‘They won’t be missed’ seems to be the conclusion of several people whose opinions I value on the topic of the decline and fall of the nation’s newspapers. Jack Shafer in Slate asks what’s so essential about the printed sheet to the preservation of democracy, and my old bud Marc Cooper defends the blogosphere as collectively at least as coherent and defensible as the ‘professional’ reporter class led by people like Judith Miller who peddled the pack of lies that brought us the Iraq war. (In all fairness to Miller, newspaper jingoism and war-promotion goes back quite a long way.) Glenn Greenwald at Salon regularly chimes in with similar tunes.
Here’s a fascinating addition to that discussion: John Mearsheimer writes in the London Review of Books this week that the Israel lobby suffered a setback in its successful campaign to trash Charles Freeman and keep him away from the chair of the National Intelligence Council, the body that produces those pesky National Intelligence Estimates saying Iran in fact is not building nuclear weapons. Mearsheimer is half of the team (along with Stephen Walt) who wrote a book about the oversized influence of the Israeli right on American policy, previewed last year in a huge excerpt in the same LRB after The Atlantic buckled and spiked it.
Mearsheimer points out that although the Israel lobby did manage to bury the Freeman nomination when Obama failed to back him up (in contrast with Obama’s tenacious, ongoing defense of creepy Tim Geithner), it was exposed in the process and did not succeed in browbeating its opponents into silence or retraction. Jimmy Carter led the way in this regard with his book calling Israeli policy a form of apartheid, and Mearsheimer is encouraged by the fact that bloggers, no less, stood up to the Likud bullies.
Mainstream media—that is, the newspapers we’re supposed to be mourning—largely ignored the whole incident, which makes them complicit with the lobby’s desire to kill off unwelcome appointments without leaving fingerprints. But blogs were afire with the story and, as Mearsheimer notes, were not intimidated into silence: ‘A vigorous, well-informed and highly regarded array of bloggers defended Freeman at every turn’ until the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Lieberman and the other Democratic stand-bys weighed in and finished the job for the Israelis.
‘The lobby never has had much trouble keeping the New York Times and the Washington Post in line, but it has few ways to silence critics on the internet’, says Mearsheimer. I gather he’s not lamenting the death of the Cincinnati Post.
Sunday, 29 March 2009
Friday, 27 March 2009
Oh-So-Liberal New York
As news filters out of Albany about the possible, dare-we-hope-for-it end of the horrible 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, it is time to reflect on how far we have to go to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise to rehabilitate science and formulate policy based on knowledge rather than ideology and emotion.
The Rockefeller drug laws have now been with us for three decades, roughly coincident with the Nixonian War on Drugs, and have been just as ignominious a failure. They mandated gigantic prison sentences for drug selling convictions and thereby jammed state prisons full of non-violent offenders. Drug use has continued to rise, and the trafficking business has become more lucrative than ever.
Misha Glenny’s fascinating book McMafia outlines how easy it is to predict all this and leads inescapably to the conclusion that powerful criminal interests are just delighted with the Draconian approach to drug addiction and abuse because it creates a great business opportunity for them, just as it did for Al Capone in the 1920s. Doh. That doesn’t mean Rockefeller was in the pocket of organized crime. Perish the thought.
Meanwhile, demagogic drum-thumping will now ensue as opportunist (white) politicians raise the spectre of increased street crime when all those bad sorts get let out of jail. Given the three decades of stupidity in drug control policy, they could be right, especially as sentence reductions may occur just as we enter the worst economic environment in a half-century. We need spokespeople ready to do battle with this kneejerk response and go to bat for the kinds of rehab and re-entry programs that will make us all safer. (Don’t expect the conservative pols to support any of that spending, either.)
Speaking of conservative pols, the New York Times outlines in detail today just what a nasty bit of work our new U.S. Senator is. Turns out that Kirsten Gillebrand, named by Governor Paterson to replace Hillary, started out as an enthusiastic conniver for the tobacco companies along the path to her current glory at the right hand of Chuck Schumer.
This disaster was one of many sins committed by our laughingstock governor who may mercifully be put out of our consciousness forever in next year’s primary. Gillebrand, however, like a case of Type I diabetes, is probably with us for life.
The Rockefeller drug laws have now been with us for three decades, roughly coincident with the Nixonian War on Drugs, and have been just as ignominious a failure. They mandated gigantic prison sentences for drug selling convictions and thereby jammed state prisons full of non-violent offenders. Drug use has continued to rise, and the trafficking business has become more lucrative than ever.
