Undoubtedly, the loss of the senatorial race in Massachusetts Tuesday, has acted as a wake-up call to the Obama administration that something simply must be done about Wall Street. The anger that pervades the rest of the nation (including this writer) over the kid-gloved treatment of the very institutions and their leaders that brought about financial near-calamity is completely justified on a number of grounds, not the least of which is the obscenely large bonuses to be handed out to the miscreants with the attitude that its recipients are entitled to them.

Obama is reacting because he must.

From his comments yesterday, which I missed because of high fever, it appears that the Goldman Sachs contingent, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, were shut out of a come-to-jesus meeting between President Obama, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Bill Donaldson, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is further clear from Obama’s remarks that the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression Era statute that separated commercial banking and investment banking, must be reenacted in some form, and that the government cannot ever again allow itself to be put in the position of standing behind banks that speculate with their depositors’ money.

Obama also made it clear that something would have to be done about institutions that are “too big to fail.”

It was only a couple of months ago that the New York Times reported that there was no possibility of Glass-Steagall becoming reenacted, but what a difference two months and the election of a right-wing Republican in a safe Democratic state can do!

As I see it, Obama was expected to do two things in his first year: 1. See universal health care enacted and 2. Take affirmative action to fix the financial system. The first has certainly hit a buzz-saw, and as for number 2, Obama simply did not seem to have the stomach to pick a fight with Wall Street—or anyone else, for that matter. I was aghast when I learned who Obama’s economic team would be and predicted that they would sooner or later have to be cast overboard if there were to be any real hope of reform. The gangplank was prepared at 11:34 AM, EST yesterday. Expect the Goldman Sach contingent to soon discover the importance of spending more time with their families.

The Obama honeymoon is over. The low-hanging fruit, admittedly meager after eight years of Bush, has been harvested. The hard and unpopular decisions that have been put off must soon be made. Obama has been as bipartisan as any president could be and he has been rewarded with snarls, curses, prevarication and stonewalling from his opponents. He will have to use the immense power of the presidency to push through real change. Not to draw too fine a line—he will have to put his foot on the neck of Wall Street and some of the other powerful corporations that are fattening themselves on the back of average Americans. That is not his preferred mode of dealing, but it is the only way that will produce results in the political climate today.

How Obama handles himself and his administration over the next six months will determine the success of his presidency.

Here beginneth the trial—by fire—of Barack Obama.

Tags: banking, Glass-Steagal

The media transformation has already began. Like it did in the Katrina disaster, it took only a couple of days for the media to switch its focus from the almost unbearable suffering of the hapless victims to stoking the fears of looting.

The same thing is happening in the media this very moment, before the bodies have begun to be buried, and while people are still dying from lack of water and food.

Like the media treatment of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a purpose to this sudden obsession: to erase any compassion on the part of the American People. If people become too concerned about Haiti they might start looking deeper into its miserable history—especially the heavy hand of the U.S. that has played such a large part in creating that misery, from the invasion by the Marines under the southern racist president, Woodrow Wilson in 1915 to the ouster of its first legally-elected president in modern times, Aristide, in 1993.

This column was inspired by a column on tomdispatch.com by Rebecca Solnit, When the Media is the Disaster.

Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud.  Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.”  It might be logic.  It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them.

The Clarion-Ledger is running without comment the AP wires that are increasingly turning their attention from suffering to looting:

Pockets of looting and violence also are hindering a slow improvement in getting aid to victims.

Just four blocks from U.S. troop landing at the palace, hundreds of looters were rampaging through downtown.

Even the venerable New York Times has shown its concern over looting.

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret) put it all together in 1933:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Follow the money.

You owe it to yourself to read the Solnit column. It’s an eye-opener.

Tags: Looting, Haiti, earthquake

The mayor lifted the boil water notice for all Jackson residents other than those served by the well system in Southwest Jackson. The water now has only the usual pollutants, with an extra dose of chlorine, just to play it safe.

Tags: Water Mains