"The banks actually caused the economic crisis through their greed and the "subprime mortgage" scandal."
"The banks" used to be regulated, who is the champion of deregulation? And when did this crisis occur? Under a democratic administration or after 7 years of a republican one?
One key regulation was the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited banks from combining investment banking with commercial and retail banking. It was passed in 1933 and repealed in 1999 during the Clinton administration. This is one factor blamed for the crisis. Another is an intentional lack of regulation of financial derivatives. Some people also claim another possible cause is that the government (mainly Democrats) put pressure on banks to lend to people with relatively poor credit histories or assets, who also by no coincidence tend to be racial or ethnic minorities (as a result of the previous history of red-lining).
"Obama cleaned up only if you define "clean up" as actually bailing out the banksters to the tune of hundred of billions of dollars at the taxpayers' expense."
It's not clear that tax-payers actually lost anything: the TARP was funded for some $431 billion (which some economists said should have been much larger), bought up toxic assets that banks wouldn't touch, and eventually sold them at a profit. The government also engaged in "quantitative easing", a euphemism for printing money. If I recall correctly, about a trillion dollars a year.
More than that, though, the government gave the money to banks, which then proceeded to sit on it, rather than distributing it throughout the economy, so millions of people lost their jobs, many lost their homes -- which then sat empty, because they were owned by banks that couldn't sell them any more than their previous owners could have sold them, so they just turned into neighborhood blight.
And are we to pretend that this outcome was a bad thing?
Bad for people who lost jobs or homes or who couldn't get their first jobs.
Is your idea of "clean up" allowing major banks to enter insolvency and cause a global financial catastrophe?
There was already a global catastrophe. One alternative would be to reduce the moral hazard by, just for example, putting people in prison for fraud, nationalising the banks, and firing all the bank executives responsible for the mess. Sweden responded much more successfully than the US, even though it's a "welfare state".
We are lucky Americans elected a serious party after 8 years of Bush, whose incompetence is only now overshadowed by Trump. Remember the good old days when we could not even imagine having another President as bad as George W Bush?
George W Bush was successful in getting a whole bunch of people killed. Then Obama and Hilary destroyed Libya. [He Who Must Not Be Named] hasn't matched W's record yet but seems to be trending that way, between attacking Yemen, various economic sanctions, and cuts to funding of critical programs.
Libya now has two groups claiming to be the government, and apparently the US has plans to deport migrants to Libya.
