Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs “very savv y businessmen”

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Het onderstaande artikel gaat voornamelijk over Palin, maar dit
onderdeel geeft mij te denken.
------------------------------
The Obama White House remains its own worst enemy. No sooner did Palin’s
Tea Party speech end than we learned of the president’s tone-deaf
interview expressing admiration for “very savvy businessmen” like Lloyd
Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. With that single remark, Obama ingeniously
identified himself with the most despised aspects of both Washington and
Wall Street — the bailout and the bonuses. He still doesn’t understand
that to most Americans, Blankfein is a savvy businessman only in the
outrageous sense that he managed to grab his bonus some 17 months after
the taxpayers had the good grace to save him from going out of business
altogether.
------------------------------
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Groet / Cees

February 14, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand
By FRANK RICH

Liberals had a blast mocking Sarah Palin last weekend when she was
caught addressing the Tea Party Convention with a cheat sheet scrawled
on her hand. Even the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs,
couldn’t resist getting into the act and treated a White House briefing
to a Palin hand gag of his own.

Yet the laughter rang hollow. You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing
if not cunning, had sprung a trap. She knows all too well that the more
the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the
third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not
have been speaking aids but bait.

If so, mission accomplished. Her sleight of hand gave the anti-Palin
chorus another prod to deride her as an empty-headed, subliterate clown,
and her fans another cue to rally. The only problem is that the serious
import of Palin’s overriding political message got lost in this
distracting sideshow. That message has the power to upend the Obama
presidency — even if Palin, with her record-low approval ratings, never
gets anywhere near the White House.

The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by
every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with
cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the
anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party
tribunes of the common folk. “This is about the people,” as Palin
repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea
Partiers’ money.

Incredibly enough, this message is gaining traction. Though Obama
remains more personally popular than the G.O.P., Republicans pulled
ahead of the Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll,
among others, in a matchup for the 2010 midterms.

This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course. Republicans in office now,
as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have
feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued
policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they’re
getting away with their populist masquerade — not just with a
considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the
“liberal media.” The Dean of the Beltway press corps, the columnist
David Broder, cited Palin’s “pitch-perfect populism” in hailing her as
“a public figure at the top of her game” in Thursday’s Washington Post.

That Republican leaders can pass off deceptive faux-populism as
“pitch-perfect populism” is in part a testament to the blinding
intensity of the economic anger and anxiety roiling the country. It also
shows the power of an incessant bumper-sticker fiction to take root when
ineffectually challenged — and, most crucially, the inability of
Democrats to make a persuasive case that they offer anything better.

The Obama White House remains its own worst enemy. No sooner did Palin’s
Tea Party speech end than we learned of the president’s tone-deaf
interview expressing admiration for “very savvy businessmen” like Lloyd
Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. With that single remark, Obama ingeniously
identified himself with the most despised aspects of both Washington and
Wall Street — the bailout and the bonuses. He still doesn’t understand
that to most Americans, Blankfein is a savvy businessman only in the
outrageous sense that he managed to grab his bonus some 17 months after
the taxpayers had the good grace to save him from going out of business
altogether.

Instead of praising bailed-out bankers, the president might have more
profitably instructed his press secretary to drop the lame Palin jokes
and dismantle the disinformation campaign her speech delivered to a
national audience. Palin, unlike Obama, put herself on the side of the
angels, railing against Wall Street’s bonuses and bailout, even though
she and John McCain had supported TARP during the campaign. Palin also
bragged that she had “joined with other conservative governors” in
“rejecting some” stimulus dollars when in reality she rejected only a
symbolic 3 percent of those dollars — soon to be overruled by the
Alaskan Legislature, which took every last buck.

This disingenuousness is old hat for Palin, who hired lobbyists to
pursue $27 million in earmarks while serving as mayor of the town of
Wasilla (pop. 6,700) and loudly defended her state’s “bridge to nowhere”
until her politically opportunistic flip-flop. What’s new is the extent
to which her test-marketed dishonesty has now become the template for
her peers in the G.O.P. “populist” putsch. Adopting her example — while
unencumbered by her political baggage — the party is exploiting the Tea
Party movement to rebrand itself as un-Washington while quietly
conducting business as usual in the capital.

