Hail Emperor Reich


Tuesday May 15th, 2012   •   Posted by Burt Abrams at 4:32pm PDT   •  

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Will Rogers claimed to have never met a man that he didn�t like. I�m consistent too. I never read anything by Robert Reich that I liked. Dr. Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and currently a named professor at UC Berkeley, is at it again. In writing for the U.K.�s The Guardian, April 23, 2012, Reich lays out a re-election economic game plan to enable President Obama to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Reich identifies four villains: big banks, oil speculators, anyone attempting to cut government spending and, of course, income inequality. My own dislike of big banks raised a fear in me that I might lose my perfect score in disagreeing with Dr. Reich. Big banks have all the mismanagement problems of big corporations and big governments: wasteful activities that benefit the management at the expense of the owner-voters. But in reading Dr. Reich�s position on big banks, my fear dissolved. Dr. Reich is not opposed to big banks per se�only big banks that do not do his imperial biddings. President Obama, according to Reich, should threaten banks. If they do not �provide meaningful relief to homeowners,� he�ll break up the biggest ones and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act to prevent commercial banks from engaging in investment banking activities. Presumably, if banks do Imperial Washington�s public policy activities, they can remain too-big-to-fail and continue to go their merry way taking outrageous financial risks under implicit and explicit federal guarantees. Oh, and big banks don�t forget to make your obligatory campaign contributions.

Read Reich�s imperial edicts




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