About 6 months ago, I started warning about the potential for a really bad electoral cycle for the Democrats in the 2010 midterms. I feared that by not taking the big banks on more aggressively, not doing more to create jobs in a really bad economic period for job creation, and letting the health care bill drag on and get too compromised in terms of taking on the insurance industry, that Democrats would be badly hurting ourselves with both our base voter turnout and with swing working class voters getting hammered in this economy. A lot of the Democratic establishment said folks like me were over-hyping, that while it wouldn't be an easy year, there were all kinds of reasons to think it wouldn't be so bad. To my great chagrin, my predictions were proved right with a vengeance in the first three big elections of this cycle in NJ, VA, and MA: base vote turnout was terrible, and working class swing voters turned dramatically against us. Now, the conventional wisdom has turned and just about everybody in the Democratic party is in full scale doomsday mode.
That's why I was so heartened to see David Plouffe's well reasoned analysis piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, laying out a strategy on how the Democrats can survive 2010 without getting slaughtered. Because what is needed now in the Democratic party is that kind of calm, steady thinking. As worried as I have been now for these last 6 months, I am equally convinced that if we do the right things politically and policy-wise (the two are in sync), we can surprise people in the 2010 elections and do a lot better than the pundits and the panickers think.
The reason I believe this is that I have been involved in several elections where good things happened against all the predictions of the conventional wisdom. Let me take you back to some elections in the past where Democrats came back when things looked really dark for them:
On Wednesday, Chris wrote a quick hit on Representative DeFazio's statement that there was "growing consensus" among Congressional liberals that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner should step down. He went on to say that Summers should go as well. Folks in the blogosphere have been saying as much for a long time now, but this seemed like something new, coming from a veteran Representative. The piece Chris linked to ended with DeFazio saying, ""We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans," underscoring that it was not just a general criticism of Geithner and Summers, but one closely tied to the need for shifting from a Wall Street-centered economic policy to a Main Street-centered one. So I followed up by talking with Darcy Burner, Executive Director of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation, to see what it might mean.
Open Left:On MSNBC Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said Wednesday that he and other liberal House members are becoming increasingly tired of the Obama administration economic policies that are too focused on maintaining the stability and health of Wall Street firms and largely ignore Main Street. There's been significant criticism of Geithner and Summers in the blogosphere since their appointments were first announced, and significant criticism of their policies as well. There's been scattered and occasional congressional criticism before, but this sounds like it's a good deal more serious. Is it? And if so, why is it different and why now? Let's take those one at a time.
Is it different?
Darcy Burner: My best guess is that it is more serious. Now the Progressive Caucus has not taken an official position. Congressman DeFazio was speaking on his own behalf, quite eloquently, I thought. I particularly liked the line about "losing two jobs to save millions." But I think that the indications are that there is growing dissatisfaction among the members of Congress who very much want to see a set of economic policies that are going to help main street, rather than just Wall Street. And a jobless recovering isn't particularly progressive approach to how we solve the economic crisis that we're in.
Now, it is the case, obviously, that we have some progressives who've been very active, particularly in the financial reform aspect, if you look at Alan Grayson, for instance. He is a member of the Progressive Caucus, he's been extraordinarily involved in asking the tough questions, and encouraging his fellow members on the Financial Services Committee to ask some really tough questions at the hearings they've held, about the Federal Reserve, about the banking system, about the banks, about some of the Wall Street shenanigans.
So there has been growing pressure from members of Congress. And, you know, we're seeing some traction around the idea of auditing the Fed, and finding out what's really going on there.
So I don't think it's particularly surprising that there would be an expression of real dissatisfaction with the Administration's economic policies and the economic advisors from progressives in Congress.
A couple of items in the financial sector, but both can be summarized in these words: the powerful and greedy continue to run things with impunity in the financial world.
