The Current Economic Reality

I read Atrios, so I know most of what the corporate media is shoveling at us about the bailouts is 100% pure unadulterated crap. Here's the real deal, from three of Duncan Black's posts today:

(a) For over a year the one point that I and others have been trying make is that the polite fiction that masters of the universe of Wall Street and their defenders in the media and Congress have been trying maintain, that this is liquidity crisis not an insolvency crisis, is utter horseshit. They made bad leveraged bets and lost immense amounts of money, and now they, and their buddies Geithner and Summers, want taxpayers to bail them out so they can go on living their opulent life styles while some of my neighbors wonder if their next food stamp card is going to show up.

(b) The question all along has been who is still standing when the music stops, which sucker gets stuck holding the bag.

(c) Bailing out these institutions might be necessary, but bailing out executives and shareholders is not.

Since the people running Obama's economic team are Wall Streeters, it appears that we the taxpayers will be the bagholders.

Trust But Verify

yahoo: President-elect Barack Obama (L) introduces retired General Eric K. Shinseki as nominee for Veterans Affairs secretary during a news conference in Chicago, December 7, 2008.
REUTERS/John Gress

Barack Obama was elected little more than a month ago. He won't take office for another month and a half. He has run one of the quickest and smoothest transitions ever, rolling out appointees and being essentially a shadow government (for the nonfunctioning Bush bunker White House) in waiting.

So what's the problem? Liberals don't like his cabinet choices. Where are the liberals? Rather than appointing the economists who predicted the meltdown of the mortgage and credit markets, Obama has appointed people who were part of the Wall Street posse that got us into this mess. Apparently sensitive to the criticism, Obama has his deputy Steve Hildebrand post on Huffington Post asking liberals to, essentially, STFU.

Me, I'm still rather sanguine about the whole thing. It's not like FDR appointed a bunch of raging liberals to his Cabinet, and from that group we got the New Deal. (FDR did appoint one raging liberal: Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet position, and the longest-serving-ever Secretary of Labor. Obama still needs a Frances Perkins type in his Cabinet.)

But, jeez, he hasn't even taken office yet. Cabinet appointments haven't all been made. He hasn't even announced his Secretary of Labor yet. I am willing to give Obama a little slack here. The people aren't the policies. And while I may not agree with all his appointments (Larry Summers, chauvinist pig, grrrrrr) I'm going to hold my fire for now. I'll wait until actual policy making is done. Patience, people, patience.

Speaking of Cabinet appointments, I was very happy to see that General Eric Shinseki - the guy who told Donald Rumsfeld that his Iraq plan was a crock and got forced out for his truth-telling -- has been named Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Make Me Puke

Oink, a male chauvinist pig goes to the White House. This is your brain on dope. Or testerone.

HuffPo: Larry Summers: Director Of National Economic Council, Top Adviser To Obama

ABC News reports that Obama has tapped Larry Summers to be his top economic adviser.

Can you imagine Obama naming as his top economic adviser someone who said in an address to an academic conference that blacks might have innate differences that explain their failure to attain high positions in the sciences and engineering? And that when asked to explain his racist remarks, this supposed intellectual stated this was a legitimate hypothesis? That he was just trying to be provocative? And complained about political correctness?

That person would not be named economic adviser, I posit, but a man who said those things about women has.

I want some of my money back, Barack.

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy: November 22, 2008

Life: Macy's Thanksgiving Parade
Looking down onto fish balloon & crowds lining street during Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. November 25, 1941, Photographer: John Phillips

Wicked cold here today, big wind gusts outside. Brrr.

Today is the 45th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was only 6 so I don't remember it that well. I remember being sent home from school early. It was the first time I saw my parents cry. The TV was on all the time for several days, the black and white Zenith a constant presence, my parents tearing up and leaving the room every once in awhile. I remember the funeral, the huge cortege, the slow, heavy pomp and circumstance of it all, and of course John John saluting the casket (hard to believe that he is dead). Others remember November 22, 1963 here, here, here, and here.

The Obama daughters are going to attend Sidwell Friends School, the same private school that Chelsea Clinton went to, where they will join Joe Biden's granddaughters as students.

President-Elect Obama is poised to name Timothy Greithner Treasury Secretary, Bill Richardson Commerce Secretary (those two are pretty well confirmed), and Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva as Secretary of the Interior (not final). So far, a very strong group, less progressive than I would like and not enough vagina-Americans. (Check out Tzvee's Talmudic Blog for a day-by-day rundown on whether or not Obama's appointees are Jews. So far the Jewish-Americans are kicking the Vagina-American's asses, metaphorically speaking. Maybe that's because they earned it: 78% of Jews voted for Barack. Yes they did. But Barack, come on, more vagina-Americans. Especially if you're going to put the loathesome Larry Summers in the White House. We've got the necessities, really.)

The burgeoning private prison system is concentrated in the reddest states that went for John McCain. Why? To gerrymander Congress. Because prisoners are counted as residents of the state where they are incarcerated by the United States census. Check out the counties with big prison populations on this map. If your neighbor is arrested in Massachusetts, and gets shipped to a private prison in South Carolina, they're counted as a resident of South Carolina for census purposes. The federal government's crackdown on immigration has also increased the prison population.

Is GE corn from Monsanto the Roman lead pipe of our age? Another terrifying story of the Republican Party's theory of deregulation gone horribly amuck: scientific tests have found that genetically engineered corn is linked to increased infertility. As scientists tested successive generations of mice, "the infertility of the GM-corn-fed rodents became more pronounced with each passing litter." Monsanto may be poisoning our planet forever and causing our own extinction.

If you're driving somewhere for Thanksgiving, read this excellent article at dailykos on how to share the road with truckers, how to drive in bad weather, how to react to problems. Just an excellent refresher on being a good driver.

Friday Afternoon News Dump

Boston.com: Boston City Hall tops the list of the "World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings and Monuments" compiled by VirtualTourist.com.

I love this headline: Summers may be off of Treasury short list. A guy who thinks I am biologically unqualified to understand math and science has no business in high government office. Neanderthals need not apply. We've all got the necessaries, Larry.

Vermont Senator Pat Leahy sez Traitor Joe Lieberman should lose his chairmanship. So does his colleague Bernie Sanders. They're right. Lieberman is frantically trying to save his plum, but when he tried to call Obama to talk about it, he got pawned off on Biden. Reap what you sowed, you sanctimonious gasbag. Connecticut voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the job their senior Senator is doing. 2012 can't come fast enough for the Nutmeg State.

The assistant US Attorneys trying Alabama governor Don Siegelman passed notes to the deliberating jury through the U.S. Marshals. All of those people should be fired, and the lawyers should all be disbarred. It's a shocking breach of ethics. Par for the course for the Bush Crime Family. Those AUSAs were only taking their cue from the U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, who was writing emails to them long after she had supposedly recused herself from the case because of a conflict of interest.

Ann Dunwoody is now the nation's first ever female four-star general.

Take That, Lawrence Summers

Photo via Is It Just Me?

Math study finds girls are just as good as boys