Demagogues always need villains. They can’t survive without them. There has never been, in American politics, a more successful demagogue than Barack Hussein Obama.
When his own approval numbers are plummeting, and when public anger at government is on the rise, the populist demagogue will always attack the private sector, especially bankers (code word Jews) and Wall Street.
Barack Obama stood in front of a microphone the other day and said “We want our money back”. He then went on to propose a tax on big banks. He did this after chastising these same banks for not lending more money. How taxing banks is going to cause them to lend more money, is something I would like to hear explained. So please opine, if you will.
He then went on to reveal that he was making this suggestion because banks were doing the same things that “got us into this mess”. So based on his own statements, it was a lack of lending that “got us into this mess”? Yeah okay.
Never mind that many of the banks that are going to be hit with this tax never accepted TARP loans. Forget the fact that most of these banks have already paid these loans back with interest. Oh and of course, never mind the fact that Bernanke and Paulson, damn near at the point of a gun, forced many of these banks to take this money against their will.
Also, if the President is really wanting to stir up public resentment against businesses that took government bailout loans, why in the hell is he giving GM and Chrysler a pass? They are paying back their loans at a much slower pace than the banks. Well that question is kind of stupid really. Forgive me for being facetious. We all know that those businesses were partly nationalized with the rest given to one of Obama’s largest donors, the UAW.
It gets worse folks. The general consensus among serious people is that Fannie and Freddie, in their quasi-government era, were most responsible for encouraging risky home lending, and thus contributed the most to the financial crisis. Since Obama is supposedly trying to prevent a repeat of what happened before, surely he is sticking it to these newly nationalized companies? Nope, wrong again.
So the banks are paying back their loans and the auto companies are not, yet the banks are being punished and the auto companies are not. Also Fannie and Freddie, which caused the mess, get to be excluded too.
Yes, you have to love populist demagoguery, do you not? Regardless of how many problems are caused by government intervention, it’s always the private sector that is to blame.
What an amazing time that we live in. Sometimes I feel like I am living in the novel “Anthem“.
Btw, Larry Kudlow sums up what is going on here pretty well. Check it out.