First there's the news that Goldman Sachs is making record bonus payments for the first half of the year. Let me repeat that: RECORD bonus payments. Bigger than 2004 or 2005 or 2006 or 2007. Bigger than at the height of the bubble. In spite of all the toxic assets they have created. In spite of all the government bailout help. In spite of all the stunning damage to the American and world economy. In spite of all of that (or maybe because of some of it), for the very, very short term, the company has good profit numbers. Ergo post hoc, they are giving out really awesome bonuses to their big enchiladas.
Then, there is the massively infuriating article entitled "Treasury's Got Bill Gross on Speed Dial". It seems that Bill Gross is extremely happy these days. Everybody in government seems to hang on his every word. The plan that he helped develop, the Public-Private Investment Program (the PPIP for short), which would coincidentally make him billions of dollars, is being pushed by Tim Geithner.
Read these two articles back to back; and if you are not sputtering with rage at the end, you must truly be the most pro-corporate libertarian around.
Hey, I know it takes a heck of all ill wind not to blow somebody some good. And I knew that when the Summers-Geithner policy of resuscitation of the financial system rather than restructuring it was adapted, that lots of people would make money off the deal. But reading these two articles really does make you wonder who won the election, and how these greedy folks can get away with doing whatever they want.
Check out this absolutely terrific post by Drew Westen, one I had really wished I had written because it's so on target. I want President Obama to succeed more than I've ever wanted anything politically, but it's not going to happen unless he (a) wrenches the control of the economy away from the greedy, and (b) confronts the greedy directly. You have to decide which side you are on, Mr. President: the struggling tens of millions barely hanging on, or not hanging on at all, in this dreadful economy. Or the greedy bankers and health insurance executives. I trust that you have good values and instincts, and I want to be on your side in these fights. I appreciate the good things you've done so far on the stimulus, the budget, health care, the environment. But at some point, you are going to have to confront the greedy, or you are not going to inspire and you are not going to win.
Fight the good fight, Mr. President, and there will be tens of millions of us who will fight it with you. Avoid these fights, and your Presidency will be adrift, with neither set of allies fighting for you or big legislative victories.
Most of us who have been working on the banking issue from the restructuring side of things (meaning put the big banks into receivership and break them up into smaller components that are no longer too big to fail), including people I know far closer to the administration's economic team than I am, have come to the conclusion that the administration's policy regarding the big Wall Street financial institutions is fairly set for the time being. There are a variety of reasons Obama has chosen this path - the fact that Geithner and Summers really believe it is better to resuscitate the big banks rather than to fundamentally restructure them, the belief (reinforced by the Senate's recent failure on cramdown legislation) by senior administration officials that despite the populist anger among the general public that there is no political will in DC to take on the big banks, the reality that most of the media's shallow interpretation about whether something works is whether the Dow Jones goes up the day the plan is announced. But regardless of the reasons, this is the reality we are living with. Obama has clearly chosen a path, and those of us with a different idea about how to work on these issues have to live with the fact that we have lost the debate, for now, inside the administration. The question now is: what do we restructuring advocates do now?
We Americans dwell in a consumer plutocracy, and the plutocrats don't even bother to be cute about it any more. Barack Obama, hailed by the geniuses of new media as a populist saviour, has surrounded himself with a team that was already bought and paid for by the financial services industry before they ever walked into the White House.
"And just in case you ever get a big job in Washington, Larry, remember who your friends are!"
George W. Bush remembered his friends who paid him $15 million on a $600K investment in a baseball franchise, and Barack Obama remembers his friend Penny Pritzker, the Queen of Sub-Prime Lending, chief financial officer of his Senate and Presidential campaigns, and Rahm Emanuel remembers his friends among the investment bankers at Wasserstein Perella, who paid him $16.2 million for two years of "work," and it isn't easy to figure out exactly what "work" that was, because Rahm Emanuel was a speech and communication major at Sarah Lawrence and Northwestern, and never had any training whatsoever in accounting, or business, or finance... but he always knew how to follow the money, as a fundraiser for Richard Daley and Bill Clinton, and now Rahm has followed the money all the way to his current job as Chief of Staff and gatekeeper outside the Oval Office.
