Former Obama Vice President Joe Biden likes to paint himself as a moderate reformer, but his history shows otherwise. The best and most far-reaching example of how corporate Democrats intentionally bypassed any efforts to reform a corrupt system is Biden’s and Obama’s meek response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Obama’s legacy of financial reform is non-existent compared to the efforts of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Obama acted as a full-blown Republican when he failed to jail any of the bankers who caused the crisis or hold 
anyone accountable for the gross mismanagement of the mortgage and banking industries. He stood by as the bankers got the full bailout they asked for, even as average Americans lost their homes and savings to failed schemes of financial engineering.
Obama had a Democratic majority at the time the nation’s largest banks manipulated the housing and mortgage markets for their gain. Obama and his Justice Department, SEC, and Treasury Department, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, all knew the systemic fraud was centered at the nation’s largest banks, and the public clamored for justice and public punishments of those responsible.
But in this exciting account from the website Truthdig, author Paul Street provides an excellent assessment of Obama’s failed ersatz “progressive” politics. He shows him for what he was: a center-right Democrat who did very little to advance the long-term interests of millions of Americans.
So, for those interested in how Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, failed to reform the self-serving financial system when he had the votes to do so, here is a chilling account of how Obama did nothing to advance needed financial reform.
Obama’s failure to put any bankers in jail later gave the sociopath and fake “populist” Donald Trump the edge over Hillary Clinton. At the same time, the real populist progressive and Wall Street reformer, Bernie Sanders, was being sidelined by the DNC.
The following is cited from the article, “Barack Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump, by Paul Street from Truthdig, posted Jan. 3, 2017. This article should be read by anyone interested in why Obama and Joe Biden failed as leaders to push for financial reform.
“The first year, when Obama’s party had Congress, was key. In the book “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President” (2011), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind told a remarkable story from March of 2009. Three months into Obama’s presidency, popular rage at Wall Street was intense, and the leading financial institutions were weak and on the defensive. The nation’s economic elite had driven the country and the world’s economy into an epic meltdown—and millions knew it.
“Having ridden into office partly on a wave of widespread anger at the economic power elite’s staggering malfeasance, Obama called a meeting of the nation’s top 13 financial executives at the White House. The banking titans came into the gathering total of dread, only to leave pleased to learn that the new president was in their camp. Instead of standing up for those who had been harmed most by the crisis—workers, minorities, and the poor—Obama sided unequivocally with those who had caused the meltdown.
“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obama said. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help. … I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you … I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.”
“For the banking elite, who had destroyed untold millions of jobs, there was,” as Suskind put it, “nothing to worry about. Whereas [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had [during the Great Depression] pushed for tough, viciously opposed reforms of Wall Street and famously said, ‘I welcome their hate,’ Obama was saying, ‘How can I help?’”
“The sense of everyone after the meeting,” one leading banker told Suskind, “was relief. The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. He could have ordered us to do just about anything at that point, and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t—he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob.”
“The massive taxpayer bailout of the super fat cats would continue, along with numerous other forms of corporate welfare for the powerful and parasitic super-rich. This state-capitalist largesse was unaccompanied by any serious effort to regulate their conduct or by any remotely comparable bailout for the millions evicted from their homes and jobs by the not-so-invisible hand of the marketplace. No wonder 95 percent of national U.S. income gains went to the top 1 percent during Obama’s first term.”
Remember, Biden was fully informed of these plans and went along with them. He will take the full defense of banking and corporate positions if he is elected president.
