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Boys Club

Obama’s Love of Wall Street

The President’s Failure to Damand a Reckoning From the Moneyed Interests Who Brought the Economy Down Frank Rich @New York Magazine

It’s one heck of a morning in Washington.  Our day began calling out former NYTimes columnist Frank Rich’s tongue-lashing of President Obama for his worship of highly-educated white men. What haunts the Obama administration is what also haunts the country. There is no accountability among the team that led America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Writing much longer pieces in his new position at NY Magazine, Rich — like David Brooks on Republicans yesterday — is read to ‘let it rip’ on Obama.

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

In debt talks, Obama offers Social Security cuts The Washington Post

The denials are in play about WaPo’s article suggesting that President Obama is willing to discuss social security reforms as part of an agreement on the debt ceiling showdown. Huff Po writes:

“The story overshoots the runway,” said a senior administration official. “The President said in the State of the Union that he wanted a bipartisan process to strengthen Social Security in a balanced way that preserves the promise of the program and doesn’t slash benefits.”

The SF Chronicle backs the story, saying that Democrats are looking for tax reforms in exchange for taking some action on social security. Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, the chamber’s No. 2 Democrat, is quoted as saying Social Security should be on the table in negotiations aimed at reducing U.S. debt, as long as savings strengthen the retirement system.

“I’ll put Social Security on the table as long as several things are clear: Number one, any savings in Social Security goes to make Social Security stronger, longer,” Durbin said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “Secondly, we’ve got to make sure the benefits structure that people really count on, those in lower and middle-income categories, are going to be protected and enhanced.”

Durbin said he supported a push toward assembling a large package of cuts worth as much as $4 trillion over more than a decade.

The incident went unreported, as is the case with most sexual harassment in Egypt.