"If you ever get a big job in Washington, Rahm, remember your friends!"
And the friends remember, too. They remembered Bill Clinton for signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and paid him $40 million for speaking, in 2007, alone, and the same friends already remember Tim Geithner.
Tim Geithner is "[a] very unusually talented young man...[who] understands government and understands markets," says Henry Paulson, who gave away more money to the banks than anybody in the history of the world... except Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, and Barack Obama.
FDR Economist Says Obama Should Put Stimulus First
April 2 (Bloomberg) -- When John Maynard Keynes came to Washington in 1934 to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to spend more to revive the U.S. economy, Roosevelt didn't pay the British economist much attention, Thomas Worsley recalls. He hopes President Barack Obama won't repeat Roosevelt's mistake.
Worsley, then a 23-year-old economist about to take a job in the Treasury Department, says Roosevelt balked at too much economic stimulus, and even allowed conservative Democrats to talk him into reining in federal outlays in 1937.
Now, at 97, Worsley is watching as Obama wrestles with the deepest economic slump since the Great Depression and is coming under fire from critics at home and abroad over his spending plans. Ultimately, Worsley said, only World War II delivered the U.S. from its hard economic times, and he advises Obama to keep pumping money into the economy.
"That vindicated Keynes's argument," Worsley said during an interview at his brick townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia, where his framed economics degrees from the University of Virginia, including a doctorate, are displayed. "You have to get enough spending going to get private enterprise interested in taking chances on investing."
Top Economics Aide Discloses Income
Summers Earned Salary From Hedge Fund, Speaking Fees From Wall St. Firms By Philip Rucker and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, April 4, 2009; Page A05
Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations.
One of the most bi-partisan pieces of legislation in the last decade played a huge role in causing the current economic crisis: The Financial Modernization Act of 1999. The bill repealed a huge number of 1930's era regulations on the financial services industry that were designed to prevent financial collapses like the one we currently face. The conference report was favored by 90 Senators and 362 members of the House. It was praised in ways that are eerily similar to calls for new regulations:
''Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,'' Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said.
"We can no longer sustain 21st-century markets with 20th-century regulations," Obama said following an Oval Office meeting with his top lieutenants and the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate panels overseeing the financial industry.
Um, didn't your chief economic advisor tell us ten years ago that we already achieved that goal? And it's not just Summers. Virtually every person involved with drafting the new regulations supported increasing de-regulation ten years ago. That shouldn't give anyone who hopes to prevent another cycle of speculative bubble rise and fall much confidence.
The best we can hope for is that Larry Summers, and everyone else who supported the Deregulate The Financial Sector bill ten years ago, have learned from their mistakes. Apropos, a question on whether the administration will repeal the 1999 Financial Modernization Act and reinstate Glass-Steagall is the top, non-marijuana related question in the Financial Stability section of Open For Questions at Whitehouse.gov. Go vote for it. It is a question that needs an answer.
Much of the news these days--the AIG fiasco, Geithner's flawed bailout plan, the financial crisis itself--points to a single essential truth: Wall Street rules. The GOP's subservience to Wall Street is longstanding and unmatched. But Wall Street also holds power over the purported party of the people, most notably in form of Robert Rubin and his acolytes. It's fair to call Wall Street, as Robert Kuttner does, the Democratic Party's most powerful interest group. Which would be horrrendous even if Obama weren't trying to solve a financial crisis that Rubin and his acolytes helped to create.
Here are the four main questions about Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner's role in the bonuses scandal:
When did they know about the bonuses? The current line from the administration is that Geithner did not know about the bonuses until last week. However, according to the Washington Post, attorneys working for the Federal Reserve Bank knew about the bonuses for months. If Fed lawyers were working on this for months, was Timothy Geithner, former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, current Secretary of the Treasury, and negotiator of all three AIG bailouts really unaware of this until last week? Really? If so, who kept this information from him?