Misha Glenny’s fascinating book McMafia outlines how easy it is to predict all this and leads inescapably to the conclusion that powerful criminal interests are just delighted with the Draconian approach to drug addiction and abuse because it creates a great business opportunity for them, just as it did for Al Capone in the 1920s. Doh. That doesn’t mean Rockefeller was in the pocket of organized crime. Perish the thought.
Meanwhile, demagogic drum-thumping will now ensue as opportunist (white) politicians raise the spectre of increased street crime when all those bad sorts get let out of jail. Given the three decades of stupidity in drug control policy, they could be right, especially as sentence reductions may occur just as we enter the worst economic environment in a half-century. We need spokespeople ready to do battle with this kneejerk response and go to bat for the kinds of rehab and re-entry programs that will make us all safer. (Don’t expect the conservative pols to support any of that spending, either.)
Speaking of conservative pols, the New York Times outlines in detail today just what a nasty bit of work our new U.S. Senator is. Turns out that Kirsten Gillebrand, named by Governor Paterson to replace Hillary, started out as an enthusiastic conniver for the tobacco companies along the path to her current glory at the right hand of Chuck Schumer.
This disaster was one of many sins committed by our laughingstock governor who may mercifully be put out of our consciousness forever in next year’s primary. Gillebrand, however, like a case of Type I diabetes, is probably with us for life.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Toxic Tim
I really don’t get the big terror over taking over the asphyxiating large commercial banks—the dreaded ‘N-word’. After all, isn’t that exactly what the FDIC does every Friday when it declares a bank insolvent and seizes it? This utterly uncontroversial federal entity then sells off its deposits and tries to dispose of the remaining assets in the cheapest possible way while announcing up front an estimate of what the cost to taxpayers will be.
No doubt it is easier when dealing with smaller operations or those limited in their field of activity like mortgage banks or S&Ls, but the principle seems to little ol’ unsophisticated moi to be exactly the same: regulators recognize a teetering bank, swoop in, socialize the unrecoverable loss, restore normalcy. Everyone is happy, and bank runs are the stuff of old movies.
One line of gossip in the business and economics blogs is that Obama’s people know this is inevitable but haven’t got the 60 votes supposedly needed to just go out and do it. So they are setting up this latest version of the Geithner plan as the only possible compromise until the next round of failure permits them to take the proper course of action.
Who knows if there’s any truth to this, but if so, it’s a helluva way to make policy. Not to mention a rather expensive one if the bank behemoths and their eager counterparties scurry off with a trillion of our dollars in the meantime. Wall Street’s celebrations are not entirely encouraging in this regard.
Another view somewhere between support and condemnation is that the Geithner plan builds on mutual strengths by pulling in private investors to these asset purchases, thus avoiding a wholesale raid on the public purse. Since they are liable for the initial investment (and can lose it), they will be more cautious and astute than the feds would be alone.
That’s fine if the economy doesn’t further tank from its current miserable state. But that’s a big ‘if’, and the quiver of policy arrows is not limitless. The fact that Geithner proposes to use FDIC and Fed as well as Treasury funds gives him the opportunity to avoid congressional approval, which becomes less likely for any big-ticket items with each passing day. The emergency conditions may merit this end run, but as a precedent it’s a bit scary.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the ‘stress tests’? They were supposed to tell us which of the wounded elephants were completely moribund and which could be carried on Geithner’s trillion-dollar pallets into the veterinary ICU. Is all the ‘stress’ now relieved by the quickie profits earned off the Dow in the last two weeks?
The problem with continuing to throw cash at ‘toxic assets’ under the assumption that they are temporarily priced below their true worth is that there are fewer and fewer fall-back options if Geithner—make that Obama—turns out to be wrong.
No doubt it is easier when dealing with smaller operations or those limited in their field of activity like mortgage banks or S&Ls, but the principle seems to little ol’ unsophisticated moi to be exactly the same: regulators recognize a teetering bank, swoop in, socialize the unrecoverable loss, restore normalcy. Everyone is happy, and bank runs are the stuff of old movies.
One line of gossip in the business and economics blogs is that Obama’s people know this is inevitable but haven’t got the 60 votes supposedly needed to just go out and do it. So they are setting up this latest version of the Geithner plan as the only possible compromise until the next round of failure permits them to take the proper course of action.
