Finally got around to reading Taibbi’s RS piece, and while of course it is a polemic and written in Taibbi’s trademark style, I’m having a really hard time figuring out what so many folks find so objectionable about it. Sure, there are some mistakes and some areas that a bit over-wrought, but how can anyone deny the basic point he is making? Is there any real argument that the FIRE boys are running the show in Washington, regardless of which administration is in charge? Can anyone name one instance in which the bankers have really taken a hit?
I think too many people are interpreting this as an assault on Obama, and just circling the wagons in blind defense. I’m really not seeing anything that objectionable in the Taibbi piece, and if you recall, folks like Daniel Larison were pointing out that Obama was the Wall Street candidate all last year. And even so, it is clear he was still the best option. I’ve remarked in the past that the only people who seemed to think that Obama was a hard left progressive are the right wing nutjobs and the lefties who wanted him to be a hard left progressive.
If what Taibbi says pisses you off, maybe you should be more pissed off about the fact that all those people are where he says they are, doing pretty much what he says they are doing. And for that matter, I’m not sure what all could be done to change things, as we are about to watch all the fiscal conservatives and “moderates” in the Democratic Senate rape the regulations bill that just came out of the House. It just is what it is. You just watched the “liberal” house vote down “cramdown” again, right? It is infuriating, the situation we are in and the power these guys have, but it is just insane to be mad at Taibbi for pointing it out in his own sometimes flawed way.
BruceFromOhio
Nevertheless, a happy round of “shoot the messenger” is still underway.
The Truffle
I am not happy at all with Obama’s handling of Wall Street. In fact, I think Geithner and Summers were poor choices. But part of being a loyal supporter is criticizing the president when needed.
Jim
Well, since the piece is titled “Obama’s Big Sell Out”
I guess this is my problem with it, the melt-down/bail-out and Wall Street influence is a complicated question, ill-suited to Taibbi’s sledge hammer swinging snark. and while this is not Taibbi’s fault, it’s falling into the maelstrom of frustration and political sniping.
mr. whipple
I would think that if this piece had appeared in the MSM it would have been rightly criticized and dismissed, even laughed at by the blogosphere.
And there would be a lot less, ‘well, the general thrust is correct’ , so….
j.e.b.
The problem I have with Taibbi’s piece is that it implies that the Obama administration could really fix things if only they wanted to.
Maybe they want to. Maybe they don’t. But this is the same bull we keep hearing on health-care. That it’s somehow a failure of will on the part of the adminstration, when it’s a failure of the Senate.
And the Senate always fails. That’s it’s job.
If you want to bitch about Obama on things where his executive powers actually matter, please be my guest. I do it all the time. But let’s not pretend that we’d have great health-care reform and great financial regulation, etc, if only ________ (insert your preferred ‘really’ liberal politician) was president instead. Not as long as the Senate GOP has access to the filibuster.
General Winfield Stuck
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him “the Wallstreet Candidate”. He is not anti-Wallstreet and likely to a fault, given what has occurred. My own impression that he is terrified of letting that Mammoth Beast fail and cause a catastrophic chain reaction that could bring the world economy to it’s knees. So is playing it safe by first reinflating the corpse at least until some major corrective surgery can be performed. This is why he fired from the syndicate a couple of guys who know where the bodies are buried. But I don’t disagree with Taibbi that Obama has gone about this wrong. But I’m a dweeb and he his presnit and a lot smarter than me. And since the game is still in the 4th or 5th inning, it is possible that we get these crooks satisfactorily re-regulated, at least to the point we are less likely to revisit existential economic fail. But since I am a dweeb on finance, and a lot of other stuff, I could be wrong. I tend to put the onus on holding up finance reform onto congress and their well stocked piggy trough.
I think Bill Clinton who gave us NAFTA, and was more of a Wallstreet candidate than Obama imo, and it was on his watch that some of the worst precipitating bills were signed into law by him. See G-S repeal and Gramm’s little virus into the system allowing unregulated CDS trading to run amock, then comes along GWB and Cheney and their “kindler gentler” SEC that effectively shut down what regs were left for keeping these fuckers honest.
edit- I could kiss WP for allowing us to edit again.
Chuck Butcher
The idea that the Senate would be a deliberative body that would slow or rethink the populist rush of the short term House has turned into something quite different. It seems to now be a body where a small investment in small population states results in the neutering of any meaningful bill affecting those interests.
Interestingly enough, those investments are actually small enough that outside grassroots money could make life difficult. It is doubtful such a thing will happen.
Parthenon
Thank goodness for Matt. Somebody has to criticise the president in a manner that doesn’t involve the words ‘socialism’ or ‘fascism.’
Chris Johnson
It’s gotta be hard to figure out what to do with the insanely ‘wealthy’ people and their monopoly money.
It’s not REAL money. There isn’t that much resources in the world. It’s totally imaginary money.
Is Obama giving them all this imaginary money knowing that at some point it will evaporate like fairy gold, and wanting to pick the best time for that to happen? Is he bribing these people to still maintain society as we know it in hopes that things like jobs, manufacturing or whatever will arise and serve as a fall-back position?
I know he’s not a dumb guy, and not crazy, but he really doesn’t give a shit who he offends. For some reason he seems to believe sucking off the bankers who are presiding over a colossal fantasy is a good move.
Maybe he has a very dour idea of what would happen if he pissed them off and they started eating each other like sharks…
I think you have to remember that when we are talking about giving Wall Street ‘money’, they themselves have made it almost a meaningless concept at this point. The solution is going to have to work without depending on a justification for the value of ‘money’ because Wall St. has fucked that up completely and there is NO real-world foundation for the collective fantasy of money anymore. It’s irretrievably broken by now…
jwb
Obama has also been saying all along that we need to make him do the right thing. But mostly what I’ve seen from the left is just a bunch of whining.
donovong
It would be okay, if Taibbi at least had his facts straight and had done some homework before he simply started lashing out. But, I am an Obamabot, so let me allow a couple of others to help wipre away some of the bullshit that Mr. Taibbi produced:
Tim Fernholz:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=12&year=2009&base_name=oh_matt_taibbi
Matt Yglesias:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/blame-obama-first.php
eemom
here’s Taibbi’s response to some of the critics:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/12/12/on-obamas-sellout-bailout-tarp-rubin-goldman-sachs-robert-bob-tim-geithner-hamilton-project-derivatives-financial-reform-citibank/
he admits he got the Rubin kid’s name wrong, and that’s all he’ll admit.
I think Andrew Leonard put it best in the piece I linked last night. He acknowledges the basic point of the thing is right. What puts people off is the self-righteous screediness and the factual sloppiness. Those are fair criticism that you don’t have to be an Obamabot to make.
eemom
hey, how come the edit thingie said I don’t have permission to edit my comment?
hal
When are the Obama lovers going to wake up. This man is a born liar, and anything but a progressive.
Try this one:
To quote Obama:
“My mother was in the hospital a few weeks from death and she was fighting with the insurance company to cover her costs.”
And this man SOLD OUT to the insurance companies and his mother. Need I say more.
I do wonder how he sleeps at night.
Must be easy in the White House, Camp David, Golf Courses
and all the other fine places he and the family have visited in Air Force One.
mk3872
John – Are you sure you read the right article?
