Obama's "flawed bank-centric cosmology"

Huffington brilliant as always:

...Worse, as the fundamental flaw in the administration's cosmology becomes more and more evident, the economic team around the president is closing ranks. Even David Axelrod, once the administration's champion of a more skeptical view of a bank-centric universe, appears to be peering through the Geithner-Summers telescope.

Back in February, he crossed swords with Geithner, arguing for executive pay caps. But there he was on Sunday, whiffing on a pro-populist softball offered up by Fox News' Chris Wallace, who asked: "When taxpayers are putting up most of the money and taking more of the risk, why would the Obama administration allow some of these executives to get even richer?"

Axelrod's answer? "On some of these programs, we're asking financial companies to come in and help solve this problem by providing more lending, by buying up toxic assets and so on. We don't want to create disincentives and undermine the program."

"Asking" them? Aren't we, in fact, bribing them with massive capital infusions and loan guarantees? That's what being surrounded by a group of modern day Ptolemys will do to a person.[...]

There is an enormous human cost to this bank-centric dogma. Unemployment, already at levels not seen since 1983, is skyrocketing. In many places in the country, it's approaching 20 percent (and in Detroit it's 22 percent).

Writing about the "grand book" that is the universe, Galileo declared that it "cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written... without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth."

That's where we find ourselves today, wandering about in a dark financial labyrinth -- being led by good men blinded by an obsolete view of the world.