Bernie Sanders vs. Barack Obama on Wall Street

On Saturday, I heard Senator Bernie Sanders speak about the criminal acts that occurred on Wall Street, which created last year’s crash.

Sanders said he wanted to see some of the criminals behind bars.

And he also said he was sick of the expression “too big to fail.” If banks are too big to fail, he said, they’re too big to exist. So he demanded that we dismantle them into smaller units.

Two days later, Barack Obama went to New York to give his big speech on financial reform.

Unlike Sanders, Obama didn’t threaten Wall Street execs with jail.

And he didn’t talk about busting up the bank holding companies.

He even praised the “Administration”—that would be George W. Bush and Henry Paulson—for taking the “difficult but necessary actions” once the crisis hit. I assume he includes in that praise the obscene bailout of the banks they designed with virtually no strings attached.

And Obama praised his current team of Geithner and Summers, et al.

He also genuflected on the altar of the free market. “I have always been a strong believer in the power of the free market,” he bleated. “I believe that jobs are best created not by government, but by businesses and entrepreneurs willing to take a risk on a good idea. I believe that the role of government is not to disparage wealth, but to expand its reach.”

Those sentences could just as easily tripped off the tongue of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan.

Obama did excoriate Wall Street for the “reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses.”

And Obama did get around to urging stronger rules of the road and tighter regulation of Wall Street, which we really need.

As he put it, “we should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution that threatens the economy, or alternatively, forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.”

But his proposals have been around for months now, and there’s no progress being made on Capitol Hill, which the Democrats ostensibly control but Wall Street appears to have conquered.

So Obama was left to plead for more individual responsibility on the part of Wall Street CEOs.

But pleading won’t get it done.

Because they still are motivated by the quick kill and the bloated bonus.