He forgot to mention that he's lighting the torches and leading the chants.

Obama was actually going to light the torches, but realized he didn't have any fuel or matches, and tried to find a solution in Macgyver fashion. He couldn't and then realized he actually was Chuck Norris, and his flatulence is a flame thrower, so he bent over and ripped a good one and turned all the bankers into charcoal in their seats. He let out a maniacal laugh as trap doors opened under the seats of the former bankers, and their remains disappeared.

He forgot to mention that he's lighting the torches and leading the chants.

*sigh*

No, he's not.

Look, I'm a socialist. In my younger days, I would have been out there among the torch wavers and slogan chanters. I know anti-capitalist radicals. Anti-capitalist radicals are my friends. And let me tell you: Obama is no anti-capitalist radical.

I don't particularly hold it against him (most of the time); after all, I voted for him. But by any rational perspective, his OMIGOD CREEPING SOCIALISM tax proposal (just to name one issue) is anything but radical: it's to return the income tax rate on the very richest to 39.6% from its current 35%. By way of comparison, the top income tax rate stood at 91% under Eisenhower, was 70% during Nixon, and was 50% or higher for the first five years of the Reagan administration.

Yeah, he's a real torch-waver there.

The idea of Obama as socialist always cracks me up.

There's such a ...comedy in imagining these captains of industry defending their salaries as needed due to "competition on a global market."

Who built their companies? Not a bunch of paper pushers with good connections. Only a few major industrial leaders were conceived as global multinational corporations. They were once actual businesses driven by clear business logic and developed by hard workers. Think of all the businesses built by sole proprietors from modest backgrounds.

If we're competing for talent, then let's look among today's Henry Fords and Oprah Winfreys, Ray Krocs, Thomas Edisons, Madam C. J Walkers and Martha Stewarts, the BIll Gateses and Steve Jobses. Let's look among people of real originality and drive, immediately apparent smarts and lively imagination. Let's look outside the leaders in this industry now. We're not likely to find solutions to the banking crises by asking well-fed insiders who wake up at sweating from another nightmare caused by impostor syndrome, knowing their inadequacies have been discovered and displayed before the world. They have blown their case for being taken seriously. They had one value proposition for the global economy, and they couldn't deliver on it. We're supposed to take them seriously?

These are the best arguments they can come up with, and it's pathetic. Their earnings are neither rational nor justified. If these are our experts, no wonder we're in such trouble. Why would we want to "compete" for more of the same type of mind that poisoned the well? Let them compete their way to a cushy retirement on the sideleines, and stop screwing with systems they clearly never understood in the first place.

The ideas that bring about our recovery will not come from the ranks of the self-satisfied and self-justifying but from the self-made and self-motivated.

Miko, I agree with you, but it sounds so Ayn Randian, which liberals tend to be horrified by. I agree that's where our recovery will come from, but where are they now, and why aren't they champions of the industry now? From the dying embers Abraxas will rise perhaps?

Unfortunately the current view seems to be that these folks will be saved, the status quo will return, but with some token oversight. What we need is a sea change in attitude and thought from the lowest consumer to the highest leader. Worshiping the almighty dollar has been a failure, so we as a nation need to find something else to find value in. I don't see that happening any time soon, and so I think we're destined to the same decaying path.

t sounds so Ayn Randian

In what way? I certainly wouldn't tie my view to that ideology and I think you may be reading what I'm saying through too narrow an aperture.

where are they now, and why aren't they champions of the industry now?

Some of them are working on their own projects and businesses, of course, which are still growing. Some are undiscovered as yet. And some have yet to be able to pull their attention away from the daily difficulty of getting out from under their chronic conditions or medical bills without enough insuarance support, or juggling their two or three jobs to make a living wage, so they haven't been able to make the sacrifices it takes to totally throw oneself toward the single-minded pursuit of great ideas. Some have been pounding the pavements and knocking on doors for a decade or more and being ignored because they haven't been speaking the prevailing language, or weren't connected with what seemed like the 'right' people not that long ago. Some are striving their way through their professions to get across the table from someone who will listen to them.

They are all swimming upstream in a world in which currents were diverted so the guys at the top could avoid change and accountability.

Worshiping the almighty dollar has been a failure, so we as a nation need to find something else to find value in.

I agree with you, but from where i sit, it looks like it is happening. So I'm not so despondent.

“The signal from Obama’s body language and demeanor was, ‘I’m the president, and you’re not.’”

Damn, I really want to believe that this observation is true.

I thought of the evisceration of Charles Krauthammer's column yesterday on Wonkette when reading this post and the comments. Charlie's premise is Obama's bailout of the banks and car companies are just window dressing for his larger plan of a socialist utopia:

Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation’s income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

This is what is keeping the conservatives awake at night? The idea that everyone will have equal access to health care and education? That Obama is using extraconstitutional authority to make us a socialist paradise? (Where was the concern about the Constitution when Bush shat on it for the last eight years?)

The whole idea that these overpaid douchebags that ruined the economy justify their salaries is stunning. My old attitude on high salaries of sports figures and movie stars was if if they're smart enough to demand the money and they've found people stupid enough to pay them so much, more power to them. I sort of kept the Wall Street and CEO class in the same league.

But as Obama said, the financial wizards that got us into this mess need better PR and talking points. A line they seem to be using on FoxNews is how if the government can cap Tarp recipient's salaries, they can cap everyone's salaries and have breathless windbags making such claims. As if the average viewer of Fox & Friends should be worried.

This class of superrich managed to steal an unfathomable amount of money from all of us and have the nerve to come back to the till and ask for more. What makes this so perverse is that the CEO argument of needing these salaries/bonuses to retain talent would even be said. If someone personally ran a company into the ground, how in the hell could they get any job, anywhere? But these guys are in a club I'm not in, so I shouldn't understand. I should embrace the mantra of government is bad and the only handouts that are good are those to these companies? These same multinationals that expend so much energy avoiding paying the same taxes they now want? Grr. Where is my pitchfork?

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

This is where Rahm Emanuel steps out from behind Obama and cocks the shotgun.

We ran a conference a week or so ago where one of the keynote speakers was Bernard Salt, who spoke about (among other things) the "New Morality" that he predicts will take over society, where McMansions and huge plasma screens will change from being signs of success to signs of shame and greed. He believes that the economic crash will lead people to value their contribution to the community (in the widest sense of the word) far beyond any material success. I don't share the same confidence, but I hope he's right. I don't see any winding back of advertising for plasma TVs or any real shift in real estate values (apart from a long-overdue "adjustment" to bring back the market to where it better belongs. I have seen signs that the financial institutions have learned the lesson of what happens when you lend people more than the value of the house they got the loan for, but I think that is more related to concerns about unemployment than anything else.

I guess we'll see.