SOUNDING OFF:

I like President Obama, but I think he has been thoroughly sold a bill of goods by those who contributed to the great Wall Street crash and who are still cashing in from the bailouts we taxpayers have — in effect — sanctioned.

I think Obama is going along because he doesn’t know what else to do, made dependent upon burgeoning government-sanctioned financial power system. It is ironic that the steep financial decline brought by the inept Wall Street leadership made Obama quite unwilling to risk independent policy.

After all, we all depend on a leadership that Wall Street moguls and the federal government have been growing since before Reagan times. It’s like a drug dependency that we are unwilling to kick, believing the pain and suffering might kill us in the process.

The growth process of this figurative drug dependency is traced by an essay called “The Quiet Coup,” written by Simon Johnson in the Atlantic.

Between 1973 and 1985, the U.S. financial sector accounted for 16% of domestic corporate profits. After continual nurture by Wall-Street-friendly administrations, this decade saw its financial power weigh in at more than 41% of all corporate profits. The power and the influence that has built on this are more than a drug empire, for it is all legal — all under the good graces of almost four decades of friendly government.

Why hasn’t Obama sought the advice of progressive forward thinkers like Paul Krugman? Krugman has proven that he is not short on new ideas.

What has the new Wall Street puppet, Timothy Geithner, proven? He has proven that he can mimic the failed policy of the puppet he succeeded, Henry Paulson.

So we are now the tale of two Americas. The exploiters and the exploited.

Guess which we are.

Wall Street and most of corporate America has staged a rather quiet takeover. It was during the last three to four decades that its oligopolistic power has been cemented and its certified and sanctioned leaders have made the golden rules; for you know the old saying: “Those who own the gold make the rules.”

It has been during that period of time that the gulf between the rich and the poor has been gaping. Thirty years ago, chief executives averaged only 30 to 40 times the average American worker pay. In 2007 they earned more than 344 times the average salary of American workers. How can corporations pay such huge compensation to executives, we might ask?

Huge favors that we — or at least our elected representatives — granted them is part of the answer.

Last year the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that two-thirds of corporations operating in the U.S. did not pay taxes between 1998 and 2008. A few weeks after that announcement, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released a new study revealing that the American taxpayer is subsidizing “executive pay excess” to the tune of $20 billion a year.

Through a series of bureaucratic rules and loopholes, the federal government is transferring billions of dollars to the most privileged Americans.

But I am getting off track. I was talking about the more pressing problem posed by Wall Street, which we are continuing to bail out with no prospects of ever getting a return on our money.

Wall Street is still the monolith that took us over the brink. It has grown to a still self-absorbed colossus and people like Paulson and Geithner still enable it. Obama — like many of us — in his ignorance and timidity toward Wall Street’s power continues to enable it.

Wall Street soared due to incestuous relationships with our federal government. Both Democrats and Republicans made sure that it became monolithic with their consistent policy of deregulation and the inbreeding of leadership between Wall Street and the government.

Therefore, Wall Street leaders can take little credit for its rise to power and share with many the ignominy of defeat.

I am for Simon Johnson’s solution. Smash the oligarch. Nationalize the banks. Sell them off in medium-size pieces. Revise antitrust laws so they can’t get back together. Find ways to limit executive compensation. Permanently reduce the size and power of Wall Street. In essence, give the American economy back to the people. Isn’t that what Krugman has been saying?

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JIM HOOVER lives in Huntington Beach.