At Press Conference, Obama Retreats on Health Care, Economy
Two things bother me about Obama’s press conference performance on Tuesday.
And they concern two big issues: health care and the economy.
He’s backsliding on both.
On health care, he was pressed by reporters who followed up on each others’ questions—a good, new journalistic skill that evidently fell from the sky after Bush left office.
What they were pressing him on was whether his public option for health care was non-negotiable.
After hedging, he basically said no. “We have not drawn lines in the sand,” he said, “other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured.”
What a concession! A public plan is the best way to provide that relief, and 72 percent of the public says it wants a public option. But Obama seems prepared to sell them down the river.
On the economy, when asked directly whether he thinks we “need a second stimulus package” since unemployment is likely to top 10 percent soon, he said, nonchalantly, “Well, not yet.”
What’s he waiting for?
The rate to hit 10.5 percent? 11 percent? 12 percent?
He even said when he was drawing up the first stimulus plan that “nobody understood what the depths of this recession were going to look like.”
Well, that’s not true. A lot of good, progressive economists did, like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Dean Baker. They predicted unemployment above 10 percent. That’s why they pushed for a stimulus that was twice as big as the one Obama settled for.
It’s disingenuous for Obama to hide behind the Condoleezza Rice construct that “nobody” could have imagined what then happened.
And it’s deeply troubling to see Obama acting so timorously on the major issues that he himself has identified.
I keep waiting for him to go to the mat on something, to put his foot down, and say, I’m not going to stand for higher unemployment so we must pass another stimulus bill, or I’m not going to sign a health care reform bill that doesn’t have a public option.
But never puts his foot down. It’s always in the air.
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But wait, Matt, it gets worse...
From the Kos:
Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.
A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.
Nothing like a little taxpayer money funneled through AIG to add to the pool, right?
In April, Goldman said it would set aside half of its £1.2bn first-quarter profit to reward staff, much of it in bonuses. It is believed to have paid 973 bankers $1m or more last year, while this year's payouts are on track to be the highest for most of the bank's 28,000 staff, including about 5,400 in London.
Let's remember that Goldman got roughly $10 billion in AIG-funneled money to "settle" CDS that their CEO said was a fully-hedged position and which would have had no material impact if AIG had gone down, mostly because they had collected nearly all of the hedge before AIG got in serious trouble.
That is, they got paid twice - once with their hedge (good move guys) and again by government fiat, directed by Henry Paulson who coincidentally used to run Goldman.
Also note the size of the first-quarter profit, multiply by four (assuming equally good results) and then compare against the "extra" payout through AIG to figure out whether there would be any bonus pool absent that payment.
Looks to me like the US Taxpayer is funding all of Goldman's bonuses, never mind this ditty:
Last week, the firm predicted that President Barack Obama's government could issue $3.25 TRILLION of debt before September, almost four times last year's sum (the FED will attempt to sling $165 Billion in iou's THIS WEEK ALONE!). Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds, is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds.
Nice, eh? Do Treasury's bidding, get paid for it, get an extra $10 billion from the taxpayer as a gift to cover a bet you had already hedged against default, and pocket it all.
Change we can believe in - yep, we'll steal even more than we did under The Bush Administration!
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How's that hopey changey thing working for you?