It's a red letter day for us when we get to note two attacks on Obama which do not originate from the right (although Richard Posner of The University of Chicago and now Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism are to the right of Obama), especially when both attacks insist on the meaning of words, like "depression" and "fascism."
Here's Smith's contribution:
It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.
Admittedly, corruption among our elites generally and in Washington in particular has become so widespread and blatant as to fall into the “dog bites man” category. But the nauseating gap between the Administration’s propaganda and the many and varied ways it sells out average Americans on behalf of its favored backers, in this case the too big to fail banks, has become so noisome that it has become impossible to ignore the fetid smell.
The Administration has now taken to pressuring parties that are not part of the machinery reporting to the President to fall in and do his bidding. We’ve gotten so used to the US attorney general being conveniently missing in action that we have forgotten that regulators and the AG are supposed to be independent. As one correspondent noted by e-mail, “When officials' allegiances are to El Supremo rather than the Constitution, you walk the path to fascism.” ...
[T]he bullying of [New York state attorney general Eric] Schneiderman looks to be misguided, since the settlement is likely to fall apart. But it is nevertheless germane because it reveals the Administration’s warped thinking and sense of priorities. As we’ve said, the Administration’s decision to cast its lot with the banks in early 2009 dictated its course of action:
Obama’s incentives are to come up with “solutions” that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry’s goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress.