It is a jouvenile mean-spirited hit piece FULL of inaccuracies and faleshoods. Here are 2 of my favorites:
1) The article’s title “Obama’s Big Sellout”. On HuffPo, it was, “How Obama Sold Out America”. That is a LOT different than the way you are portraying it here in your blog post, John. The way I read your interpretation, Obama just hired some Wall Street guys and let us know his intentions during the elecion. But to say he “sold out” means that he either turned his back on those that voted him there or that he is getting something in return. Neither of those premises is true.
2) Anyone not in the immediate admin or is part of the economics advisory board is called part of “Siberia” or didn’t make the cut. Those and other disparraging terms he uses to describe Obama’s advisors are from single unnamed sources. Classic weak “journalism” used to justify his own nastiness. It gives journalism a bad name. We’d all slash WaPo for using the same technique.
These are just the beginning. Salon has some a pretty good full list of the problems. I was surprise to read you gloss over those “sure there are mistakes”. Do you take that same cavallier attitude to over-wrought diatribes from the Right Wing like in a typical Charles Krauthammer piece as well?
Probably not. You’ve given Taibbi far too many liberties in your review, IMO, because you love his work.
Jim
He is not anti-Wallstreet and likely to a fault, given what has occurred. My own impression that he is terrified of letting that Mammoth Beast fail and cause a catastrophic chain reaction that could bring the world economy to it’s knees.
I think that’s it. I, like you, think Obama could and should have been more vigilant and demanded more strings attached to the bail out money. Obviously, he should have done this as a candidate/Senator not just as President. But Taibbi’s paranoid game of Six Degrees of Robert Rubin assumes that Obama’s motives are purely nefarious. To my reading, the piece isn’t coherent enough to be taken seriously.
jwb
@eemom: WP giveth and WP taketh away: it is not ours to question the way of WP.
mk3872
@eemom:
Well said. If someone from the conservative Washington Times, WaPo or WSJ op-eds wrote a piece that had this many innaccuracies and unnamed sources throwing darts at people, we would call them out, too.
I’m surprised that John gives Taibbi a pass.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Without any reflection on the other issues here, this is an absolutely correct statement.
My opinion is that Obama’s odd mix of mostly centrist positions, with a touch of rightwing and smattering of leftwing here and there, plus a large dose of pragmatism and a keen sense of the politically possible, are the core reasons why he was elected. He appealed to a wide spectrum of voters who were sick of the old and wanted to try the new.
And so far he has turned out to be who we thought he was. Which is fine with me.
General Winfield Stuck
@hal:
Want to see my shiny new ratfucker trap?
eemom
from his blog post, Taibbi sounds like an insufferably arrogant prick, also too. But I guess that’s neither there nor here.
Ian
@hal:
Is this a variation on the “his brother in law sleeps in a tent in Kenya theme?”
Seriously guy.
eemom
@hal:
there’s this other blog called Firedoglake that you would just LOVE….
mk3872
I don’t even get the whole “selling out America” bit.
What does that even mean?
Is he claiming Obama turned his back on those who elected him because he hired guys who didn’t want to burn down Wall Street? As in, Obama is a “sell-out”.
Or is there a belief that there some magical pony solution to the economic meltdown that WOULDN’T cost the taxpayers BILLIONS of dollars?
Cuz I just don’t see either one of those being true.
mk3872
@Parthenon:
Agree with the need to criticize.
But this story, particularly because of the nastiness and inaccuracies, comes across as being written by someone who needed to step away from his computer, have a drink, and chill out before hitting “Send”.
chrismealy
Cynicism is always the biggest threat to progressives. A lot of us hate Matt Taibbi because we remember the Ralph Nader fiasco.
Notorious P.A.T.
@Chris Johnson:
I find your ideas intriguing.
mk3872
@chrismealy: right on
Jim
Here’s Obama selling out to the banks again
The president also told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that “the people on Wall Street still don’t get it. … They’re still puzzled why it is that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see. You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year … in decades and you guys caused the problem,” Obama said in an excerpt released in advance of Sunday night’s broadcast of his interview.
Yes, I know it’s just words and the place where the rubber meets the road is, as JC said, when this bill gets to the Senate and we see what Obama does to push through reform, but the question is, are there more people in CT, NE, LA and AR who want to protect the banks or regulate them? Are Moveon and FDL and all of us going to go after the Senators who will be trying to gut the bill, or Obama not using the words they want?
namekarB
@General Winfield Stuck: Heh. I was trying to think of a snappy comeback and then read yours.
Do I think Obama has made some bad decisions? Yeah. Do I have access to all the information that the President has access to? No. Now, which president did I agree with 100% of the time? Not one.
Compared to a almost President “you-kids-get-off-my-lawn” McCain and President “go-with-my-gut-instincts” Bush, Obama is a breath of fresh air.
Notorious P.A.T.
Stupid me, I thought putting him in office was “making him do the right thing”. Guess I’ll just have to put the rebuilding of my life on hold to go out and once again stuff envelopes and knock on doors, while Obama has dinner with Rick Warren.
maus
This wouldn’t have come from the “MSM”, so a completely moot point.
Also
you’re fucking kidding me, right? Living in a fantasy world is better?
LM
This, from Andrew Leonard, is the kind of thing I found objectionable:
I wish fair use allowed me to quote the rest of the passage.
I also think Matthew Yglesias makes some excellent points.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Try as I might, I can’t make sense of this sentence.
Is there a concordance?
Thanks.
gwangung
Are you kidding me? That’s a necessary condition, but not sufficient. It’s ALWAYS been necessary but not sufficient.
maus
Yeah, that really excuses the extremely poor fiscal policy. The thing I hate the most about Taibbi’s article is that it brings out the tiny amount of “Bush-defender” attitudes on the left that feel that the President is beyond criticism and justify those goddamned idiots in the MSM and on the GOP’s claims that Obama can do no wrong.
Notorious P.A.T.
It’s been my impression that Obama insists on the congressional Democrats getting 60 votes, including at least 1 Republican, instead of pushing health care reform through the Senate with 51-vote budget reconciliation. If I’m wrong, please show me!
mr. whipple
I think what it is, is this: people rightfully feel like they’ve been fucked. They get up every day, go to work, pay their taxes. No one is writing special rules for them, or special workarounds, or gaming the system to their benefit.
So when they see something like this, they want justice. But that isn’t ever gonna be forthcoming, and it makes them even more angry. The rules are different for the wealthy/powerful/connected. When they are down, no one is coming forth with their bailout.
General Winfield Stuck
I think Taibbi, like Greewald, aspire to be scions of Advocacy, maybe a little, or lot, in the vein of a Nader. Advocates operate in a space of their own, and any perceived bias does not help their cause. And makes them seem, or be, shrill and uncompromising. And this gets doubled when they are personally liberal and dealing with a liberal, or dem president’s administration. This is how DC advocates operate for whatever is their cause.
They do it to shake up the powers that be, and nothing does that better than a little hyperbolic rhetoric and a few facts awry to get attention from their target audience, which is usually a president.
I suppose they have a valuable presence, but piss me off just the same,
blahblahblah
I point you to The Mayfair Set, a BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that explores how British financiers in the 1960s began using leveraged buyouts to takeover industries, rip out their assets to sell and fire piles of people in the process. Curtis points to James Goldsmith as the financier who started the process and then – after having reaped all the rewards he could – challenge it when it became apparent in the 1990s that this had become a worldwide phenomena that threatened trading political stability for economic “efficiency”. Their work led to the same practices here, ala Milken, which started a global feedback cycle.
