Obama and Wall Street: the love that dare not speak its name

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  • 08/21/2022

Writing at the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch on Election Day, Jon Markman offered an unflinching look at “the love story of Wall Street and Obama,” which he called “a bromance like no other, a man-crush for the ages”:

The staggering advance of the market is probably one of Obama’s greatest accomplishments, and yet, in a rich irony, political sensitivities prevent him from bragging about it.

The beauty part is that this was not a coincidence, beginner’s luck or a historical fluke.

The administration and the Federal Reserve run by his appointed chairman, Ben Bernanke, have systematically stuffed big banks’ pockets with cash in an unending rescue effort, slashed interest rates to the lowest levels of the past 300 years, diverted senior citizens’ savings to revive the moribund residential construction industry and showered drug makers and insurers with fresh sources of revenue from his health care overhaul.

Little wonder then that Wall Street cannot bear the idea of parting ways with the Obama administration, and thus in the past two months has thrown a tantrum to protest the surprising advancement of challenger Mitt Romney in the polls.

He went on to review some of the big-money interests poised to profit from the Really Huge Money thrown around by their spendthrift senior partner, Uncle Sam.  The health care industry is his first example.  It’s always been odd that people who support ObamaCare tend to despise insurance companies, when the entire point of ObamaCare is to warp the Constitutional relationship between citizens, the State, and the State’s favored industries by forcing them to buy expensive, mandated products from the very insurance companies they loathe.  ObamaCare is wrecking the insurance market for you, but there’s a lot of lettuce waiting to be harvested from all those mandates and subsidies by industries with the right connections.  The House Oversight Committee tried to call public attention to this by reviewing the agreements reached between Big Pharma and the Obama team on the eve of ObamaCare’s passage, but it didn’t get a lot of attention.

The concept of corruption is very flexible.  Most people generally take it to mean illicit, fraudulent activity – the sort of thing that could, at least theoretically, end up with somebody doing a perp walk.  But corrupt relationships are not necessarily illegal.  Corruption occurs whenever special political relationships influence the distribution of public resources more than careful planning and logic.  Big Government’s agenda is always sold to the public as the product of brilliant, selfless central planners working tirelessly for the greater good.  Big Business is generally depicted as the foe of Big Government, if not a menace that only Big Government can control.  Those are simplistic fairy tales, perfectly suited for our new Big Bird level of discourse.

 

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