
inevitable.

Not so Volcker, once the darling of fiscal
conservatives when he tamed inflation during the Carter and Reagan
years, and when as Fed chair and later as an influential observer he
failed to stand publicly against the move to radical deregulation. As
was reported in the Times interview, "In retrospect, Mr. Volcker
regrets not challenging the widely held assumptions that underpinned
much of this. `You had an intellectual conviction that you did not need
much regulation-that the market could take care of itself,' he says.
`I'm happy that illusion has been shattered.' "

Unfortunately, that illusion has not been
shattered for many of the elite in this country, as evidenced by their
rage against Obama's too modest steps in the right direction.