Who knows if there’s any truth to this, but if so, it’s a helluva way to make policy. Not to mention a rather expensive one if the bank behemoths and their eager counterparties scurry off with a trillion of our dollars in the meantime. Wall Street’s celebrations are not entirely encouraging in this regard.
Another view somewhere between support and condemnation is that the Geithner plan builds on mutual strengths by pulling in private investors to these asset purchases, thus avoiding a wholesale raid on the public purse. Since they are liable for the initial investment (and can lose it), they will be more cautious and astute than the feds would be alone.
That’s fine if the economy doesn’t further tank from its current miserable state. But that’s a big ‘if’, and the quiver of policy arrows is not limitless. The fact that Geithner proposes to use FDIC and Fed as well as Treasury funds gives him the opportunity to avoid congressional approval, which becomes less likely for any big-ticket items with each passing day. The emergency conditions may merit this end run, but as a precedent it’s a bit scary.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to the ‘stress tests’? They were supposed to tell us which of the wounded elephants were completely moribund and which could be carried on Geithner’s trillion-dollar pallets into the veterinary ICU. Is all the ‘stress’ now relieved by the quickie profits earned off the Dow in the last two weeks?
The problem with continuing to throw cash at ‘toxic assets’ under the assumption that they are temporarily priced below their true worth is that there are fewer and fewer fall-back options if Geithner—make that Obama—turns out to be wrong.
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Wait
Geithner has given Wall Street a terrific orgasm, but it’s too early to say whether he cleverly turned a bad hand into a great hand-job or just postponed the déluge. The underlying debate about whether the big banks are illiquid (Geither, Summers) or insolvent (Krugman, Roubini) is still with us.
There is plenty of precedent for not taking the current euphoria at face value—kind of like SIVs and CDOs from Lehman Brothers. Every time the government has intervened dramatically to pull us back from the precipice, the financial markets have rallied only to reverse course and sink even further once the warm afterglow has faded into a clammy sweat.
If Geithner’s plan works, we will forget the fact that the Obama Administration missed a gigantic opportunity to put into practice the ‘personal responsibility’ mantra that Mr O is fond of by chasing the guilty gamblers and moneychangers out of their ruined behemoths through direct state intervention, a.k.a. the N-word (nationalization). Too bad, but not disastrous.
If, however, the latest scheme tanks because these mega-entities really are zombies that cannot be brought back to life, then we have a really depressing scenario: the progressive, people-first, hopefully audacious, once-in-a-lifetime, broomstick-wielding Obama team has just poured unimaginable sums of public cash into the private pockets of the rich.
Not just depressing but also dangerous because the next wild swing away from the Obama promise is likely to be in a most unappealing direction.
There is plenty of precedent for not taking the current euphoria at face value—kind of like SIVs and CDOs from Lehman Brothers. Every time the government has intervened dramatically to pull us back from the precipice, the financial markets have rallied only to reverse course and sink even further once the warm afterglow has faded into a clammy sweat.
If Geithner’s plan works, we will forget the fact that the Obama Administration missed a gigantic opportunity to put into practice the ‘personal responsibility’ mantra that Mr O is fond of by chasing the guilty gamblers and moneychangers out of their ruined behemoths through direct state intervention, a.k.a. the N-word (nationalization). Too bad, but not disastrous.
If, however, the latest scheme tanks because these mega-entities really are zombies that cannot be brought back to life, then we have a really depressing scenario: the progressive, people-first, hopefully audacious, once-in-a-lifetime, broomstick-wielding Obama team has just poured unimaginable sums of public cash into the private pockets of the rich.
Not just depressing but also dangerous because the next wild swing away from the Obama promise is likely to be in a most unappealing direction.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Helluva Job, Geithner
It’s hard for a lay reader to evaluate whether the new bank bailout is well-considered or has a chance to work. But it’s pretty easy to see that the political framing of this chapter is a miserable failure, and the responsibility for that resides with one Barack Obama, President.
Obama seems to have concluded that the winning formula for electoral triumph directly translates into the best way to run the country, that is, steady, plodding consistency without too much attention to the ups and downs of the polls. Under normal circumstances he might be right.
But these aren’t. The country is facing a populist revolt that is simultaneously encouraging and dangerous. The mobs getting out their pitchforks to skewer the gamblers and usurers who’ve ripped us off for decades are certainly to be applauded for finally catching on. But they can just as easily be whipped into a frenzy by Sara Palin as by Jon Stewart.