Why weren't the bonuses disclosed before the Senate voted to release the second half of bailout funding? Clearly, given that Federal Reserve lawyers were working on blocking the bonuses for months, some government officials knew about the bonuses before the Senate voted on January 15th to release the second $350 billion of TARP funding. Given the current furor, I think it goes without saying that public knowledge of the bonuses in January could have altered the outcome of that vote, or at least convinced Senator Banking Chair Chris Dodd to take up the TARP Reform Act passed by the House. Given that, three days before the Senate vote, Larry Summers sent a letter to Congress urging them to release the TARP funding without any new legislative requirements, if he knew about these bonuses back in January that would be a pretty severe case of denying legislators relevant evidence before a critical vote. Even beyond Geithner and Summers, anyone in the government who knew about this but did not bother to tell either the Senate or the media tampered with that vote.
Why were Geithner and Summers working as recently as last month to water down legislation that would have blocked executive bonuses? If Geithner and Summers are both so outraged by the bonuses given to employees of financial institutions receiving bailout money, then why were they working, as recently as last month, to water down legislation that would have retroactively blocked such bonuses? When Senator Chris Dodd had included legislation retroactively blocking bonuses for employees of financial institutions receiving bailout money, he received a personal call from both Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner asking him to drop the retroactive aspect of that legislation. Eventually, Geithner and Summers prevailed, as the legislation was watered down significantly.
Why did Geithner and Summers both say there was no way for the government to get the bonuses back, when there obviously is? Over the weekend, Geithner and Summers both publicly declared that there was no way for the government to force the individuals who are scheduled to receive these bonuses to pay those bonuses back to the government. However, Summers and Geithner were obviously wrong. Over the last two days, dozens of Democratic member of Congress have either introduced, co-sponsored, or set a deadline for introducing legislation that will place a 100% surtax on these bonuses, thus forcing the recipients of these bonuses to pay them back to the government. Given that there was a fairly obvious solution to get the bonuses back, why did Geithner and Summers, who are supposed to be such leading thinkers on finance, declare in public that there was no solution? As I asked last night, are they lacking in imagination, or are they protecting someone?
These are the questions that still have not been adequately answered about the role Geithner and Summers played in the AIG bonus scandal. Journalists and activists of all stripes need to keep asking them. This is not a small issue, since the same people who are being given these bonuses are being entrusted by Timothy Geithner with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to get the economy back on track. If we can't trust the person giving the money, or the people receiving it, then they need to be fired and replaced with new people who will do a better job.
(Via Jane Hamsher) Back in mid-February during the fight over the stimulus package, Senator Chris Dodd was pushing for retroactive restrictions on bonuses paid to employees of financial companies receiving bailout money. This measure, which would have applied to AIG bonuses, was opposed by both Wall Street and the Obama administration:
As word spread Friday about the new and retroactive limit -- inserted by Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut -- so did consternation on Wall Street and in the Obama administration, which opposed it.
Both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner personally asked Senator Dodd to remove the retroactive provision, because they thought it meant banks would give the government its money back:
The administration is concerned the rules will prompt a wave of banks to return the government's money and forgo future assistance, undermining the aid program's effectiveness. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who heads the National Economic Council, had called Sen. Dodd and asked him to reconsider, these people said.
Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said.(...)
The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.
Don't forget that Chris Dodd is the most endangered Democratic Senate incumbent in 2010, as he currently trails his Republican challenger Robert Simmons. Hard to imagine how Dodd's re-election chances will be helped by a senior White House source telling the New York Times that Dodd is to blame for the AIG bonuses.
The enormous complexity of the economic mess that we are in makes an incredibly smart man like President Obama understandably irritated with people who want to simplify everything down to a quick either/or equation. I understand that, and am sympathetic to the overwhelming swirl of nuance, subtlety, ripple effects, and unintended consequences inherent in every Presidential decision when the stakes are this high.
