what are barack obama's flaws?

can anyone point me to a reliable chart of US corporate tax rates compared to other countries?

Probably my biggest disappointment with Obama so far is the Afghanistan troop surge, but he's basically been true to his campaign promises there, so I have no justification to feel betrayed.

Taibbi is good at rabble-rousing outrage as usual, but I don't think his article is very constructive. To read him, you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach

Well, yeah, sure, but regulatory overreach never even crossed Obama and his Cabinet's minds, did it?

I'm sure Obama has influence, but regulation is currently wending its way through Congress, so it's a little premature to say what we're going to get at this point.

except Congress doesn't do regulations, the executive branch does

^^^erm no

Congress may have some input but congress writes/passes *statutory* authority, not regulatory authority.

I think basically Congress writes the rules and the executive branch enforces them.

no

In areas where Congress hasn't specifically written a rule, the executive branch has considerable leeway. But it wouldn't make sense for Obama to direct his cabinet to try to reform by working within the interpretation of existing law at this point when a big Congressional overhaul is coming down the pike anyway.

Timely article: "Sweeping bank reform bill clears House"
http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/11/news/economy/financial_regulatory_reform/

"a big Congressional overhaul" = the 2010 midterm elections.

Let's hope not - if it is, it won't be in the direction we want.

In any case, the inclusion of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) in the House bill should be seen as a victory for liberals (and Obama). Banks and Republicans fiercely opposed it.

We'll see.

i like Matt Taibbi b/c he is more than willing to kick the Rubins and Summers (and the Gabbnebs) w/n the Party around and call them out on their pretensions (which is MORE THAN RICHLY DESERVED imho). few things sicken me more than so-called Dems who shit on the middle- and lower-classes almost as much as Republicans do, but think that b/c they're willing to throw the plebes a few more crumbs than Republicans and b/c they don't hate gays and black people or thump Bibles that they are somehow "better" than the GOP (who at least are open in their contempt for the "lower orders.")

where i find Taibbi weak, though, is on just HOW we should have handled the financial world and the economy post-Lehman Bros. -- does he think we should've just let AIG and Goldman Sachs go under (a libertarian/Republican back-bencher view) or something else? maybe i missed the column(s) where he spelled out his ideas, or he just thinks that his role should merely be to point out how the financial sector is taking the American taxpayers for a ride.

b/c they don't hate gays and black people or thump Bibles that they are somehow "better" than the GOP

um, this does make them better than the GOP imho

and not to get all constitutional/administrative law-ish on folks here, but Mr. Que and nate are right -- administrative agencies are either part of the executive branch or independent of either the executive or legislative branches (e.g., the FCC). Congress can delegate "discretionary power" to administrative agencies to regulate in a given area, but not its legislative authority to an administrative agency (the so-called "non-delegation doctrine").

um, this does make them better than the GOP imho

you are right ... i should have said "simply because they don't hate gays and black people or thump Bibles." of course, that line of thinking also applies to lots of libertarians as well as the likes of Rubin et. al.

you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach

He really should give you a job, primo shit-shoveling.

Commenting on political threads now are we? Someone really woke up on the wrong side today.

that Nobel turned out to be an even sicker fucking joke than it seemed at the time; Strangelovian congrats all around, Nordic plaudit dispensers.

"Nordic plaudit dispensers" is terrific prose

I was gonna make it my screenname but then remembered we had a poster named I think "Nordicskillz" a long time ago so deferred to the old guard

he and his speechwriters use too many adjectives

they should use more internet abbreviations amirite

tevs

let me b real srs w/u

make no mist8k

and j0hn by that i mean "tevs" could be the entirety of his nobel speech

what I don't get is why everyone feels so deceived (in:re economic appointments, etc.)?

otm, and that's my only problem with taibbi's article. the sense of betrayal is weird. surely matt taibbi never expected obama to be anything but an establishment incrementalist? yes there was some populist speechifying in the campaign, but there was from mccain and palin too, so what? if you looked at obama's record or read anything serious about his economic views, it was obvious there wasn't much rooseveltian about him (fdr or teddy). there was a reason he got all that money from wall street. i mean, i'm not saying i'm not disappointed; just that i expected to be. taibbi's right on the facts, but sort of wrong on the whole WE WUZ TRICKED thing.

Taibbi's a muckracker though: he's supposed to generate outrage.