There’s “no difference” between G.O.P. and Tea Party beliefs, claims the
House Republican leader, John Boehner. Not exactly. The three senators
named “porkers of the month” for December by the nonpartisan Citizens
Against Government Waste were all Republicans: Richard Shelby of
Alabama, Susan Collins of Maine and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Shelby
is so unashamedly addicted to earmarks that he used a senatorial “hold”
to halt confirmation votes on 70 Obama administration appointees until
his costly shopping list of Alabama pork projects was granted. Or so he
did until his over-the-top theatrics earned him unwelcome attention and
threatened to derail his party’s pious antispending posturing.

While more brazen than his peers, Shelby is otherwise typical of them.
Jonathan Karl of ABC News last week unearthed photographs of various
G.O.P. congressmen posing in their districts with stimulus checks that
they had publicly opposed. The Washington Times uncovered more than a
dozen other Republican lawmakers who privately solicited stimulus money
from the Department of Agriculture while denouncing the stimulus to
their constituents and the news media, often angrily.

Even the G.O.P./Tea Party heartthrob of the hour, Scott Brown, is not
the barn-coat-wearing populist he purports to be. In her speech, Palin
saluted him as “just a guy with a truck” who was doing “his part to put
our government back on the side of the people.” In reality Brown’s
Massachusetts Senate campaign benefited from a last-minute flood of
contributions from financial industry donors — with 80 percent of the
haul coming from outside the state. It says all you need to know about
our politics that his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, matched him
by holding a fund-raiser largely sponsored by lobbyists for the health
care and pharmaceutical industries.

Now that he’s in the Senate, Brown is likely to junk the truck and side
full time with Wall Street against Main Street. To do otherwise would be
to buck his party’s entire establishment. Shelby, the ranking Republican
on the Senate Banking Committee, has already signaled that he’ll fight
the Obama administration’s push for a “Volcker rule” to rein in
too-big-to-fail financial behemoths. The conservative message guru Frank
Luntz has drafted a memo instructing G.O.P. legislators on how to defeat
a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency while camouflaging themselves
as populist foes of the very banks and credit card companies that that
agency would regulate. That’s a neat trick — Luntz’s nonpolitical
clients include Merrill Lynch and American Express — and it helps
explain why Wall Street is now tilting its contributions to
Congressional Republicans for 2010.

Yet it’s the Democrats who are now most linked to corporate interests,
thanks to all the backroom deals over health care. More Americans have
heard of the Medicaid money shoveled to the Democratic senators Ben
Nelson (the January “porker of the month”) and Mary Landrieu in exchange
for their health care votes than of Thad Cochran’s $8.75 million earmark
for the “Exchange With Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program” (a
proposed cut in the Obama budget). The Republicans are so disciplined at
claiming the fiscal-hawk high road that even Jenny Sanford, the wronged
first lady of South Carolina, is still defending her husband, Mark, as
an uncompromising defender of “hard-earned tax dollars” in her new
tell-all memoir, “Staying True.” Though she gives us the skinny on her
husband’s philandering, she never mentions the subsequent revelations
that expenses for his trysts and other personal travel were billed to
taxpayers.

Before he was done in by his Argentine firecracker — and before the
emergence of Palin — Sanford was floated by The Wall Street Journal
editorial page and others on the right as an ideal ticket mate for John
McCain in 2008. As a congressman he had slept on a futon in his office
and voted against a breast cancer postage stamp as wasteful “feel-good
legislation.” As governor, he refused to take stimulus money despite the
fact that South Carolina had the nation’s fastest-growing unemployment
rate. When an unemployed man from Charleston caring for a seriously ill
mother and sister called in to C-Span last February begging Sanford for
help, he didn’t budge. But he did volunteer to pray for the caller and
his family.

So it went with Palin last weekend. Her only concrete program for
dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer
session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine
intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe
and secure and prosperous again.” That pretty much sums up her party’s
economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what
government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning
this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington
Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to
the ominous political writing on the wall.

19.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Elizabeth Fuller
Peterborough, NH
February 14th, 2010
10:27 am
When the Supreme Court voted to allow corporations to fund political
campaigns, a commenter on these pages wrote in to say that this is what
we get after President Obama appoints people like Sonia Sotomayor to the
Supreme Court, proving Republicans have done an excellent job of
convincing stressed-out Americans who don't have the time to read that
they are the party of the common man.

