This is from President Obama’s much-praised speech Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Teddy Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech in 1910. The setting was chosen so that the corporate media would link Obama to the resurgence of progressive sentiments among voters, but some of us thought the president sounded as lofty and disingenuous as ever:
The fact is, this [economic] crisis has left a deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit. At minimum, they should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home. We’re going to keep pushing them to provide more time for unemployed homeowners to look for work without having to worry about immediately losing their house.
I’m sorry, but why should any progressive — any Democrat, really — give Obama credit for saying what he should have said more than two years ago? And how can Obama speak of a “deficit of trust” without explaining why he didn’t tell us the Fed bailed out the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars, not $800 billion, as was commonly assumed until Bloomberg News got the real figures recently?
Odd Man Out 
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Fool me once, shame on you;fool me twice, what was the end of that one again…..? Not one prosecution
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I agree with your post entirely, but I want to point out that people paying attention knew all along that the actions of the Fed amounted to trillions of dollars of bailout in addition to the $800 billion TARP bailout passed by Congress and usually known as “the bailout.” That the Fed was providing near-zero interest loans and buying toxic assets was well known, but not exactly how much or which companies were taking advantage of the programs. The president is not responsible for the Fed’s actions, and I don’t blame him for not talking about the Fed actions much (eloquent as he is, he has a hard enough time explaining his own). Even TARP was initiated under Bush, although Obama seems to get most of the blame these days.
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