The Real News Network has a two part series starting off with the segment Obama Joins Club of the Super-Rich – Defends Global Capitalism in Lecture.

This segment and the one I will post next get frustratingly close to the point, but still manage to miss it. That point is that Obama did have a choice when he came into office, and he worked tirelessly to avoid that better choice. He had a golden opportunity to turn the situation around, and he purposely chose people for his administration that would obstruct that choice. He inherited peopple in the technocracy of goivernment who were begging him to do the right thing, and he pushed them out in favor of his chosen Wall Street types – Rubin, Summers, and Geithner did not have to be given control.

Here are two of the people who were pushed aside over the years Sheila Colleen Bair the 19th Chair of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Brooksley E. Born from August 26, 1996, to June 1, 1999, was chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency which oversees the futures and commodity options markets.

The Warning: Brooksley Born’s Battle With Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin And Larry Summers.

Here is the next segment Obama Says Inequality Led to Rise of the Right, but Takes No Responsibility for It (2/2).

They talk about how certain things are endemic to the system without mentioning agency of people who made it that way. The system didn’t become the way it is without active participation of people who made it be exactly what it has become.

The following may not be the perfect article to explain what the Obama administration could have done instead of what they did to “resolve” the financial crisis, but it was an article that I found easily – Sheila Bair on Helping Banks Fail

Telesur TV has the article $2B Nigerian-Chinese Currency Swap is ‘Win-Win’ Deal: Experts.

Just to be sure you understand what is being swapped, here is an excerpt.

The swap, totaling 15 billion Chinese yuan for 720 billion Nigerian nairas, or vice versa, aims to facilitate bilateral trade and investment and can be extended by mutual consent.

This isn’t necessarily a direct example, but I think it does show that China is not hemmed in by the $3 Trillion it has in US dollar reserves. The theory is that China can’t put that $3 Trillion to use without buying USA goods. If one of its trading partners is being pressured by lack of dollar reserves, I bet China could spare some to bail them out.

The Atlantic has the article Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?

Stock buybacks are eating the world. The once illegal practice of companies purchasing their own shares is pulling money away from employee compensation, research and development, and other corporate priorities—with potentially sweeping effects on business dynamism, income and wealth inequality, working-class economic stagnation, and the country’s growth rate.

That’s a rhetorical question in the headline. Of course it is starving the economy. What the article doesn’t talk about is the need for companies to shrink down to the size of the market for their products. There are consequences for the government not stimulating consumer demand.

Companies also need to keep the cash down so that they don’t attract a leveraged buyout. Even companies that don’t want to do stock buybacks are forced into it by our rigged system.

If we want companies to consider the good of the economy as a whole, we need to protect the good companies from hostile takeovers. If good companies are taken over by hostile takeovers, they will be turned into bad companies. The regulations that Reagan overturned were part of the protection for good companies.