I have stopped wondering why so many people continue to vote against
their own best interests, believing that because they are busy and
tired, they consume only sound bites, and the Republicans have been
masters at writing the best sound bites. What I have continued to wonder
is why the Democrats haven't taken the time and spent the money to
compare political philosophies in a simple but non-condescending manner
in order to point out that the deregulation of business sought by the
Republicans is what caused all our retirement funds to shrink and raised
interest rates to 29% on credit cards we signed on for at 5.9%. It has
been inconceivable to me that they haven't done so.

Only recently has it occurred to me that it may be that the Democrats
can't do that because they haven't been putting their money where their
mouths are. This country has moved to the right, and if Democrats are
going to convince the public their positions are more beneficial to the
common man, they're going to have to show voting records that prove they
care about those without power or money. They're going to have to drop
the centrist label and proudly explain and claim more liberal
positions-- positions that twenty years ago may have been called
centrist. How many of them can now? Why haven't national usury laws been
enacted or even seriously considered? If they can't back up their
populist claims with real action, they're no better than Sarah Palin.
Democrats--and I count myself among them-- need to grow backbones and
proceed civilly, but with the courage of our convictions.
  Recommend  Recommended by 799 Readers
5.
Al
State College PA
February 14th, 2010
8:56 am
The GOP would destroy what they cannot rule. These are truly dangerous
times for our country
32.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
Stonecutter
Broward County, Florida
February 14th, 2010
10:28 am
I have enduring admiration not only for Frank Rich's mind, but his
impecccable skill as a writer. Tragically, I can't say the same for the
minds of so many terminally distracted, semi-literate, profoundly
uninformed Americans who seem to be clueless, listless, shiftless, and
whatever other "-less" you can conjure, in their mind-boggling drift
back toward vacuous, bigoted, blindly nationalistic Republican "dogma",
a term of art that confers way too much substance on the drivel most of
these GOP bozos excrete every day in the 24/7 media circus. Only in a
nation pock-marked by hordes of obese imbeciles, morons and idiots
(there is a difference between these three categories), slobering over
the outcome of cretinesque TV shows like "American Idol" or "The Big
Loser", can a government so fundamentally inept, mendacious, venal and
self-aggrandizing continue to flourish, let alone pass itself off as
concerned with the lives and security of its citizens.

I served my country through 4 years of military service several decades
ago, so I feel I have the right to now say that I'm thoroughly ashamed
of the government I served, at least in its present incarnation, and the
complete domination of the Congress and Presidency by corporate special
interests, rendering the very concept of "The Public Interest" a
pathetic, archaic joke. The HC "debate" during all of 2009 that produced
nothing of value for ordinary Americans, while millions of jobs
continued to evaporate and Wall Street went virtually unscathed, are
superficial examples of the putrid rot that has infected the core values
and operational ethics of our so-called elected officials.

The Congress has become analagous to a terminally ill lung cancer
patient pumped full of chemo, still playing golf in his Cutter & Buck
ensembles and dining on lamb chops at the club with the boys, while his
skin turns blue, his hair falls out in clumps and his bones atrophy into
mush. One day, he just doesn't show up, and the rest of the guys share
their profound sorrow and a moment of silence, before they tee off,
"business as usual".

Someone once philosophized that "People get the government they
deserve". What a smart guy. Jefferson is spinning in his tomb...non stop.

  Recommend  Recommended by 685 Readers
170.
HIGHLIGHT (what's this?)
AMS
Minneapolis, MN
February 14th, 2010
11:21 am
For the love of God, I implore you and the other Times columnists to
please stop writing about this woman! Seventy-one per cent of the
electorate believe that she's unqualified to be President, yet the media
continue to write article after article about her as some sort of
political powerhouse. She is very popular with a minority of Americans
but let's not inflate her into more than she is--a unique sort of hybrid
political celebrity with a passionate but relatively small following,
someone who speaks in simple slogans and has a very shallow knowledge of
issues. Why portray even an obvious embarrassment like the "notes on the
hand" bit as a cunning act of political genius? Media attention is
oxygen for her fire---turn it off and the flame will soon die down.
  Recommend  Recommended by 680 Readers
7.
themunz
sydney
February 14th, 2010
8:57 am
No Mr Rich, the more stupid she looks, the more they can identify with,
and see "a real American".
To be an elite (ie intelligent) is scorned, dumb is in.
There is even a 24/7 "news" channel to reinforce the message, which just
happens to claim the largest audience in the country.
Is there a competing "news" outlet anywhere that, 24/7, says this is nuts?
  Recommend  Recommended by 572 Readers

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