The documentary argues that governments first lost power to the global financiers, then they gave up trying to maintain it when financiers like George Soros broke the Bank of Britain back in ’91. At the time, the government attempted to lock the Pound to the Mark and failed due to an intense storm of international selling of the Pound by Soros and his ilk. Curtis argues that was the point when governments realized they could not control the economy and so gave up trying. Blair even handed control of setting interest rates.
If this is the correct analysis, governments have simply thrown in the towel and left us to the wolves.
MikeJ
Amen. It reads a lot more like something the birchers would have put out decades ago about how the
joosgnomes of zurich pull all the strings to keep the white man down.AngusTheGodOfMeat
@namekarB:
And don’t forget “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast twenty minutes ago” Reagan.
John Cole
Look, I read the article, I read the criticisms, I red Taibbi’s rebuttal. My general reaction is that Taibbi’s critique was reasonable, if but in his over-the-top tone.
The point of his piece was not to provide both sides of the debate, you know? You do know what a polemicist does, right? You do know that Molly Ivins took liberties.
And reading Taibbi’s piece, I still support Obama. I’m not sure what options there were other than to bail out these scumbags. Burn it down? Maybe that is what is so infuriating to many- we know Taibbi is in large part right, but doubt there is anything that can be done about it.
jwb
@Notorious P.A.T.: Damn straight you need to keep your ass involved. Every person who voted for Obama has a piece of him, and you can be pretty darn certain that the moneyed interests aren’t wasting their time bitching.
Notorious P.A.T.
@gwangung:
That’s our modern Democratic party alright.
“We can’t do anything because we don’t have majorities!”
So we give them a majority.
“We have majorities but we can’t do anything because we don’t have the White House!”
So we win ’em the White House.
“We have majorities and the White House but can’t do anything because we don’t have 60 seats in the Senate!”
So we vote in 60 Senators.
“We have majorities and the White House and 60 Senate seats. . . now, make us do what you want!”
Will
I’m a guy who donated $250 to Obama, despite the fact that it came from my unemployment check. That month was fun.
Still, I had premonitions of disappointment early on. The FISA vote was disappointing enough that I decided at the last minute not to walk the half mile from my house to Obama’s local campaign HQ and donate, despite the fact that a couple of my friends kept telling me that the place was fun and a great place to meet hot girls who loved guys who loved the Big O.
So, yeah. Tabibi’s kind of angry, and this is a place full of serious people with serious ideas about how to slowly, carefully look into establishing panels of experts to suggest realistic ideas for examining how to approach fixing America’s problems in this difficult domestic environment.
But I still suspect he’s more right than wrong.
Notorious P.A.T.
@jwb:
Well, like I said, I don’t have ANYTHING else to do. So, back to pounding the pavement!
Montysano
What I disagree with is the basic stance of the article: that Obama sold us out. After 8 years of Dick Cheney as the Unitary Executive, I think we’ve forgotten that we have a president, not a dictator. And as Obama has demonstrated, he believes in the separation of power, which is a good thing. The Congress is made up of 435 people who never quit campaigning, and the Senate is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America.
As another commenter pointed out: as long as a couple of senators from some low-population state can ratfuck any meaningful legislation, nothing will change.
Notorious P.A.T.
This just infuriates me. The Democratic leadership are such candy-asses. Thousands of people die each month because they don’t have health coverage, but we have to let reform come to a screeching halt because of Ben Nelson, instead of ramming it through. And when someone complains? “Hey, make us do it!” If I ever get a job again, I’m going to sit at my workstation doing nothing until my boss “makes me do it”.
mr. whipple
Ok, but how does that frustration go from anger at finance/gvt. to ‘Obama Sells out America’?
MikeJ
@John Cole: It wasn’t just his tone, it was his basic unfamiliarity with the truth. “He gets most of his facts wrong but I still agree with his conclusion” is a pretty lousy way to judge columnists.
Jim
@mr. whipple: @mr. whipple:
Mr Whipple, I would like to subscribe to both your newsletters.
Karatist Preacher
Obama seriously f-ed up with the crowd he chose to run his economic team. I like the guy and there is time to fix the situation, but it needs to happen soon.
mk3872
This is all part of the newest MSM theme: Americans now blame Obama for the economic mess, not Bush.
This piece advances that theory and helps heap the blame of the U.S. economy where it does NOT belong: Obama.
It’s a little early to start passing historic judgement on the recovery from the Great Recession.
Certainly FDR’s plans to dig out of the Great Depression were not always smooth and a constant up-ward march either.
gwangung
@Notorious P.A.T.: This has ALWAYS been the case, not just for modern politics.
And, by the way, why are you holding onto reconcilliation? It’s a crappy alternative (which is why It’s the last, last, last, last resort) because it’s going to expire in six years just like the Bush tax cuts are.
mr. whipple
@Jim:
Thank you, Jim, but it’s only available in comment form at Balloon Juice.
blahblahblah
Followup to my prior comment: Actual videos of The Mayfair Set available for download at the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheMayfairSet
jwb
@Notorious P.A.T.: Well, personally, I would like to see the left get itself better organized. It seems to me like we’re too involved with the inside baseball of politics, with lots of resources being spent on following the machinations and the direct lobbying of pols, and not enough resources have been directed to basic organizational activity. Sure, we laugh at the astroturfing of the teabaggers, but if only our astroturfing was good enough to generate half that energy we’d be operating in quite a different political environment.
Xanthippas
No, I don’t think so. I saw this piece mentioned and only finally get around to reading it today also, and was quite convinced by how clearly Taibbi lays out his case. You may not like his snark, but it’s his facts that are hard to argue against. And before you even try to cite someone like Fernholz, read how Taibbi destroys him in an even more carefully laid out rebuttal.
Anyway, I don’t know how it’s even possible to argue with Taibbi’s central assertion, which is that the foxes are guarding the henhouse. It’s not as if he’s the first one to notice this after all, and I don’t know what’s so “complicated” about the fact that these guys occupy central roles in the administration now.
These criticisms are pretty much the same ones that people want to lay out against Glenn Greenwald every now and then, that he’s too “overwrought” or “screeching” to be taken seriously. I hate to be so blunt, but that’s just stupid. You can’t possibly read Taibbi seriously, understand what he has to say, and not feel that sarcasm, snark and outrage are perfectly appropriate ways to address the subjects he rights about.
Mr Furious
I haven’t read either of these pieces, or frankly ANYTHING online for the last week or more, but I can say this with certitude anyway…
I don’t have the axe to grind with Taibbi that many have, but I can see the his flaws, and I don’t mind somebody fisking his column and setting the record straight.
That said, I have a high tolerance/threshold for Taibbi’s style and his conclusions and implications—even if speculative and ultimately proven wrong.
Why?
Because he and NPR’s This American Life seem to be the only two entities in the whole of the fucking media that care enough to look into this stuff at all.
And he is one of the very few columnists with a national outlet (RS) that is attacking the Administration from the left.
Does Taibbi drive too fast and have his eyes closed some of the time? Sure. But he’s a useful balance to the rest of the fucking establishment media that won’t even take the car out of the garage.
Brien Jackson
Not to be a smart ass, but that’s kind of the most obvious problem with the article; a lot of the people he mentioned aren’t doing what he says they’re doing.
Brien Jackson
I don’t really see how spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories is helping anyone, even if it’s “from the left.”