Sometimes, though, you just have to make a basic "gut check" decision to go down one basic path or another. To his enormous credit, that's what Obama did on the economic recovery bill, his budget, and his framing of the health care, energy, and education issues: he decided to go big, bold, and progressive in all of those areas.
Now he has to do that on the issue of these big bank and insurance company bailouts.
In the extended entry, I provide a lengthy, detailed timeline of AIG bailouts and bonuses, from September 2008 through the present. The timeline includes the role Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers played in those bailout and bonuses. It shows that, more than any other government employee, Timothy Geithner is responsible for the bonuses at AIG. Larry Summers provided Geithner with assistance in this matter, but overall the blame almost entirely rests on Geithner himself.
In response to this scandal, it is time for President Obama to demand Timothy Geithner's resignation. The timeline in the extended entry explains why. Not only is Geithner the person responsible, but it would demonstrate that President Obama is deadly serious about reform in the financial services industry.
Please read the timeline in the extended entry. I would love your feedback on it.
[T]he administration would use a $30 billion installment of bailout funds approved March 2, to bring some pressure to bear. The official said before AIG can draw down funds from the $30 billion, new rules would be written into AIG's contract. The idea: to ensure no government money goes toward paying financial products division bonuses and that the cost of bonuses already paid would be recouped for the taxpayer.
However, the official said, Treasury has determined there is no way the government can actually extract the money from the individuals who received the bonuses.
This isn't nothing, but it still raises several questions, all of which come to point at Larry Summers and Timothy Geither:
Why weren't these rules written into the AIG contract in the first place? Geithner is in charge of that department, both as Treasury Secretary now and as the backer of the original AIG bailout when he was head of the New York Federal Reserve. Given that he was in charge of both AIG bailouts, why isn't he taking a lot more of the blame for this? More than anyone else in the government, Geithner could have prevented these bonuses. He failed.
Further, given that we were promised improvements in TARP under the Obama administration, why did it take a public outcry to actually improve these contracts? Larry Summers sent a letter that dissuaded Senator Chris Dodd from passing legislation to legally mandate improvements TARP. Given the promises that were made, why aren't there guarantees against this sort of excess in all TARP contracts written by the Obama administration? Larry Summers promised us there would be. He failed. Maybe its time for the "very severe hostility" Chris Dodd had threatened?
Why isn't everyone at AIG involved in the scandal about to be fired? We own 80% of the company, so we should be able to hire and fire people, right? And even if we can't just hire and fire people, we can apparently still change the contract. As such, why can't we make firing people involved in the scandal conditions in the contract? Everyone involved in this should be fired. They took $170 billion in government money than used it to line the wallets of already wealthy employees. Fire them now.
I am getting really sick of Geithner and Summers. If they were serious about fixing TARP, then conditions against employee bonuses would already have been in the contracts they wrote (Geithner) and promised us they would write (Summers). If they were serious about punishing the people involved, they would include requirements to fire those people in the new contracts (which they are not talking about doing), and they would not have incorrectly stated that there was no way to get the money back (they would have at least said they were looking into it).
It is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that Geithner and Summers are working to protect the Wall Street executives at the financial institutions that are receiving TARP money. Its either that, or they are demonstrating a lot of incompetence. No matter which is the case, I have created a petition asking President Obama to replace Geithner and Summers on his economic team. We need people who are serious about changing TARP to be running TARP. Geithner and Summers ain't it.
I see trees of green........ red roses too
I see em bloom..... for me and for you
And I think to myself.... what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue..... clouds of white
Bright blessed days....dark sacred nights
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world.
That's the great Louis Armstrong, and now let's hear from Barack Obama's main economic adviser, Larry Summers, who invented the concept of "underpollution."
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted."
