Bold Words, Inadequate Actions

Derek Shearer, former economist in the Clinton administration, Ambassador to Finland, and professor of Diplomacy at Occidental College, sees what lots of others are seeing about Obama's administration:

In speeches earlier this year, most notably at Georgetown University,
President Obama said that he wants to lay the foundation for new economic
growth--growth that improves citizens' lives and does less damage to the
environment. Unfortunately, while his words are bold, he acts cautiously when it
comes to actual reforms that are necessary to create this new foundation for
economic growth, and he runs the risk of returning to the same old "money
values" that underpin Reaganomics, which brought us the recent economic
crisis.His proposals, and his economic team, seem at variance with his rhetoric.
Whether this is a function of his true beliefs about what his goals really are,
or simply his political calculus of what is possible, is difficult to know. On
the evidence, we do know that his choice of economic advisers and appointees has
not been reformist. Instead of Joe Stiglitz, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman or
Barry Bluestone, he has selected Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Christina
Roemer. Even Laura Tyson and Robert Reich, both of whom endorsed and campaigned for Obama, would have been more progressive and reform-minded.

In Washington, personnel is, in large part, policy--and who you see in
power is what you get. Obama picked stabilizers not reformers. His recent speech
to Wall Street spoke more about responsibility than about reform, as if it were
personal failings rather than an unbalanced system that caused the crisis.
Obama's proposed reforms are moderate and in the analysis of many experts like
Simon Johnson of MIT, insufficient to prevent a future meltdown. Wall Street
seems to have returned to its old ways of doing business, only with even larger
financial conglomerates like the new Bank of America which swallowed Countrywide and Merrill Lynch and is surely "too big to fail." The message seems to be that
the Obama government will bail out the big companies to get back to stability
and growth, but not significantly change the way the system operates to prevent
future bailouts.