Brien Jackson
I don’t really see how spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories is helping anyone, even if it’s “from the left.”
BombIranForChrist
I am confused like John. What exactly is untrue about his article, except for the error he made re: Rubin? I don’t think there is any question re: has Obama sold out. The only real question is … when did he do it? Was it immediately after the election or well before?
Progressives got played.
bayville
OMG, Matt Y and Fernholz defend Obama. Shocking!
Let me guess, Ezra disagrees as well. Going out on a limb.
It should be noted that Fernholz’s TAP column (screed) has throroughly been dismantled by Taibbi.
maus
@Notorious P.A.T.: Thanks, nice to have that described so cleanly.
@jwb: “Well, personally, I would like to see the left get itself better organized.”
Stop giving money to the central Democratic fundraising powerhouses. I can’t believe you’re saying that the ground-level organization is incompetent, that’s ridiculous. The problem is that the ground-level doesn’t reverberate to the top, THAT is why we’re angry. Unlike the right-wing, we don’t lynch our leaders in effigy and fill them with actual fear for their life, but that shouldn’t be necessary.
mr. whipple
What kind of shocks me is the impatience. While the Depression started from a much higher baseline of unemployment(~26%), it didn’t reach about 10% until just before WWII. So, that’s a 16% drop over 7 years. We are barely 1 year into Obama’s term, and only 10 months since the stim passed! This mess was always going to take a very long time to correct.
Xanthippas
Did you read the article? The point is the people who were his economic advisors during his campaign, are not the people who went on to be his economic advisors in office. The progressives were replaced with Wall Street hucksters and Clinton-era leftovers. And in return, Obama gets big money from Wall Street. That pretty much meets the definition of what us lay people call “selling out.”
jwb
@BombIranForChrist: No, progressives did not get played; they were simply not listening and so heard what they wanted to.
Xanthippas
What conspiracy theory?
Brien Jackson
Austan Goolsbee has a seat on the NEC, the PERAB, and was nominated to head the CEA. I have no idea what Jason Furman is doing these days.
In any event, when in the bloody blue fuck did Austan Goolsbee and Jason Furman become progressive heroes. Taibbi is aware these guys are “Rubinites” right?
burnspbesq
I’m not offended by Taibbi’s outrage that the Citigroup bailout was essentially no-strings-attached. In fact, I agree that a no-strings-attached bailout was
bullshitsuboptimal.I’d like Taibbi to tell me what Federal statute that was in effect at the time of the Citigroup bailout would have allowed the Feds to attach the strings to it that he would have liked to see. And if the answer is what I think it is – i.e., none – then I’d like him to forthrightly admit that the problem was the absence of an appropriate legal framework, not Obama bending over.
J. Michael Neal
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Reconciliation is a pipe dream. Forget it. It also isn’t Obama’s fault, or anything he could do something about. I went through this in the last thread, but the basic reasons are two:
1) The Senate parliamentarian would probably strip out a bunch of the more important items. (And I’m not interested in practicing a politics where we decide to fire the parliamentarian until we get one who says what we want.)
2) The votes aren’t there to pass a bill in reconciliation, either, because there are too many Democratic Senators that would balk.
The votes aren’t there for a bill with public option. That is mostly an indictment of the insane rules that the Senate runs under, much ofthe rest of it is an indictment of the right wing of the Democratic caucus, and the rest is an indictment of the uselessness of the GOP as an opposition party. Almost none of it lands on Obama’s desk.
jwb
@maus: I don’t give money to the fundraising powerhouses, and I didn’t say that ground-level organization is incompetent. At best, I implied that it is not as visible as it needs to be. No, we don’t need to burn our leaders in effigy, but we do have to be manifestly visible—and I’m just not seeing it. There’s nothing like the energy and visibility of the movement during the second Bush term. That is, whatever the ground-level organization is doing, it is not percolating up to the point that I can see its tangible effects. Personally, I think people got complacent after the 2008 election and thought the Democrats would do the right thing. That’s a perfectly understandable reaction and expectation, but it clearly didn’t come to pass and I think the organizing needs to change to reflect that. At the moment, I don’t think that it does.
J. Michael Neal
@Xanthippas:
Taibbi does no such thing. Take, for instance, his defense of the $23.7 trillion figure for the possible loss on the bailout. He claims that he was, technically, correct, since Barofsky did use that figure. That’s a weak defense, because Barofsky’s report was a hit piece every bit as wrong as his own. If Taibbi wants to be anything more than a court reporter, that doesn’t cut it. More importantly, Taibbi’s claim that it’s accurate, since that is a worst case figure even if it isn’t likely is also wrong. A $23.7 trillion loos isn’t the worst case scenario; it’s a complete impossibility. Fernholz laid out why. It depends upon the idea that every single loan that was purchased is worth zero, and that every single asset backing those loans is also worth zero. THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE. I’m not saying it’s not likely; it’s not possible. Not even close. This number would only be used by someone who has no idea what he is talking about, or is more interested in attacking someone than they are in being honest. In the case of Barofsky, it’s the latter. In the case of Taibbi, I think it’s probably both.
gwangung
ding! ding! ding!
Harley Furguson, the Tractorcycle
@mr. whipple:
That’s not surprising at all, Americans have been trained by decades of electronic media to inherently assume all problems can be wrapped up in a half hour or an hour or at most a miniseries of a few hours in length.
Intellectually we may know that such rapidity is unrealistic but emotionally we are extremely well programmed and when it comes to a conflict between the intellect and the emotions, emotions win the great majority of the time.
This is not the same country or the same culture it was in 1929 or even 1969 for that matter.
MikeF
Likewise. Also, am I completely missing something, or is this:
simply a Beck/teabagger talking point being asserted as if it were fact? IIRC the latest CBO report came out well before Taibbi’s article and established that figure as the lowest possible number of jobs created/saved thus far by the stimulus.
Joel
I don’t like Taibbi specifically because I never feel like I’m getting a clear picture from him. Of course, you never get the complete picture from anyone but some are better than others. Regarding this piece, Yglesias’ criticisms echo mine.
Will
On impatience,
Some of you guys need to go read FDR’s Fireside chats. They’re up in collected form for free at Project Gutenberg, so get to it. It’s a nice corrective to the whole “What could poor Mr. Obama do?” school of thought.
FDR campaigned by hitting hard against the bankers and Wall Street. And when he came into office, he kept hitting. Virtually every Fireside chat has rhetoric against the financial interests that makes Tabibi look reserved, and this was coming from the president of the United States.
FDR, like pretty much every effective president in the country, hit hard against his rebellious Congress and enemies in the opposite party, the banks and industry. He laid the groundwork for the New Deal not by quietly making friends, but by whipping up the public against his foes. The Republicans of the day called him a fascist, but he was well loved and managed to ram his reforms through Congress. He lost quite a few battles, but they were battles that he fought directly and openly.
mk3872
@MikeF:
Of for C’s sake, he used the jobs created or saved line?
The friggin’ CBO came out and said that up to 1.6M were created or saved.
I guess Taibbi thinks the CBO is a wall street-owned Obama luvin’ orgy, too?
mr. whipple
@Harley Furguson, the Tractorcycle:
Point taken. I could perhaps understand this impatience within the general public, but among the Liberal press/LW pundocracy?
mk3872
@Will:
Did FDR have a multi-billionaire finance newspapers & news channels opposing and slamming him 24 hours a day, too?
