Their System Doesn't Work For You

The Obama campaign team is hitting up the banksters for some much needed campaign cash for his quest to raise a cool billion for his reelection bid:

The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Last month, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, traveled to New York for back-to-back meetings with Wall Street donors, ending at the home of Marc Lasry, a prominent hedge fund manager, to court donors close to Mr. Obama’s onetime rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. And Mr. Obama will return to New York this month to dine with bankers, hedge fund executives and private equity investors at the Upper East Side restaurant Daniel.

[...]

The president’s top financial industry supporters say they are confident that the support Mr. Obama needs will ultimately be there, despite the financial industry’s unhappiness over his efforts to tighten regulation of their businesses. 

So President Obama has to go back to the banksters, even after he hurt their fee-fees and called them fat cats and was so mean to them with his policies and rhetoric that their businesses have returned to record levels of profitability. This article is profound for a couple of reasons:

(1) Can there be any greater statement on how broken and corrupt our campaign finance system has become that elected officials outwardly rely on substantial donations from the very group of people and corporations that torpedoed the global economy? Or that the price tag for the presidency is now close to $1 billion? What sort of corrupt incentives do you think this implies?

(2) Can there really be any doubt that this same perverse incentive structure was even marginally responsible for the overly feeble Dodd-Frank financial reform bill? Or as Glenn Greenwald notes, perhaps in part responsible for the fact that there have still been no significant indictments coming out of the financial crisis?

And as for the rest of us, we just supply the votes, and maybe a few hand picked questions  for town hall style debates to give a nice photo-op and a folksy interaction of the candidates with the peasants. 

It's just a complete mystery why the trend in our economic policies continue to favor the ultra wealthy, you know, the unparalleled levels of low and regressive taxation, deficit paranoia, siren calls to slash the safety net, the now habitual ignoring of unemployment, decades of deregulation and a willful disregard for rampant corruption and financial fraud. I am sure when they are meeting at swanky Manhattan restaurants, soliciting donations and trading for POTUS access, that they are really just discussing how to act in Main Street's best interests.