If Obama doesn’t channel this righteous anger into some serious paddling of the rich and their bloated institutions and some quick relief for the underdogs, it will very quickly shift course and come after him. There’s plenty of pent-up hostility to Obama and his liberal program that is just waiting for an opening.
Obama is obviously unwilling to jettison his first economic team just weeks into the new administration, but he could do himself (and us) a favor by locking the completely inadequate Geithner and Summers into a broomcloset and finding a new face to front for his program. Even some additional visibility from Paul Volcker or another roundtable with a broader mix of experts would provide much needed balance.
Bankers, bad; working stiffs, good. That’s the narrative out here and across the land. Obama has a big chance to show us which side he’s on. He better not blow it.
Obama seems to have concluded that the winning formula for electoral triumph directly translates into the best way to run the country, that is, steady, plodding consistency without too much attention to the ups and downs of the polls. Under normal circumstances he might be right.
But these aren’t. The country is facing a populist revolt that is simultaneously encouraging and dangerous. The mobs getting out their pitchforks to skewer the gamblers and usurers who’ve ripped us off for decades are certainly to be applauded for finally catching on. But they can just as easily be whipped into a frenzy by Sara Palin as by Jon Stewart.
If Obama doesn’t channel this righteous anger into some serious paddling of the rich and their bloated institutions and some quick relief for the underdogs, it will very quickly shift course and come after him. There’s plenty of pent-up hostility to Obama and his liberal program that is just waiting for an opening.
Obama is obviously unwilling to jettison his first economic team just weeks into the new administration, but he could do himself (and us) a favor by locking the completely inadequate Geithner and Summers into a broomcloset and finding a new face to front for his program. Even some additional visibility from Paul Volcker or another roundtable with a broader mix of experts would provide much needed balance.
Bankers, bad; working stiffs, good. That’s the narrative out here and across the land. Obama has a big chance to show us which side he’s on. He better not blow it.
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Technocrat hell [Updated]
If Treasury Secretary Geither had a political team, someone might have warned him that dishing out succulent, taxpayer-funded bonuses to incompetent bankers who have wrecked millions of lives might be problematic. But Geither does not have a political team because he is short-staffed because his advisors and assistants are stuck in the vetting process because Geithner’s boss wants to avoid another problem like the one Geithner himself brought him by not paying his taxes. Thus ‘the whirlygig of time brings its revenge’.
Many of those ubiquitous Voices of the Powerful are now heard in Geithner’s defense: he didn’t know (except he did); he wasn’t responsible (except he is); the holiness of sacred contracts trumps all (except it doesn’t); members of Congress did it (except if they did, no one knows who). President Obama’s defense lingered on the fact that Geithner is working so very hard (and works out at 5:30 a.m. daily—okay, all is forgiven!)
Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post has outlined, no one knows who killed the Wyden-Snowe provision that would have halted this outrage. If Obama is sincere about shouldering blame for the bonus debacle, he should be getting to the bottom of that decision and rethinking the employment of whoever—at the behest of which lobbyist—reached into the rush-rush House-Senate conference committee to erase the ban.
It would also be a good time to address the conference committee abuse that presents such perfect opportunities for corruption.
Only weeks into the new administration, an aroma of putrefaction emanates from Geithnerville, fanned by the rush to defend him. Obituaries are clearly premature as, we are told endlessly, Geithner has unique technical knowledge that makes him oh so valuable. Ho fucking hum. At least as important as knowing how to crunch numbers is having a clue about how this plays out to people chewing their pillows at night over the next mortgage payment. Geithner and Summers, who live in the bankers’ world and explicitly permitted the bonuses to go through, are total disasters at that, and Obama himself isn’t doing much better despite his trips to see The People out in Ohio and California.
At a certain point, the soothing confidence from on high will start to sound like detached indifference to reality. Before that happens, we need strong signals that more crap like the A.I.G. hogfest are out of bounds and will cost the perpetrators dearly. ‘Personal responsibility’, I believe is the favored phrase.
[Update] When the Prez has to appear on Leno to say your job is safe, your job is NOT safe. The trickle of devastating revelations on the A.I.G. rip-off threatens to turn into a flood of hogslop. Witness the Mother Jones item on key Geithner aide Patterson, Geithner's own completely unconvincing miasma of non-denials on CNN, dodge-ball as played by Senator Dodd and on and on. I see no sign of a waning of outrage over Ain't-I-Great-gate; if so, prepare the first political tombstone of the new administration, and none too soon.
