President Obama has invited the heads of America’s biggest banks to hang out at the White House tomorrow, and like any good host he spent the day before the party talking trash about his guests on TV. “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” Obama said on 60 Minutes last night. He said he’s frustrated with big banks that pay huge bonuses while the rest of the country suffers through double digit unemployment rates. “Some people on Wall Street still don’t get it,” he said.
Larry Summers, who’s pretty certain the recession is over, also lashed out at Wall Street. “They don’t get in some cases that they wouldn’t be where they are today, and they certainly would not be paying the bonuses they are paying today, if their government hadn’t taken extraordinary actions.”
But the “fat cat bankers” weren’t the only targets of presidential barbs. Obama also had some choice words for the people who let party crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi grope his vice president. “I was unhappy with everybody who was involved in the process,” Obama said. “It was a screwup.”