BTW, did you listen to Obama’s speeches or today’s address slamming wall street?
mk3872
@J. Michael Neal:
That $23T line from Baroksky has to be one of the most singular worst moments of the entire economic rescue attempt.
What was the point of putting that number out there?
I marvel at how data like that can be so dangerous in the hands of idiots who don’t know what it means. Scarborough, Hannity, Beck, the GOP, etc. etc. continue to claim it is the amount American taxpayers will lose in the bailouts.
MikeJ
Forget Taibbi. Michael Rennie and the movie, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is still your best source for wisdom:
“Why doesn’t the government do something? That’s what I want to know.”
“What can they do? They’re only people, just like us.”
“People, my foot. They’re Democrats.”
Will
Have you heard of an obscure gentlemen named Henry Luce, Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst? They owned a few small newspapers and weren’t exactly fans of FDR (although Hearst admittedly came late to the FDR hating party). And note that this was a period when Americans paid a lot more attention to the media than they do today.
FDR followed up the speeches with constant, vocal and unwavering support for legislative action. When Obama does that, we’ll talk.
Rich people suck and should be taxed has never been a popular argument with the people who owned the presses. FDR, himself from a long wealthy family, knew this and still made the arguments, because he knew that they were the only way to save capitalism.
Annie
As I was taking a shower, I was thinking about the Taibbi piece. And, thought about a larger point here. The piece indicates how progressives and Obama supporters can disagree, and really disagree, while fundamentally staying committed to the administration. Last night I was with my neighborhood group, all Obama supporters, and agreeing and disagreeing with the Afghanistan policy. But in the end, our commitment to the administration remained strong.
Republicans don’t understand this. They don’t dialogue about policy. They dialogue about personalities. When it comes to policy, they use the same empty rhetoric, the same stupid talking points, and then return to personalities.
Hence, their new attempt to reach deep into the Republican wasteland to find a new “manly” man, who will stay true to the purity test (they did loose several potential manly men this past year to the purity test..) as the solution to beating the Obama administration in the next election.
Yet, again with Taibbi’s article, we show we can debate, discuss, and argue, which is what we should be doing in the first place. Obama is not infallible. Republicans can use this to show how supporters are loosing faith, but I see this as another example of how we are adults and can argue over what really matters. And, that is a good thing.
SiubhanDuinne
@jwb 5:06 pm
“I would like to see the left get itself better organized.”
Heh. Heh-heh. Snorfle. Hahahahaha. Snurf.
*AAAAHHHHahahaha!*
*LOLROFLMAO*
*HRAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!*
/gasp
*HAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAAAHAHA!!*
/wipes eyes
Andy K
@Will:
I don’t think you can make a comparison between FDR’s and Obama’s styles without factoring in the differences of their eras. The labor/union movement was still in its ascendancy in the early ’30s where now it’s in its third decade of decline. Mass media- radio in the ’30s, television today- was more tightly regulated in FDR’s era than today; the media conglomerates that existed in the ’30s were owned by media moguls, not defense contractors partnered with banks and trading houses. In short, the general population was much more open to FDR’s message and the media much more friendly than they are for Obama. The FDR template doesn’t fit today’s problems.
Sly
It’s because Taibbi’s piece is trying to create a narrative about a specific person, or a group of people, based on exaggerated claims.
I have no problems with people criticizing Obama for being too close to “Wall Street People,” whatever the fuck that means, or that he’s pursuing a compromise in order to get stuff done (which, to the everlasting chagrin of ideologues, is preferable to the lonely ineffectiveness of Purity). You can make that argument with virtually everything his administration is doing. Financial reform, health care, unemployment, Iraq/Afghanistan, detainee issues, etc.
But relying on compromise to get things done is not a strategy to dilute policy or “betray your base.” It’s a strategy to, you know, get things done. A financial regulatory bill that limits the excesses of derivatives, establishes a Federal agency to monitor risky lending schemes, and sets up a fund that banks pay into to help unwind shaky institutions that could blow up the world is a good bill. It’s not shit because it doesn’t have a hard limit on executive pay or reimposes Glass-Steagall. Those might be good provisions, but they aren’t the linchpins around which good financial regulation should be measured.
That’s my basic problem with Taibbi’s piece. And FDL on Health Care. They aren’t getting the particular policies they have held up us progessive shibboleths, so even compromise policies that get us 80% of the way to where they want the country to be are insufficient. As a result everything has to be constructed around the narrative that Obama is selling them out, or there’s some bogeyman in the administration (Rahmn Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, take your pick) who, when not feasting on the blood of unbaptized babies or sucking Satan’s cock, is trying to deliberately upend the progressive agenda.
Aside from being gallingly insipid, which is enough for me to not want to listen to any of them in the first place (and I really like reading Taibbi), it’s incredibly counterproductive.
Jim
@Andy K:
There’s more discussion of BHO vs LBJ than FDR, but I’d also throw in that (and I’m not an historian so I could be mistaken) in the 30s and the 60s more people voted for their own economic interests back then. You didn’t have the “culture wars” paranoia –gays, god, guns and abortion–driving so many people to fight against the general welfare.
In that regard, I’d guess it was the Bircher anti-Catholicism under JFK that had the most in common with today.
Will
Which, to come full circle, is why I think Tabibi is more right than wrong. We’re pretty much fucked, as the systemic problems in our economic and social structures are proving impossible to reform in a way that will prevent or at least soften future shocks.
Obama’s pretty much impotent, the reforms will be more cosmetic than substantive and the population at large is friendlier to right-wing demagogues than pragmatic reformers. This is why so many Obama supporters are becoming disenchanted, as it seemed for a brief time that he embodied a way out of this mess.
That was probably expecting too much, but there it is.
Andy K
@Will:
And while they owned newspaper conglomerates, their newspapers had competitors in every city willing to take the opposite side of any political argument. Hell, the Catholic Worker had a monthly circulation of 150k in 1936- not bad for an era that saw much higher illiteracy rates in the working class than we see today.
Will
You should check out Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. If anything, the right wing in the late 60s and early 70s were even more angry, radical and violent than today’s teabaggers, and the media was just as willing to portray them as the “real Americans” putting the scary hippies in their place.
The big irony was that the the sixties rightwing drew much of their support from union members. The willingness of union types to vote Republican had lasting impact.
As the young protesters began to equate the “hardhats” with the thugs who beat them up for opposing the war, support for unionism crashed among the young. At the same time, the nascent unionized types, later dubbed the “Reagan Democrats”, cheerfully voted for the politicians that would ship their jobs overseas out of a shared dislike of hippies, feminists and blacks.
J. Michael Neal
@Sly:
Let’s correct that. They aren’t getting the particular policies they have held up as progressive shibboleths for the last year, but which they hadn’t even heard of prior to that, when they were advocating policies that look an awful lot like the compromises that they now say are unacceptable.
J. Michael Neal
@Will:
If that were Taibbi’s point, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with him. I’d still have plenty, since he doesn’t seem to think that being, you know, factually accurate is very important, but not as much. That isn’t his point. He’s not ranting about systemic problems in our economic and social structures. He’s talking about problems with the administration, and ranting that, if the Obama administration were just not so perfidious, then we’d get the reform we want. He’s wrong, but he’d feel a lot less thrill about being so smart and witty if he wrote the article the other way.
bayville
@Will:
Radio personality Father Coughlan – whose audience dwarfed Limbaugh’s, Hannity’s and Beck’s combined – wasn’t a big fan of FDR either?