Obama's little friends on the internet like to claim that Obama is blameless for the ongoing meltdown of the American economy, because he has only been President for 44 days, as if he fell off an interplanetary turnip truck only 44 days ago.
Maybe I'm wrong, but apparently Barack Obama was the Presidential nominee of a party with majorities on both sides of Congress ever since last summer, and President-Elect since November 4th, and a member of the US Senate since 2005, and he wasn't exactly on another planet when bankers started transforming deposits into worthless paper.
Obama's main financial backer was the poster-girl for bankrupting banks with sub-prime derivatives, Obama was Bush/Paulson's Senate whip for the first bailout/giveaway to the banks, and as David Sirota observed on Open Left...
...out of the $9.7 trillion our government is putting on the line to deal with the economic emergency, just 4.6% of it is actually being allocated to direct spending on social programs.
Obama was a major player in the enormous bailout/boondoggle, and if there was any possible doubt about his endorsement of the crazy banking that produced the meltdown, Obama terminally draped that albatross around his own neck by appointing the main architect of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Larry Summers, as his main economic adviser.
So Barack Obama didn't really fall off a turnip truck and land in Washington only 44 days ago. He played along with the banking deregulation that destroyed the American economy, and endorsed it again by making Larry Summers director of the National Economic Council, even after the current catastrophe had already rolled down the mountain and thrown millions of Americans out of work.
Thousands of depictions of George W. Bush as a chimpanzee were floating around the media for 8 years, and nobody noticed the racial implications of any of them!
"Comme c'est bizarre, comme c'est étrange et quelle coincidence!"
Most of the people demanding that the Post fire Sean Delonas probably don't even know that his cartoons run on Page Six, and mostly cover sports and entertainment, and only what you might call the most grotesque elements of national politics, like the economic stimulus designed by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.
Personally, I think of Summers and Geithner as goddamned blood-suckers and chumps, but now that criticism of the ridiculous tax-cut stimulus has been rebranded as racism, I guess we can all forget about the millions of jobs and houses that will be lost because of absurd concessions to Republicans, and go back to our usual media-induced stupor until another wave of phony outrage or phony concern or some other form of news about nothing comes out of nowhere and distracts us again.
It only makes the whole stupid mess even stupider that it coincided with the 8th anniversary of the great Chandra Levy super-spectacle that distracted almost everybody from the stolen Presidential election in 2001.
So now that a cartoon from Page Six of the New York Post has crowded any criticism of the brain-dead stimulus out of the news, I want to add my little voice to the chorus of praise for all the unscrupulous hustlers who distract us from unpleasant realities year after year, by updating one of Sean Delonas' cartoons from a few weeks back...
The situation we find ourselves in at this moment is very strongly reminiscent of the situations we've seen many times in places we don't like to think of ourselves as being similar to. It's Russia or Indonesia or a Thailand type situation, or Korea. And, yet, we somehow find ourselves in the grip of the same sort of crisis and the same sort of oligarchs.
The Obama/Summers/Geithner neo-liberalist response to this economic crisis will only make it much worse. Post-election I had been stupidly hopeful that Obama would do the right thing, somehow allow the mega-banks to fail -- perhaps gracefully but fail, THEY MUST FAIL! - and then deal concretely with an economic crisis that -- on the real, not financial side - is at bottom, a 2-3-4 year overbuilt property market (and so a depressed construction industry). That, to me, meant massive deficit spending on construction. And, with sugar pops and candy canes dancing in my head, I thought, "What the hell, let's strike huge blows against global warming and for energy efficiency over this 2-4 years of government-jacked-up construction!"
Dealing with the real economic crisis had nothing to do with bailing out all the big financial sector players/gamblers. But that's not how the financial kingpins feel, and they've gotten it all from Obama: we have the most reactionary possible, the most neo-liberal, big banker oriented response possible. I'm talking about the 'mortgage (banker) rescue plan installment 1' announced yesterday. I'm talking about the big banker bailout bill, installment 2 referenced a few days ago by Timothy Geithner. The 'stimulus' bill was admittedly a mess and didn't satisfy my dreams, but it will do a lot of good and is not a right-wing plutocratic piece of legislation. These other two are.