Many of those ubiquitous Voices of the Powerful are now heard in Geithner’s defense: he didn’t know (except he did); he wasn’t responsible (except he is); the holiness of sacred contracts trumps all (except it doesn’t); members of Congress did it (except if they did, no one knows who). President Obama’s defense lingered on the fact that Geithner is working so very hard (and works out at 5:30 a.m. daily—okay, all is forgiven!)
Meanwhile, as the Huffington Post has outlined, no one knows who killed the Wyden-Snowe provision that would have halted this outrage. If Obama is sincere about shouldering blame for the bonus debacle, he should be getting to the bottom of that decision and rethinking the employment of whoever—at the behest of which lobbyist—reached into the rush-rush House-Senate conference committee to erase the ban.
It would also be a good time to address the conference committee abuse that presents such perfect opportunities for corruption.
Only weeks into the new administration, an aroma of putrefaction emanates from Geithnerville, fanned by the rush to defend him. Obituaries are clearly premature as, we are told endlessly, Geithner has unique technical knowledge that makes him oh so valuable. Ho fucking hum. At least as important as knowing how to crunch numbers is having a clue about how this plays out to people chewing their pillows at night over the next mortgage payment. Geithner and Summers, who live in the bankers’ world and explicitly permitted the bonuses to go through, are total disasters at that, and Obama himself isn’t doing much better despite his trips to see The People out in Ohio and California.
At a certain point, the soothing confidence from on high will start to sound like detached indifference to reality. Before that happens, we need strong signals that more crap like the A.I.G. hogfest are out of bounds and will cost the perpetrators dearly. ‘Personal responsibility’, I believe is the favored phrase.
[Update] When the Prez has to appear on Leno to say your job is safe, your job is NOT safe. The trickle of devastating revelations on the A.I.G. rip-off threatens to turn into a flood of hogslop. Witness the Mother Jones item on key Geithner aide Patterson, Geithner's own completely unconvincing miasma of non-denials on CNN, dodge-ball as played by Senator Dodd and on and on. I see no sign of a waning of outrage over Ain't-I-Great-gate; if so, prepare the first political tombstone of the new administration, and none too soon.
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Obama on the Potomac
I visited the Civil War battlefield at Antietam Creek on the way back from Ohio this weekend and was touched by the somber setting and the opportunity to learn of that terrifying event. The carnage of the war’s bloodiest battle (over 20,000 dead) is easy to imagine as the fields and woods are kept roughly as they were on September 17, 1862—there’s even a whitewashed, stone smokehouse that remains standing on the old Mumma farm just as it did when Robert E. Lee made his first attempt to invade the North. (Gettysburg was his second and last.) Chirping birds and ground hogs the size of small elk are the only signs of life on the landmark site.
In the car radio all along the route to and from the battleground in the western Maryland mountains, I got an earful about the A.I.G. execs helping themselves to our money. It appears that Obama’s managers were slow to react to the outrage and haven’t yet realized that the country is feeling a tad murderous about the continued looting of the national treasury to feed the greed of these arrogant pricks. Timothy Geithner seems not to have much of a feel for the pulse of the nation, despite his extensive training at Kissinger & Associates, the International Monetary Fund and the Clinton White House.
At the head of the Army of the Potomac in 1862 was George B. McClellan. He was an expert general and had observed campaigns in the Crimea, spoke French and had broad knowledge of the logistics involved in equipping and mobilizing large armies. He once wrote a manual on cavalry tactics.
Lincoln kept General McClellan in charge of the battle at Antietam despite the latter’s miserable failure to smack Lee down during the Peninsula campaign in first year of the war. McClellan was cautious and overestimated the size of Lee’s army, but his timidity was political as well as military. McClellan, like many northerners, wasn’t sure that the southern white elite should be crushed, despite their treasonous assault on the nation. McClellan, who later ran against Lincoln on the antiwar Democratic ticket, was also quite comfortable with slavery and assured slaveowners in what later became West Virginia that he wasn’t about to touch their ‘property’.
