That "Socialist" Obama Is At It Again

Trey Smith

The obscene greed-and-arrogance stories emanating from Wall Street are piling up so fast, it's getting hard to keep up. This one is from last week, but I missed it – it's about the foreclosure/robo-signing settlement that was concluded earlier this year.

The upshot of this story is that in advance of that notorious settlement, the government ordered banks to hire "independent" consultants to examine their loan files to see just exactly how corrupt they were.

Now it comes out that not only were these consultants not so independent, not only did they very likely skew the numbers seriously in favor of the banks, and not only were these few consultants paid over $2 billion (over 20 percent of the entire settlement amount) while the average homeowner only received $300 in the deal – in addition to all of that, it appears that federal regulators will not turn over the evidence of impropriety they discovered during these reviews to homeowners who may want to sue the banks.

In other words, the government not only ordered the banks to hire consultants who may have gamed the foreclosure settlement in favor of the banks, but the regulators themselves are hiding the information from the public in order to shield the banks from further lawsuits.
~ from While Wronged Homeowners Got $300 Apiece in Foreclosure Settlement, Consultants Who Helped Protect Banks Got $2 Billion by Matt Taibbi ~

When I hear about news like this, it makes my head want to explode! It is not the part about crony capitalism that puts me in a dither. It is not the fact that Wall Street and Corporate America time and time again come out of self-created debacles smelling like a rose. Sure, those sorts of things certainly peeve me, but what really takes the cake is these are the actions that leads those on the rabid Right to call the President "a socialist"?

This is business as usual capitalism! There is NOTHING socialist about it at all. This isn't that "liberal" president handing out treats to the poor and it's not Obama rescuing the middle class. No, this is providing corporate crooks with a "get out of jail free" card. This is insuring that the monied interests don't have to pay for their sins.

If Obama was the socialist the Right makes him out to be, he would have lowered the boom on these miscreants. His administration would have slapped them down so hard that they wouldn't know if they were coming or going! In fact, that is putting it lightly. With this kind of gross criminality rampant in the financial industry, a truly socialist Obama may well have nationalized the banks and Wall Street.

But he didn't do anything close to this. So, how could any upstanding person call this guy a socialist? He is about as red as the Republican Party!