Oink oink

The difference in treatment of the auto industry and the banks was put into stark relief this week as Obama sallied forth to defend the bailout of Detroit by saying the money was well-spent, saved jobs and all but $25 billion or so will be recovered.

Obama didn’t mention that the price of the bailout was the Grand Guignol-style rolling of heads down the corporate aisle. He hadn’t been president for two months when the White House pushed out the chairman of GM and forced Chrysler into a partnership with Fiat as the conditions for the federal life-line.

Meanwhile, yesterday the federal agency charged with vigilance over the equity markets barely rapped the knuckles of Citibank, beneficiary of either $20 billion or $300 billion in federal largesse (depending on how you calculate it) around the same time as GM and Chrysler were getting $85 billion. Two executives will have to pay back some tiny portion of their Ali Baba loot while the company was saddled with a laughable fine of $75 million for systematically cooking its books.

How many ways is this unfair? First of all, Citibank’s sins were of quite a different nature than GM’s—the latter was a lousy automobile company that lost oodles of money while at least trying to produce something. But Citibank was a casino run by a mob. It put out phony balance sheets to bamboozle bond and shareholders, and when the whole thing blew up, the government came to its rescue while regular folks got laid off and thrown onto the street.

So did the guys responsible for this debacle go the way of Rich Waggoner and the other GM schmos? Um, not exactly. Gary Crittenden, former chief financial officer of the bank, will have to folk over $100,000 for his lies. That would be a lot for a normal person, but Crittenden ‘earned’ $19.3 million in 2007 and another $12.2 million in 2008 from Citibank alone, not to mention the eight interlocking corporate boards he also sits on. The fine is barely an embarrassment.

Citibank did not bother to conceal its contempt for the federal overseers in its statement, noting that the other of the two ‘punished’ executives is a ‘highly valued employee’, rather than a crook who should be taken out and shot.

The grotesque surrender to finance capital performed by the Obama Administration (with the Republican ‘enemies’ expressing faux outrage and secretly cheering them on) gives us the worst of all possible worlds—the alleged party of the downtrodden carrying hod for the rich and powerful. At least when it was Bush and his sleazy crowd doing it, one could read their obvious indifference to anyone not as rich as they are. But the Democrats pretend to be concerned while doing nothing to stop the steady concentration of power in the hands of a financial oligopoly that has demonstrated to all and sundry that nothing can stand in its way.