John 2:15

I’m reading Obama’s wonderful memoir Dreams from My Father and enjoying his storytelling skill and every insightful incident. He comes across as so thoughtful and smart, which makes it doubly difficult to understand why he’s hanging the success of his economic program and potentially his entire presidency on the unimpressive shenanigans of Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, the two-headed beast standing at the gates of the national treasure chest while their minions shovel out ever vaster quantities of its contents.

Economist Robert Kuttner—whom I saw warn against financial derivatives and the potential for catastrophe on C-SPAN about two years ago—has an amusing satire on the situation. He mockingly asks why doesn’t Obama do what he does best and bring together a roomful of smart people who disagree and get some dissident views on what should be done with the financial system.

But Kuttner has no answer to the question of why Obama is letting these two tainted figures from the worst excesses of the past run his shop and shut out the chorus of voices across the political spectrum who are warning that fast action is needed to pull the plug on the moribund patients, namely Citigroup and Bank of America, before it’s too late. ‘Dr. Doom’ Roubini now says the chances of a depression have risen to 1 in 3 (six months ago he was saying 1 in 10), all because no amount of cash flushed down the toilets of AIG and these other two living-dead, vampire banks will work until the government puts them into receivership.

People’s patience with Obama has not run out, but their tolerance for more profiteering out of the gathering cataclysm just might be. The guys he’s letting run the show are letting their old buddy-boys loot these shell banks for bonuses and channel taxpayer funds through AIG to their chums at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere. I don’t know if Obama is the Messiah, but if so, we’re way past the chapter where he should be throwing the money-changers out of the temple.