Here’s a summary of a section of Chris Hedges interview with Marie Gottschalk that:
Obama paved the way for Trump by betraying the working and middle class:
Democrats have written off Trump voters as racially driven but:
there are millions that voted twice for Obama
Obama won states like Indiana.
Obama maintained bifurcated policies, such as on crime and banking/mortgages:
Crime: expanding the carceral state for: street crimes, drug offenses, and immigration violations. while effectively decriminalizing high level crimes
Banking/Mortgages: bailing out banks, while 9-10 million families lost their homes
A summary of the plan was to crack down on the poor and middle class but coddle the powerful.
Transcript
30:13
I just want to read a passage you wrote about the Obama administration because it seems to me uh, that this passage explains how the Obama administration really paved the way for the arrival of Trump. The Obama administration failed to reverse the remarkable inversion in the criminal legal system of the last five decades. That is the vast expansion of the carceral state to punish street crimes, drug offenses, and immigration violations since the 1970s and the accelerating de facto decriminalization of high level crime in the suits since the 1990s. as nonprosecution agreements and deferred prosecution agreements proliferated to settle cases stemming from the financial and foreclosure crisis. These get out of jail free cards became even more deeply legitimized and institutionalized to deal with all kinds of corporate crime under Obama and his successors. Furthermore, Obama’s mortgage relief program ended up being a boondoggle for leading banks and mortgage servicesers who turbocharged the foreclosure crisis, turning millions of people out of their homes and illegally repossessing many properties. An estimated 9 to 10 million families would end up losing their homes, about twothirds of them to foreclosures. many people simply walked away from their devalued properties as you said earlier returning the keys to the banks and action that would destroy famil family’s credit for years. Um I I I think that the you make this point in the book. I mean you people who turned to Trump had at one point supported Obama well and at one point had supported Bernie Sanders too after Obama. Right. And so, you know, there’s a common argument that, you know, the the support for Trump is largely racially driven, but there were millions of whites who voted twice for Obama. And, you know, Obama won states like Indiana, which we can’t imagine the Democrats right now winning, right? But he won Indiana. And many of the a good proportion of the Sanders voters, we understand, then moved over moved over to Trump. And if you listen to Trump’s final commercial, his main commercial in the 2016 election, it s it could be a commercial by Bernie Sanders except that the voices unmistakably Trump’s, but it it’s pictures of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the so-called global elite, the oligarchy, and it’s interspersed with this multicultural um working class people of seemingly all different races, ethnic backgrounds, etc. And it’s a very very powerful commercial about this perception that uh these people have been abandoned in the United States. I want to add one other thing about Obama. The book I what I don’t want people to come away with is thinking corporations have always had all this power. There is no choice. There’s nothing we can do about it. And what I try to do in the book is say yes, corporations throughout American history have disproportionately had power, but it’s waxed and it’s waned. And I try to identify moments when it was possible to do something else. So after the savings and loan crisis, George HW Bush was forced to put some regulations in. The Clinton administration stripped down those guard rails and let let the economy rip and be deregulated. uh crashed and burned with the great recession. Obama comes in and we read back now and say it was always polarized with Obama. Yes, it was very polarized about the Affordable Care Act, but there was remarkable support ranging pretty broadly across the political spectrum to restructure the banks to do not just window dressing about uh economic reform, but something much more uh penetrating so that you wouldn’t have these banks become too big to to fail. uh that you would make them pay in some certain way that you would make them uh keep high reserves in in in uh compared to previously. And the Obama administration blinked on that and Obama’s justification he said if we sent these corporate executives to jail and we use the criminal system he says in his memoir that would have been violence to the social order. I think about that. I think about the violence to so many Americans who lost their homes, who lost their pensions, right? But but this would be violence to the social order. So what Obama sort of argues is, okay, we’re going to do regulation, right? We’re not we’re going to just let our Department of Justice close its eyes to what’s going on and instead we’re going to do regulation. And then he supported a very weak regulation economic reform regulation of the banking industry. Uh he delayed in in what side he was going to come out on that. By that time capital had regrouped. They were back on a roll. The largest banks had consolidated. They used the hundreds of billions of dollars um in the TARP money to to come back u to buy up smaller banks. and that then at that point uh Obama had missed the moment and yet there were there were opportunities legislation in Congress to take a much stricter uh position with the financial industry and it didn’t happen and Obama justified it. Okay, we’re going to do regulation. We’re not going to do criminal. But he didn’t really do either. And let’s talk before we talk about Trump the media a little bit and and the
36:18
QUESTIONS:
Do you think that Democrats go overboard in blaming racism for their political defeats?
How much difference would it have made if Obama had a more balanced criminal and economic policy?
Barak Obama attributed his resistance to prosecuting corporate executives to concern for the violence it would have to the social fabric. How would you assess the financial and political elites’ concern for the social fabric and working and middle class people? Might that suggest a significant element of Democratic losses?
Theme: Impunity