Why Obama’s Party Is Going Down

The excuses are already coming fast and furious as President Obama and his party faces a rebuke in Tuesday’s election of historic proportions. The lack of accountability so far may be forgivable; after all, nobody admits they have done a lousy, hypocritical, incompetent and dishonest job while they are running for re-election. The voter’s fury and the Democrats’ peril are being blamed, alternatively and collectively, on George Bush, on Sarah Palin, on racism, on the sad stupidity of the American public, who just are so impatient and unsophisticated that they don’t comprehend all the wonderful things that have been done for them.  It’s also the Supreme Court’s fault for allowing large corporations the right of free speech, although the union money flowing to Democrats as the result of the same decision has dwarfed corporate money.

All of these excuses are demeaning to Obama and his party, and insulting to the intelligence of everyone else.

The reason the Democrats are going down to a party that had thoroughly disgraced itself out of power just two years ago, is illustrated by a shocking report that barely caused a ripple in the news cycle. Continue reading

Sec. Geithner’s Dead Ethics Alarm

The ethics problems in the financial sector are rooted in conflicts of interest, some willful, some systemic, some naive. The presumption of the Obama administration when it chose Timothy Geithner to be Treasury Secretary at this time of collapsing trust in bid business was that Geithner, a supposedly canny insider, would bring to the job an invaluable understanding of the systemic problems, and perhaps he has. But the fact that he also brought a stunning insensitivity to basic conflicts principles is disturbing. Continue reading