mcurry 's Profile

And the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?

I don’t know which possibility is worse.

In my first book, Hostile Takeover, I made the overarching point that the corruption of our political process has as much to do with raw vote buying as it does with the artificial narrowing of the political debate exclusively on terms that do not threaten moneyed interests. Clearly, the Establishment Media - eager to suck up to power, eager to ingratiate itself to politicians, overtly stating that it doesn't think tough questions are appropriate in crisis times - plays a huge role in that endeavor by manufacturing a political conventional wisdom that has almost nothing to do with actual verifiable facts.

That this same Establishment Media wonders why it is losing readership and viewership to alternative media sources is the only thing that is truly surprising. The country is angrier than it has been in a long time, and thanks to the Bush era, its bullshit detector is now finely tuned. At times like this, explicitly dishonest propaganda that is wholly divorced from reality is not only easy to detect - it is particularly infuriating. The longer the Establishment Media ignores that truism, the more it will lose its audience.

The monumental quarterly loss revealed by U.S. insurance giant AIG of $62 billion is the largest in corporate history, amounting to about $460,000 per minute. The loss caused jaws to hit the floor around the world and left us wondering, what else would $62 billion buy?

The Huffington Post reports that there is growing concern in organized labor that a faction of Democratic senators will vote against the Employee Free Choice Act, thus killing it. Unions will (and should) work hard on a state-by-state basis to keep Democratic lawmakers on board (and I promise to do my part to get my own wavering Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet on board), but it seems to me there's a much easier way to enforce unity: Make Harry Reid choose between getting every Democrat on board, or ending his political career.

This is not a far-fetched idea. In fact, the inevitable whining, screaming and moaning from Establishment Democrats aside, it would be relatively simple to pull off, and Reid - a smart politician - would know that labor could pull it off in a state like his.

Read that again: We gave that bank $45 billion as its business practices helped destroy the economy. And yet, it's CEO is telling us that money doesn't mean any fundamental change to the way that company does business. Because, really, why would we want banks that destroyed the economy to change their business practices, right?

At first pass, the Citi plan sounds better than expected (not good, but better). The government is going to convert preferred shares into common in a kind of matching program, to the extent that Citi can convince other preferred shareholders to do the same. The US will end up owning about 36% of Citi.

This doesn't, at the moment, add any more government money. It does make the investment more risky, though to the extent that you believe Citi's dead anyway it doesn't make all that much difference.

Basically it's just a continuation of "let's make it up as we go along" which isn't really a good way to handle this stuff. I think I heard a snippet of Pandit claiming that Citi's all better now. I doubt it.

The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically fueled upheavals.

If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.

What’s more, the banks will continue to be managed by the same bad managers who got us into the current situation. As a result, we’re going to wind up giving the banks less money than they really need to take off. And they’ll continue to be managed poorly. So they’ll continue to be wards of the state. And no private investors are going to want to give smaller, healthier banks the capital they would need to expand and thrive. Consequently, our economy will continue to be dominated by large, semi-dead financial institutions that hamper growth.