Overall, I think he should be impeached and convicted for not prosecuting these people. And to not prosecute Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, et al.

Of course, it might also be argued that all four of these analyses are dead wrong, that none describes what actually happened because none puts total and complete blame on Obama’s mismanagement of the problem. In other words, since all four viewpoints fail to attack Obama, or place full blame of the aftermath of the crisis on him, they must all be totally incorrect, not to be trusted and are all obviously attempts to justify and excuse his actions. I submit that analysis starts off with some unjustified assumptions, but of course, I am biased.

We’ll never know for sure, will we? We are still having this argument about whether FDR guided us safely through the Great Depression, or whether his actions just prolonged it. And I further submit that these questions will never be answered because they CANNOT be answered. The very fact we are still arguing about the 1930s is all the evidence we need to tell us that some sorts of questions have no answers, and that what we take from them has more to do with our ideological predispositions than a sober analysis of the events. History is not a science. We do not have alternate timelines available for comparison, we cannot conduct experiments, and no two incidents can be compared–there is no controlling the extraneous factors that might influence the outcome.

We live in a fractal, chaotic universe; yes, there is cause and effect, but somehow, knowing that doesn’t seem to help much, does it? As for Mr Obama (and Mr Roosevelt, for that matter) what can we really say with any certainty? Neither actually started the economic crisis they were forced to deal with, and both managed to avoid the worst possible consequences that were predicted when the crises first began. The ship made it through the storm, perhaps profoundly damaged but nonetheless still afloat, and the next storm will be different. We don’t study history to learn what we need to do when next faced with the problem. The best we can do is familiarize ourselves with what the crisis felt and looked like so that next time it won’t catch us totally by surprise.

Obama had two different groups working on financial policy. One of them wanted to prop up the existing system, the other wanted the financial people to take their lumps. Obama chose the prop option, and went with the advice of the insiders.

He also tended to stick with people he knew, and men. The women economists, who universally predicted the crisis, were on the other side, and ignored by Obama. They protested, and he paid lip service but didn’t seem to follow through.

Obama will make policy by assigning the problem to a diverse group and telling them to solve the problem. He will then go with the group concensus if it meets with his own approval.

Those guys are all friends. The same people who created the problem were charged with solving it. Justice was never considered, keeping the economy afloat was.

And there is no excuse for not prosecuting the perps. Obama is a disappointment, but the people who should be in jail are Bush, Cheney and Greenspan. With the rest.

Perhaps the government is primarily a tool of that oligarchy and exists to protect Wall Street and big business, not to restrain or punish them.

If that’s the case, don’t expect more than a token slap on BofA’s wrist. Don’t expect anything more than all the previous “investigations” into how the economy crashed. It’s not like we don’t already have plenty of evidence that the system is rigged. Obama already has a track record of not prosecuting wrongdoing on Wall Street.

Cynicism is aligned with Occam’s Razor. You know I’m right.

As it turned out, he shouldn’t have bothered. He was going to be painted as a radical bolshie by the Right no matter what he did. But he was naive and probably felt he was better off not coming on too strong, and actually believed that he could get further by working with the GOP than going to war with them right from the start. He knows better now.

You will recall, at the time, the situation was being painted as being really scary, perhaps scarier than it actually was. People were talking about global economic collapse. The fact that he was seeking political support and funding from the business community probably figured into it too. Also, from the last days of the Bush Administration, even before the election, the emphasis seemed to be on first stabilizing the situation, not overhauling the financial system or letting it crash in a flaming bonfire of free market retribution. And the solution seemed to work, the death spiral was under control before he was in office too long. The crisis was difficult, and it’s still not over, but it wasn’t the catastrophic implosion that seemed inevitable at the time.

It may be possible to Monday Morning Quarterback the decisions that were made in those days, now that we have the advantage of 20-20 hindsight. But while it was happening, it seemed like the way to go. Of course, once the crisis was over, two things became abundantly clear–the Republicans were not going to let him do anything. Their goal was to crash the economy, and blame it on Obama so they could gain ground in the mid-terms and triumphantly pick up the pieces in 2012. But it didn’t work out quite the way they expected.

Another problem was Obamacare. Obama knew that our ponderous and corrupt health system needed to be junked and a European style medical plan had to be instituted, not just for ideological or humanitarian reasons, but because it would be good for business. Without the expectation of having to provide medical insurance for their workers, American industry would automatically be more competitive on world markets, the unions would be more willing to make concessions, and the people would be relieved of the terrifying anxiety of being both sick and unemployed. Obama sincerely believed a National Health Plan would be just the shot in the arm the economy needed to get the country back to work again, and he bet all his political capital on it. Of course, the plan that emerged after the trench warfare in Congress was far short of what was needed.

In short, there are parallels with FDR’s first term. Mistakes were made, but the disaster was avoided, and even though it didn’t go back to pre-crash boom, the world didn’t come to an end, either. Not surprisingly, the GOP doesn’t read it that way, but enough Americans did to re-elect Mr Obama, and that’s what matters. The obvious disaster that the Right perceived as the Obama administration was a scenario that was only apparent to those already predisposed to loathe him. As a result, they totally misread the electorate and mismanged the election, not only losing the White House, but taking setbacks in Congress as well. We can argue all we want on what might have happenened in some alternative timeline, but that is a fool’s errand.