Will
How much of Tabibi’s work have you read? I’m not his Number One Fan or anything, but I know that this article is the culmination of several years of reporting on financial issues that make the point that our government is captured by financial interests, which makes even token reform nearly impossible.
I get the feeling that some of the people here are coming to Tabibi for the first time through this article, not realizing that it is the culmination of a fairly long and steady disillusionment with Obama backed up by reporting on the financial industry that ended up being proven right by later events.
Harley Furguson, the Tractorcycle
@mr. whipple:
They are as human and as much part of this culture as are any of us.
Also too, as Will points out upthread..
A lot of us feel that Obama is simply part of the machine that has put us, to paraphrase Roseanne, so far beyond screwed that the light from screwed won’t reach us for ten billion years. I’m not quite sure yet what I think but I know there are more people every day I’m talking to who feel that way.
It appears to many of us that Obama is playing beanbag.
Will
Coughlin was an odd duck. He was a fundamentalist, anti-semitic, anti-Wall Street hater of all things capitalist. He both supported and demonized FDR from both the left and right, and his politics were so idiosyncratic and personal that he’s pretty much impossible to categorize as left or right. There’s literally no one out there like him today.
Robert Waldmann
I haven’t read the Taibbi piece. I just note that John Cole’s defence is odd. Taibbi is supposed to be a journalist. Errors of fact are not acceptable if they are of any importance. Taibbi calls liquidation “bailout.” This is not a minor distinction.
More to the point the fact that the Senate is about to gut the inadequate House financial regulation bill suggests that Taibbi is barking up the wrong tree. Taibbi attacks the Obama administration for being pro-banker. I have it on a reliable source that his article doesn’t include the word “Nelson.”
So ignorance about actual policy proposals and overlooking the existence of the senate are flaws ?
Again I haven’t read the article, but the review sure sounds like say, arguing that the arguments made at Tea Parties are flawed. Anger is not a plan.
bayville
@J. Michael Neal:
What are you one of those multi-dimensional chess players? Taibbi’s point is simple: Change and Hope were/are just a marketing slogan. Citi, GS, Rubin and the Wall Street Big Boys are still in charge.
Christ, Greenspan (Alan Fucking Greenspan!) has visited the WH six times already this year.
The theme of the article isn’t that complicated.
Harley Furguson, the Tractorcycle
@Will:
That’s the way I remember it.. Well said Will and thanks for the historical perspectives..
J. Michael Neal
@Will:
The stuff that has been linked here, which has impressed me so little that I haven’t had any desire to seek out anything else. If people wanted me to read him, they should have started with his good stuff.
J. Michael Neal
@bayville: You are absolutely correct. The theme of the article isn’t complicated. Factual errors and a simplistic theme isn’t a winning combination.
Andy K
@bayville:
Father Coughlin was a huge supporter of FDR in 1932, but diverged from the President by railing against the Federal Reserve in the latter half of FDR’s first term. That’s when Coughlin started to let his antisemitism show, too (can you say Gnomes of Zurich and Protocols of the elders of Zion?), and began portraying Hitler and Mussolini in a positive light.
Which sorta makes Coughlin seem like the predecessor to the Paulbots…to me, at least.
bayville
@Robert Waldmann:
Yeah, that’s part of Yglesias’ tripe. This was all Ben Nelson’s fault…and the PUMAs, DFHs, Naderites, Tea Partiers, Code Pink, Michael Moore etc. etc. etc.
The President is powerless, afterall. Just ask Bush.
bayville
@J. Michael Neal:
It’s a 7,000 word article and the one error that has been pointed out is he had the wrong James Rubin as an ambassador.
What other factual error was noted?
FormerSwingVoter
For what its worth, I think its only natural for people to be overly defensive about President Obama. I’ve spent so much time and effort defending him against the most insane accusations (“He’s a Muslim! He’s a Socialist! He’s a Nazi!”) that I’ve found myself falling into the Obama-defending role even when the arguments are sane.
It’s something I’m trying to be better about. Considering that I always used to pride myself on being a moderate, it’s unsettling to see what a knee-jerk liberal I’ve become over the past two years. Not everything Obama does is going to be a happiness party filled with kittens and pixie dust, and I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that “a good President” is different than “a perfect President”.
J. Michael Neal
@bayville: Well, there’s the $23.7 trillion number in which he simply repeats someone else’s egregious error without critical thought, and defends his lack of critical thought when he doesn’t understand Fernholz’s criticism of it.
There’s the problem that he lists people as holding positions they don’t hold, and then insists that they hold positions kind of like it.
There’s the problem that he relies upon the typical “unnamed sources” to say things about Austan Goolsbee’s role in the transition that Goolsbee denies, and then claims as evidence for Goolsbee being sidelined that Obama thought it was more important to start his work within the administration than serve on the transition team; he compounds this by clearly not understanding Goolsbee’s position on several issue, which is kind of odd, because he could have used Goolsbee’s *presence* to bolster the case he wants to make if he’d gotten them right.
There’s the problem that he accuses Obama of going with Wall Street insiders rather than academics, which means he doesn’t know anything about the actual background of people within the administration. Trivial people like Christina Romer and Larry Summers.
It’s sloppy. What it mostly provides evidence for is what I’ve been saying all along: Taibbi doesn’t know anything about finance, and really shouldn’t be writing about it. Again, there are plenty of critics of Obama who do know what they are talking about. Barry Rithholz and Yves Smith come to mind, though I disagree with them sometimes, too. (Rithholz more than Smith, but, then again, Smith isn’t always a critic, either.) Of course, reading them doesn’t provide the same thrill of outrage that Taibbi does, so no one wants to cite them. That could lead to reasonable debate.
Sly
@J. Michael Neal
Maybe in some respect, but in most cases the people we’re talking about advocated more simplistic policies that represented an enclave of belief within the Democratic Party. Single-payer, impeaching Bush/Cheney and anyone else who advocated for torture and indefinite detention, precipitous withdrawal from Iraq/Afghanistan, etc. I’d put financial regulation in a different category, because the topic came about suddenly and the response was to basically Google some shit and set certain policies up as the ideal.
Will
For me, it’s less of question of whether or not Obama is perfect or good and whether he is up to the challenge of the time. I am increasingly of the opinion that the bill for a ton of bad past decisions made by our society are coming due at the same time and the only way to prevent a nasty 21st century is to radically rethink how we do things while we are still wealthy and powerful.
Obama just doesn’t seem like the guy to do this. And to be fair, he’s still much better than pretty much anyone else in our political structure. To that extent, we’re probably lucky to have him. I still think he’s a pretty decent guy personally and would have been a great president as little as a decade or two ago, but these are weird times.
The disappointment comes from the brief moment during the campaign and early presidency when it seemed like he may have been the right man at the right time. This country has a history of dodging the bullet with style, and what better way for us to at once redeem our sins and rescue ourselves than with a storybook leader like Obama.
That was just us being naive.
Andy K
@bayville:
After “fault” you’re just putting shit in Yglesias’ mouth. Did you fail to read the whole thing?
—-
So you just want a dictator whose policies jibe with your own ideology? Unitary executive theory is a bad idea, no matter which part of the political spectrum the executive inhabits.
bayville
@J. Michael Neal:
Yes. That person being Neil Barofsky who is only the inspector general of TARP…which in Fernholz’ world is comparable to a commenter on a blog.
