Class Warfare, II

Krugman;

Preliminary thoughts on the tax bill:

1. It’s not the way you should make policy — it’s clumsy, and it will punish some innocent parties while letting the most guilty off scot-free

2. But — there wasn’t much alternative at this point. And for that I blame the Obama people.

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

That is why I constantly say that this will never end.

We all thought Obama was a great agent for "change" that would right the wrongs of the past. On certain issues, he really is. For example, the United States is now going to sign the UN charter on gay rights. The chimpanzee refused to sign it because he was concerned that people couldn't hate Teh Gay anymore.

However, on issues related to money.. Obama is very much in the hip pocket of the very wealthy class. That's Tim Geithner's mission...

The economic problems we have now are not a "liquidity" issue. It's a human issue. It's bad management, but beyond being "bad", it's corrupt. It's a willful and purposeful screwing of average Americans.. because they can.

It's obvious to anyone.. and Obama's economic policies are obvious evidence of it. The goal isn't to fix the true economic problems. The goal is to shovel as much money as possible at the same fuckers who caused this in the first place.

This will not change unless we have a revolution. It's a drastic step, but sometimes revolutions produce great results.. see (revolutions, French, American).

It's just not going to happen... and so what we end up with is a cycle where the economy is growing and wealthy people make a lot of money.. and then economic recession where the government makes wealthy people a lot of money.

That's "winning" in America.