Pointless Gestures

Today's culprit: Our conciliator-in-chief, still feeding the hand that bites him:

President Obama says he would like to establish a "secretary of Business" if he wins a second term.

In an interview with MSNBC, the president said he wants to consolidate a number of business and trade-related agencies, creating a "one-stop shop" for oversight.

"I’ve said that I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one secretary of Business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA [the Small Business Administration] or helping companies with exports," he said in an interview with MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.

We already have a "Secretary of Business". He runs the fucking Commerce Department.

Sigh . . .

Whether or not the President serves a second term, I think we can already begin drawing some definitive conclusions on his, and his administration's, most significant failure of judgment: specifically, it's clear by now that the President and his inner circle of advisers truly believe that the debt-financed multinational corporatocracy that crashed the global economy, and which continues to inflict vast suffering-for-profit upon the lives of millions of people, is fundamentally and ethically sound, and that it only requires a little corrective triage (along with regular trillion-dollar infusions of cash from the Fed, and a steady stream of semi-skilled non-union workers) to be restored to full health. I suspect that history will not judge his wisdom kindly (subscription req'd):

What Barack Obama has saved is a bankrupt elite that by all rights should have met its end back in 2009. He came to the White House amid circumstances similar to those of 1933, but proceeded to rule like Herbert Hoover. Today the banks are as big as ever, and he has done precious little about it. The regulatory system is falling apart, and he is too ideologically demure to tell us why. Organized labor is crumbling, and he has done almost nothing to help it recover. Meanwhile, the people who told us that finance was king, that the "new economy" changed all the rules, that we didn't really need a strong supervisory state---those people are still riding high, still making their pronouncements from the heights of the op-ed page and the executive branch.

Ad while Obama and his fellow Democrats have been off chasing post-partisan soap bubbles, the right has seized the opportunity to make itself into the great expression of hard-times protest. When unemployment is high this time around, it is the right---with its mythology of heroic "job creators"---that we ask to rescue us. It is the right that talks about the little people, about smashing the cozy Beltway consensus, about bringing in a whole new crop of leaders.

As I watched this upside-down unrest emerge, I used to wonder how long it would take Obama to switch on his inner FDR and start grappling with the nation's problems the way they obviously needed to be grappled with. The years passed, and I finally realized that this was never going to happen. Then a different possibility started to dawn on me: Maybe a second New Deal is precisely what Obama was here to prevent. Maybe that was the hope all along.

Yet even after all this, I will still tramp down to the neighborhood polling place next week and punch the hole on my ballot card that's next to his name. Because the only viable alternative is, and would be, incredibly worse for the commons. This is not a terribly convincing reason for voting, but that's about the best that can be said for participatory democracy in our corrupt and cynical time.

---Baron V