You don’t like Taibbi. Cool. But as I said earlier there’s only one factual error that I’ve read in the post.
One James Rubin is married to Christiane Amanpour and the other one is Bob Rubin’s son. Both had advisory roles in the Obama transition team but only one was a former Ambassador (Not Bob Rubin’s son).
Mike
Taibbi is a journalist with a POV, not a he/said she/said reporter.
He himself has stated many times that giant entities like Goldman and
the Washington establishment have battalions of PR people and hack reporters
willing to defend them in the media, so he does his research and gives
his interpretation of the facts without presenting opposing viewpoints.
I agree with John Cole on this. I also approve of Taibbi’s over the top style.
It’s entertaining, therefore memorable, therefore thought/discussion provoking.
Folks who seek total factual accuracy in today’s media environment are doomed to daily disappointment, IMO.
Joel
@mk3872: FDR had Hearst, so yes.
That said, I’m not sure that Obama could, or should be FDR.
maus
The factual errors affect aspects of but don’t invalidate the entire article.
Comrade Kevin
An awful lot of this piling on Taibbi reminds me of people who complain about someone like Glenn Greenwald being “shrill”.
bayville
@Andy K:
I read it. I was riffing on Mattie Y.’s history. He’s an elitist.
He likes to marginalize the outsiders, the working class and was one of the Liberal enablers during the run-up to the Iraq War, the disasterous John Kerry candidacy and a major apologist for the Obama healthcare plan (featuring no public option, no single payer and mandates for the little guy).
And how did TR, FDR, LBJ, Reagan and W. use the bullypulpit compared to Obama.
Brien Jackson
Ok, but throwing the non-white people under the bus didn’t hurt anything either. But yes, if Obama had done what FDR did and just walked up to Lieberman, Snowe, and Nelson and told him to tell him whatever they wanted and he’d get it for them, we could have passed a broad outline of a lot of shit already.
J. Michael Neal
Another problem with the analogy of Obama to FDR is the structural difference in the Senate. The requirement to get 60 votes changes things. The number of Democrats in the Senate now is almost exactly the same as it was in 1933-34: it’s varied between 59 & 60 in both cases. FDR had to get about 83% of the caucus to vote with him to pass his agenda. Obama needs every single one. Anyone care to guess what the New Deal would have looked like if he had consistently needed 60 votes?
The Banking Act (Glass-Steagel II; the first part passed in 1932) passed the Senate 54-44.
I can’t find the data available to the public for the other votes, but I’m betting that most of them didn’t get to 60.
J. Michael Neal
@bayville:
I don’t care who Neil Barofsky is. The $23.7 trillion figure is ridiculous. For it to come true, every single house on which any of the mortgages in the bonds is written would have to be worth $0. Every single house loan purchased from the FHA, Fannie or Freddie would have to be worth $0. Everything else would have to be worth $0. As I said, that isn’t a worst case scenario. Barring a nuclear war, it’s impossible. Not unlikely. Impossible.
This isn’t the only ridiculous thing that Barofsky has written in one of his reports. He demonstrated that he didn’t know the history of the AIG bailouts, since he couldn’t keep straight events that happened in September 2008 and November 2008.
So, actually, I do care who Neil Barofsky is. My regret is that we couldn’t get someone competent to fill the very important role of Inspector General.
Taibbi still has no idea what job Austan Goolsbee has had, or what his actual views are.
Matt Taibbi does not know his subject.
J. Michael Neal
@maus:
Yeah, they do. They indicate that Taibbi doesn’t know his subject. Once that is established, it’s impossible to trust the other stuff he says.
J. Michael Neal
@Mike:
Sort of. What he is is a “He said, and I don’t care what she said” reporter.
J. Michael Neal
@bayville: You clearly don’t read Yglesias very much. Marginalizer of the working class? Really?
YankeeApologist
@Montysano:
Re: “As another commenter pointed out: as long as a couple of senators from some low-population state can ratfuck any meaningful legislation, nothing will change.”
This seems to generally be the endpoint of most discussion here at Balloon Juice.
It’s almost fascinating to watch a system that is so unbelievably inefficient and self-destructive in progress.
Knowing that healthcare and financial reform lie in the hands of not only the GOP but guys like Ben Nelson . . . well . . . it makes you wonder how much homes in Vancouver are. Heh.
Toast
Taibbi is a clown. Seriously. Even on those occasions where I agree with 99% of what he says, I hate the way he says it. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a writer more obviously in love with himself – more spellbound by his clever, colorful, writerly gifts. And, especially with this latest series of Wall Street articles in RS, I’m just tired of his act. I can picture him sitting down, getting ready to violate his keyboard, and saying “OK, how far over the top can I go this time?”
FlipYrWhig
@Comrade Kevin:
I have no problem with that. They’re both insufferable narcissists and I can’t stand either one of them.
That said, a point in Greenwald’s favor is that he’s typically fairly careful about facts. Taibbi doesn’t care about that. Hamsher doesn’t care about that. Aravosis doesn’t care about that. _Energy_ is more important, _passion_ is more important, because it’s through bluster that you prove your authenticity, because If You’re Not Outraged You’re Not Paying Attention.. and You Also Love Bankers, Homophobes, and Insurance Executives. No compromise, no reflection, just engorgement of erectile tissues. They get angry, decide who needs to be blamed for it, and then fit the facts around their feelings of indignation. And what’s getting worse is that it’s becoming a dick-measuring contest on the liberal blogs to prove just how “radical” you are by how upset you can pretend to be about Obama and how turned-on you can pretend to be about one of his critics’ latest rants and how rapturous your Told Ya So’s make you feel. It’s really taking its toll on the virtual citizenry.
FlipYrWhig
@J. Michael Neal:
w00t. This. Mucho _this_. They hadn’t learned how radical they could pretend to be so that they could claim the power of being terribly, terribly disappointed in things.
The Sheriff Is A Ni-
@Toast: A writer more in-line to write what he knows his readers will eat up like hotcakes?
Mr Furious
That’s a pretty good point, and I’m as guilty as anyone. The problem is that they started with the compromise and they aren’t done yet. I’d be willing to settle for whatever the results are if I know the other things had an honest hearing…
J. Michael Neal
@Mr Furious: If you’re waiting for an honest hearing in the US Senate, you’re going to be waiting a long time. There are far too many of them that really don’t have any interest in policy, but are in it for the fame, glory, and perks. Among them, I include folks that I often agree with; most people can go through life without ever meeting anyone as in love with themselves as Chuck Schumer or Chris Dodd.
A lot of things could be solved if we could get Americans to vote for people who care about policy and governance more than the camera time. If you have any suggestions along those lines, I’m all ears.
mk3872
@bayville:
Anyone who holds up that ridiculous $23T number as proof that Americans are losing their shirts due to TARP loses credibility.
That number is a guess as to the approximate TOTAL amount of taxpayer money at risk for every single bailout program enacted since the recession began. It does not say Americans will or have lost that much.
It isn’t very hard to figure that out or to understand it.
Taibbi is either being purposefully intellectually dishonest or he is ignorant.
gwangung
@FlipYrWhig: So, basically, the left wing equivalent of Beck and Limbaugh.
Doesn’t accuracy matter for a journalist?