Also, like all good writers, he remembers his audience. His pieces run in Rolling Stone, which has always been yay-Obama and the last bastion of complacent liberalism.

oh i know, and i'm glad he's out there. i just don't believe that he personally feels deceived by obama, because i think he's too smart for that. and that sort of undermines the outrage in that article.

where i find Taibbi weak, though, is on just HOW we should have handled the financial world and the economy post-Lehman Bros. -- does he think we should've just let AIG and Goldman Sachs go under (a libertarian/Republican back-bencher view) or something else?

i felt that the gist of what he was saying is that Obama shouldn't have appointed them all to run the economy and tossed his campaign economic advisers to the wayside once he got elected. i also read that as one of the main sources of outrage.

but summers and rubin were campaign economic advisers. obama had a whole bunch of different people. and goolsbee and volcker are still advisers too, in lower-profile spots (which i think was true in the campaign as well). there isn't this big difference between obama the candidate and obama the president that that article is trying to make it appear. i'm sure there were a lot of people who weren't really paying attention to all that during the campaign, there was lots of personal projection about who obama was and what he believed, but if you look at any in-depth discussions of his ideas during the campaign -- like this one -- you hardly get the sense that he was lying about anything or that his ideas have changed very much. the major thing that's happened since that article came out, obviously, was lehman brothers and the collapse and the bail-outs. and people are going to be hashing that whole thing over forever, but obviously that was where the wall street guys really got the upper hand in designing policy, starting with paulson and continuing on through geithner. it's all pretty appalling, but it's not very surprising.

for the rec, I went to some Brooklyn Library discussion btwn Taibbi and David Rees (the Get Yr War On guy, who'd done some door-knocking for Bam) last December, and in front of a 98% Obama-lovin' crowd, I don't recall either of them raising the possibility that BHO's aim was to be a biz-as-usual prez.

had nobody actually looked at his list of donors? that site's called open secrets for a reason.

I'm racing through Andrew Sorkin's Too Big to Fail to meet a reviewing deadline this week, but what really galls is how incestuous this world is (Geithner, Jon Corzine, Paulson, Summers all worked together).

the best and the brightest.

you would never suspect there could be such as thing as regulatory overreach

He really should give you a job, primo shit-shoveling

I'm just saying that Taibbi tends to be a bit one-sided, and I'm not too crazy about the way he deploys facts in an intentionally misleading way. For instance, he dismisses the CFPA with a statement about how exemptions were given to the vast majority of banks, but he never mentions the facts that the banks who were exempted were the many small, local banks that only add up to a relatively small percentage of the total consumer banking market. The big national banks with the biggest market share are covered. I think that's a pretty notable accomplishment, but Taibbi makes it sound like a joke. It doesn't fit in with his view of government as basically a fat-cat conspiracy to defraud the rest of the country.

I don't understand all the outrage with using people with Wall Street backgrounds. These people know where the bodies are buried. FDR appointed Joe Kennedy to be in charge of the SEC. Anybody knows that Joe Kennedy made his money gaming the stock market. FDR believed that it took a crook to know a crook.

I knew someone was going to make that analogy, cuz I've puzzled over it myself. The difference here, micheline, is that instead of one Joe Kennedy you have seventeen.

xpost
its like any social scene. "ex-":(wall street firm)::"ex-":(local indie rock band)

if Taibbi really wanted to play to his audience, he should ask them why their belief in Obama was just as superficial as most Bush supporters' belief in Bush. I feel better knowing Obama is in the White House than Bush but the fact that people are voting on projections and impressions and not on actual policy decisions means that if anyone who is elected actually gets anything substantive done, it will be pretty incidental to the rationale that allowed that person to be in the position to accomplish those things.

Taibbi is just justifying the ignorance that got us here, and incidentally marginalizing progressive voices who argued that this was going to happen in the first place by writing from the perspective of this "surprise" instead of from the perspective of "intelligent people knew this all along but you folks ignored them as if the only purpose of their alarmist viewpoints was to 'harsh your buzz'".

Yes, but these people probably are more useful than some one with no Wall Street background.

I should also add that many of those people worked in the Clinton administration which was a time of great prosperity.

Actually the Geithner/Obama connection goes back to Geithner's dad, who ran the Ford Foundation and was friends with/boss of Obama's mother.

I knew someone was going to make that analogy, cuz I've puzzled over it myself. The difference here, micheline, is that instead of one Joe Kennedy you have seventeen.

― Hell is other people. In an ILE film forum. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, December 12, 2009 4:22 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what?

omg ppl know each other

ive argued with gabbneb on the internet but i certainly hope that doesnt retard my future career options

im sympathetic to the idea that some of these dudes are philosophically not really helping things esp w/r/t employment numbers but i should hope u guys can come up w/ something a lil more specific -- say, motives -- instead of this guilt-by-association inference b.s.