Most importantly, they will make our economic crisis much worse. I said exactly the same thing about the Bush big bankers' bailout bill, that $700 billion dollar waste of money, with a chorus of smart (i.e., they correctly predicted the current economic crisis) economists behind me, and I say so again. But now the money figures, the debt impossible to repay, will be that much larger. Out of whose hides will these trillions of dollars be taken? Mirror! Are we truly committed to rescuing all the big banks, keeping them private and making them solvent again, without any regulatory reform or writing off of debts? I.e., are we truly committed to the Geithner/Obama plan?
Do we realize that we don't need to rescue the giant banks? That there are hundreds of smaller U.S. banks who sensibly did not base lending practice on obscuring, bundling, and selling off bad loans? Only the 'stupid' and/or irresponsible banks did that, the big ones who 'knew' they could buy, with campaign donations, a bail out for whatever their stupidity and irresponsibility might get them into.
Now is the time to hear from the left, the most important moment since the 1930s. But where are the voices on the left opposing this giveaway? (Is there a left here?) Where are the voices opposing Obama and pointing out a better way? I mean, I can link to non-right-wing economists, but where are the politicians, the activists, the union leaders?
The plutocrats' army has critically breached the defenses of the middle and working classes, Obama leading the charge. Yet still, leaders who are labeled progressive shout, "Hold your fire!"
Essential reading (bold added), and notice the repeated reference to the sooner than you imagine apparent end game, the U.S. getting the IMF ('structural adjustment') austerity treatment:
Sometimes lost in all the anger and irritation over the things that we don't like about this Economic Recovery Act, and over some bad decisions that seem to be being made on the banking bailout, is the fact that some really big things are going on right now for the good. We had to make some really irritating compromises to get the recovery bill passed, and it's too small, and we sure didn't message it well at times. But wow: almost $800 billion dollars going mostly into great investments into the economy for the poor and middle class, and tax cuts targeted vastly more towards middle income people than rich people. The size, the scope, the kinds of investments- health care, state/local fiscal relief, universal broad band, school construction, infrastructure, health care, green jobs, poor people's income support- it really is historic. Let's get this thing passed.
And let's stop for a minute after this gets passed, and take some satisfaction: The Lily Ledbetter is law. S-CHIP, including children of immigrants, is law. About a dozen outstanding executive orders on civil liberties, labor, reproductive choice, regulatory issues are signed and in place. And now an $800 billion jobs bill, targeted mostly to progressive things, hopefully is about to become law.
Geithner and Summers are still pissing me off. We have a long way to go on a whole lot of issues. But even so: wow.
President Obama's economic stimulus has lost so much weight in the last few days that dieters everywhere are flooding Congress and the White House with requests for information about the so-called "Ivy-League Diet," named after an association of degree-granting institutions in New England that granted degrees to President Obama and most of his economic advisers. Thanks to my new job as a busboy at Washington's exclusive Alfalfa Club, I was able to get the inside story from Tim Geithner (Dartmouth '83), Paul Volcker (Princeton '49), and Larry Summers (Harvard '82).
"Excuse my humble self for disturbing your Lordships," I groveled, "but would you please be so kind as to explain the "Ivy-League Diet" that I hear so much about on TV?"
Larry Summers graciously replied.
"It's very simple. We shit on the economy and you eat it."
"Harharhar!!!" said Paul Volcker.
"Harharhar!!!" said Tim Geithner.
And even my humble self joined in the merriment.
"Harharhar!!!"
"What are you laughing at?" said Larry Summers.
"Nothing, your Lordship," I replied. "Enjoy your soup."
On Wednesday, Chris wrote a 
