President Barack Obama “invited” credit card company CEOs to the White House and threatened them Thursday.
Egged on by market-hating liberal activist groups, Obama implied that if lenders don’t play ball, there’s going to be trouble. A news report summed up the meeting:
 “I trust that those in the industry who want to act responsibly will engage with us in a constructive fashion, and that we’re going to get this done in short order,” Obama said, delivering a pointed message to leading executives of credit-card issuing companies after a closed-door White House meeting.
Both the House and the Senate are pursuing bills to give consumers greater protections as an expansion of new rules slated to take effect next year. Obama said his economic advisers will examine the various proposals and work with Congress and the industry, but he made clear he wants to sign a bill into law.
“The days of any time, any reason rate hikes and late fee traps have to end,” Obama said.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are tripping over each other in a competition to see who’s best at denouncing the lenders.
The whole situation is getting confusing. On the one hand the government is giving money to banks to help keep them afloat, and then on the other hand it wants to kneecap them by hindering their ability to make a profit.
And we recently learned that perpetual bumbler Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is refusing to allow banks to pay back emergency aid because letting them do so would reduce the administration’s leverage over them. If banks pay the money back, then the government can’t exercise strict control over them any more.
Is the Obama administration serious about economic recovery, or, inspired by the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis, is it deliberately exacerbating the current economic downturn? Making the banks the bad guys for decades to come would certainly serve the left’s political purposes by giving the government even more control over the economy and the personal lives of all Americans.