Obama fished Timothy Geithner out of the murky waters of Washington-New York high finance where he clearly developed a low opinion of things like income taxes, given his disinclination to pay them. When he talks, he sounds like any of the interchangeable Republicrat suits trained to answer questions by divulging no information. His ascent to high office was built on an appropriate number of Indonesian, Korean and Thai backs as the IMF and the Clintonians spooned up disastrous fiscal medicine during the 1990s Asian financial panic and added greatly to human misery in that part of the world.
McClellan hurried west from Washington to cut off Lee’s audacious attempt to march into Pennsylvania and seize Harrisburg, further undermining the North’s will to fight after the string of Union defeats. Despite having stumbled upon a copy of Lee’s battle plan, McClellan settled for a draw and failed to deliver the knock-out blow that could have shortened the Civil War by three years. Lee’s army escaped back across the Potomac.
Lincoln was indignant and had had enough with his lukewarm commander. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and cashiered McClellan for good.
Geithner helped salvage the crumbling financial system by arranging the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns last March and is believed to have played a big part in the A.I.G. bailout. His co-consul Lawrence Summers bleated pitfully over the weekend that top bankers’ contracts are Sacred Documents that, sadly, must be respected at all costs—or roughly $180 million out of our threadbare pockets. Those objecting—or raising distractions like their own labor and pension contracts—simply don’t understand the subtle nuances of finance and should trust Daddy.
As the sans-culottes gather at the gates of their local Wal-Marts, cobblestones and pitchforks (but not paychecks) in hand, one wonders whether the president from Springfield, Illinois, is ready to heave these stale, preening overseers into the dustbin of history and bring us victory.
In the car radio all along the route to and from the battleground in the western Maryland mountains, I got an earful about the A.I.G. execs helping themselves to our money. It appears that Obama’s managers were slow to react to the outrage and haven’t yet realized that the country is feeling a tad murderous about the continued looting of the national treasury to feed the greed of these arrogant pricks. Timothy Geithner seems not to have much of a feel for the pulse of the nation, despite his extensive training at Kissinger & Associates, the International Monetary Fund and the Clinton White House.
At the head of the Army of the Potomac in 1862 was George B. McClellan. He was an expert general and had observed campaigns in the Crimea, spoke French and had broad knowledge of the logistics involved in equipping and mobilizing large armies. He once wrote a manual on cavalry tactics.
Lincoln kept General McClellan in charge of the battle at Antietam despite the latter’s miserable failure to smack Lee down during the Peninsula campaign in first year of the war. McClellan was cautious and overestimated the size of Lee’s army, but his timidity was political as well as military. McClellan, like many northerners, wasn’t sure that the southern white elite should be crushed, despite their treasonous assault on the nation. McClellan, who later ran against Lincoln on the antiwar Democratic ticket, was also quite comfortable with slavery and assured slaveowners in what later became West Virginia that he wasn’t about to touch their ‘property’.
Obama fished Timothy Geithner out of the murky waters of Washington-New York high finance where he clearly developed a low opinion of things like income taxes, given his disinclination to pay them. When he talks, he sounds like any of the interchangeable Republicrat suits trained to answer questions by divulging no information. His ascent to high office was built on an appropriate number of Indonesian, Korean and Thai backs as the IMF and the Clintonians spooned up disastrous fiscal medicine during the 1990s Asian financial panic and added greatly to human misery in that part of the world.
McClellan hurried west from Washington to cut off Lee’s audacious attempt to march into Pennsylvania and seize Harrisburg, further undermining the North’s will to fight after the string of Union defeats. Despite having stumbled upon a copy of Lee’s battle plan, McClellan settled for a draw and failed to deliver the knock-out blow that could have shortened the Civil War by three years. Lee’s army escaped back across the Potomac.
Lincoln was indignant and had had enough with his lukewarm commander. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation and cashiered McClellan for good.
Geithner helped salvage the crumbling financial system by arranging the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns last March and is believed to have played a big part in the A.I.G. bailout. His co-consul Lawrence Summers bleated pitfully over the weekend that top bankers’ contracts are Sacred Documents that, sadly, must be respected at all costs—or roughly $180 million out of our threadbare pockets. Those objecting—or raising distractions like their own labor and pension contracts—simply don’t understand the subtle nuances of finance and should trust Daddy.
As the sans-culottes gather at the gates of their local Wal-Marts, cobblestones and pitchforks (but not paychecks) in hand, one wonders whether the president from Springfield, Illinois, is ready to heave these stale, preening overseers into the dustbin of history and bring us victory.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)