I can't resist

Naked Capitalism comes up with this howler today.

I’m late to this, as everyone with an operating brain cell, starting with Simon Johnson to Paul Krugman is duly horrified by the remarks that Obama made in a Bloomberg interview, published this AM:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Yves here. There are only two, not mutually exclusive, conclusions one can reach from reading this tripe: that Obama is a lackey of the financiers, and putting the best spin he can on their looting, or he is a fool.

Now, it's not that I disagree with the sentiment here.  There's no way that you can legitimately say that Dimon and Blankfein "earned" this money in the free market, unless of course you extend your definition of the free market to include market for rules in Washington (I will not bore you again with the resulting distinction between markets and capitalism). 

No, my reaction is just to point out that SJ, PK, and NC cannot be serious with all these gasps of horror.  Children.  Please.  When will you learn? 

There are not only two options here.  The third option is that OBAMA IS A POLITICIAN.  We didn't vote for change.  We voted for more of the same shit, this time in blackface.  So when we get exactly the same bullshit ritual kowtowing to the wonders of a "free" market that is to real, socially useful markets as the Sicilian mafia is to family ... well, we shouldn't be surprised.  Politically, this is what sells.  Witness the healthcare "debate".  Keep your grubby socialist paws off my corrupt mafia state.

Squeezing real change out of this guy is like asking for blood from a stone.  May I suggest a different approach.

Posted via email from The Capitalist Axiomatic