Help! Stop! I'm going under!

That's the cry of millions of little savers and pensioners whose life-savings are locked into the institutional funds whose managers have been so roundly condemned by President Obama for refusing to rescue Chrysler.

The man has no understanding whatsoever of the financial world and no interest whatsoever in the earned personal savings of individual Americans. Only in the big political picture, and his position within it.

More importantly, Obama expects fund managers to fail in their fiduciary duty to their terrified savers and investors and instead to bow to his priorities of political panic and dogma, upon which he acts out of the deeply prejudiced ignorance typical of one who has spent his entire life in the 'it's government money' academic mindset universal to those who 'work' in 'community politics', or the gimme culture as we doctors call it.

With all the colossal power of his office, Barack Obama berates fund managers who are legally obliged to use their discretion in the interests of their investors and who on that basis have refused to pour any more of their investors' already devalued pensions into the dead-but-won't-lie-down Chrysler Corporation, just because it would be politically expedient for the President.

Just how many too-big-to-fail companies does he plan to rescue with the pensions of the little people, and with the earnings of their unborn grandchildren?

I am beginning to see the ghostly image of Gordon Brown behind the smiling Obama features, like an old underpainting gradually revealing itself in a portrait newly painted on an old canvas.

I wonder how long Obama's got before he starts getting the treatment Gordon Brown is getting now - the last thing Brown expected when he took the office for which he had been grasping all his life.