At this point I usually close the window when I read someone referring to Barack Obama with the shopworn phrase “Chicago Way” or some variation on it, but This Is Special:
One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as “hostile to business,” “anti-wealth,” and “anti-capitalism”; as a “redistributionist,” a “vilifier,” and a “thug.” A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a “Chicago mob guy.” Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. “Oh, not everybody—just most of them,” he replied. “Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.”
The Volcker Rule/s comes from former Carter and Reagan Fed chair Paul Volcker, who is the most socialist/mafiaesque member of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, which stems from his experience in that radical hotbed of reds, Chase Manhattan Bank.
I mean, they’re not wrong; in this humble writer’s opinion, the massive and expensive rescue of some of Wall Street’s largest institutions sure as shit sounds like “redistribution” and “anti-capitalist” to me. I eagerly await our butthurt financial overlords throwing in with President Rand Paul.
Update: Simon Johnson argues that Obama isn’t a radical, and isn’t even a centrist.