Bob Cesca
Yep. Exactly. I like Taibbi a lot, but my worry is that some of us are holding Obama accountable as if he were George W. Bush. President Obama is closer to the progressive cause than any president since whenever — not some far-right zealot. If the White House begins to realize that progressives will never be satisfied, the White House will bolt for the conservadem middle.
The best approach, it seems to me, is to hold him accountable but in a fair and reasonable way. The best way to be ignored is to screech about everything with over-the-top phrases like “sell out” and “worse than Bush.” Both are ridiculous on Obama’s worst day.
And I would add that the White House could be doing more to reach out to progressives as well.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
once again, sir/madam — spot fucking on.
Also, the image of Hamsher in a “dick-measuring contest”? Priceless.
Jim
Rashomon and what not. I’m reminded of the seventy-two hours when We Were All Van Jones.
bayville
Yep. It’s always Nader’s fault. No wonder modern day Progressive=Fail.
@Andy K:
Some more rationalization from the Yglesias post on Taibbi:
Don’t blame the Wall Street guys sitting next to the Preznit. How’s that for a 2012 campaign slogan?
JC
This is really a fascinating discussion.
A few questions –
Question 1: Is Tabibi correct, that the financial segment is 80% dictating the financial structure? That the foxes are in charge of the henhouse, no matter Democrats or Republicans?
Question 2: Is Tabibi correct, when he says that “millionaire assholes who made their millions on a banker friendly regulatory scheme, are NOT GOING to be interested in making that regulatory scheme better?
Despite the focus on the minutiae – which Fernholz focuses on, and is actually INCORRECT on the facts of the matter – reading Tabibi’s rebuttal, it does seem as if Fernholz has chosen different interpretations of the SAME set of facts – but insists that Fernolz’s interpretations mean that Tabibi is ‘factually challenged’.
But again, as Tabibi points out, if Fernholz and Tabibi agree on question 1 above, then the real point of contention is question 2.
Because Obama, in conjunction with people he trusts like Furman – DOES choose who runs his financial policies.
So are Geithner and Summer the ones who can affect financial regulatory change?
Given all the evidence –
a. from the sweetheart deals given to Citibank,
b. paying out the creditors of AIG at 100%, some of the issues that Tabibi points out with regard to financial regulation
c. (initially proposal by Obama financial team that Congress couldn’t veto future bailouts)
I’d say that Obama’s rhetoric is at odds with what is proposed.
Look, the team of Summers/Geithner is still going to be better than the team of whatever the Republicans put up.
But it’s a real danger, politically and substantively, when the financial world remains untouchable, and the possibility of the bad behavior taking the system down, remains. Politically, the danger is the anger manifests in people choosing a conservative populist, or just saying, “Frack it, they are all the same bunch of sellouts”. Substantively, the banksters charge a bigger and bigger VIG on the activities of the american economy, making us all poorer.
Two other questions:
c. Was Obama REALLY rhetorically a progressive on financial matters, which Tabibi said he was? I think Tabibi ‘sellout’ angle assumes that too much, when I never thought Obama was a great progressive on this issue. (Although he talks a great game.)
d. The issue others have raised – even if Obama Finance Team were awesome – this also has to go through Congress.
The basic question #2 remains – what percentage is THIS finance team, married to the regulatory structure that ensures a bankster Vig on the american economy?
chek
The responses I’ve seen to this article across the internets since these so-called “fact checks” have come out has been almost universally the same as the responses on freep that you’d if Media Matters catches Hannity or Beck out in a lie, only this time it’s our side making the rationalizations.
Except for the Fernhotlz/Leonard pieces much of the commentary from liberal blogs is along the lines of “Those people have an agenda”, “No matter the ‘facts’, he’s talking about a ‘larger truth'”, “The central point that Obama is a SELLOUT still ring true”.
I don’t disagree that Obama is an enormous disappointment for many people, but I don’t think it serves the point of view that Taibbi is supposedly representing here to distort facts and promote conspiracy theories. TARP and other bailout programs deserve to be investigated, no doubt, but you can’t go calling FOX news out on the carpet for their bizzaro world truthy “news” and then rationalize it into some “larger truth” when super cool journalism guy Matt Taibbi does the same fucking thing.
J. Michael Neal
I don’t know, in part because I’m still not convinced that the current team is as wedded to the current regulatory system. That’s really hard to tell from the outside, though.
Let me ask a follow-up question. To some extent, I’m playing devil’s advocate, but not entirely. If you know that you aren’t going to get a new regulatory system through Congress, which was apparent before Obama was inaugurated, do you really want people at the top of the Treasury Department who don’t believe in the system they have to enforce? How effective are they going to be? Are the good ones even going to want to be the ones trying to enforce a system they don’t believe in?
I don’t think that we were overwhelmed with a lot of alternative choices to roughly the team that we’ve got. I like Paul Volcker, but he’s 82, and didn’t sound like he wanted to be Treasury Secretary. I like Joseph Stiglitz, but everything I’ve ever heard about him is that he is a terrible team player; that’s not a good trait for a cabinet secretary, and I think he serves us all better outside the administration.
For better or for worse, just about every Democrat with any experience in the higher echelons of a bureaucracy, Treasury or somewhere else, is connected to Robert Rubin. If you are going to eliminate the people close to him, you aren’t going to be left with very many experienced people.
FlipYrWhig
I am in no way an expert, but my general feeling about the prominence of financial-sector-linked people in Democratic policy-making is that it’s a lamentable but probably unavoidable situation. Bill Clinton had that remark about how he had to keep the bond traders happy in order to get anything accomplished. They are undeniably a malevolent force that pushes the rest of us around, and everyone hates them–and the alternative is… what? (J. Michael Neal has been saying similar things.) They really can fuck things up worse. No president can get too openly adversarial with them. You have to find ways to keep them happy, because they have supervillain powers. Your Rubins and Summerses don’t cure the addiction, but at least they provide some (perhaps minimal) harm reduction.
Chuck Butcher
I’ve defended one of his pieces here and I won’t defend this one. My POV may be well left of Matt’s and may even be a bit more violent, but my fury doesn’t require BS to continue.
Mnemosyne
I feel like the only person here who remembers that the right has been on a jihad against taxes for the last 30 years, so the notion that Obama could do what FDR did and hike the top tax rate from 25% to 63% in a single year is absolutely insane.
I mean, Jesus, the entire fucking economy is collapsing here in California, state offices are being closed, state employees are being put on involuntary furlough, and we still can’t get anything resembling a rational tax policy because Republicans are fucking nuts when it comes to taxes and have managed to infect everyone else. They really have convinced people that the Magical Infrastructure Fairy will repair their roads and schools, so there’s no need for tax money to pay the contractors to do it.
Mnemosyne
Well, so much for the edit function.
I feel like the only person here who remembers that the right has been on a jihad against taxes for the last 30 years, so the notion that Obama could do what FDR did and hike the top tax rate from 25% to 63% in a single year is absolutely insane.
I mean, Jesus, the entire fucking economy is collapsing here in California, state offices are being closed, state employees are being put on involuntary furlough, and we still can’t get anything resembling a rational tax policy because Republicans are fucking nuts when it comes to taxes and have managed to infect everyone else. They really have convinced people that the Magical Infrastructure Fairy will repair their roads and schools, so there’s no need for tax money to pay the contractors to do it.
n00tch
@namekarB:
When you compare mediocrity to shit, mediocrity looks great. That still doesn’t mean it’s not mediocre.