Monday morning….
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by John Cole| 32 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Archives for 2009
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Just Awesome
Ladies and gentlemen, the Republicans have some ideas how to move forward out of this economic mess:
John McCain and Richard C. Shelby, two high-profile Republican senators, said on Sunday that the government should allow a number of the biggest American banks to fail.
“Close them down, get them out of business,” Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.”
While the Alabama senator did not say which banks to shutter, he suggested that Citigroup might be on that list, saying the bank has “always been a problem child.”
Looks like Monday will be a good day to short Citigroup (or maybe not, since commenters claim you can’t short under 5 bucks and Citi is worth approximately nothing anyway. I am still betting this was not helpful commentary for the broader market).
Seriously- the welfare queens on Wall Street keep asking what Obama can do to “regain the confidence of Wall Street” (and I really can not describe how angry those statements make me- Obama needs to have you regain confidence in him? You were the rocket scientists who caused this mess.) He could start by sending Sen. Shelby to Gitmo every Friday through Monday so he can’t appear on any more weekend shows. There may be drastic steps that need to be taken shortly, but the last damned thing the jittery market needs right now is Senators running around publicly suggesting we need banks to die.
By the way- which member of the CNBC brain trust will blame Obama for Citigroup’s cliff dive tomorrow?
Creeping Galtism
Much html code has been spilled about the wingnut obsession with “going Galt” in order to avoid paying a 39% marginal rate on income over 250K a year. Matt Yglesias points out that we’d probably be better off if a lot of wealthy Americans went Galt, the Washington Independent has a nice run-down of the whole movement, if it can be called that, and commenters all over point out that John Galt would never have worked as a dentist, represented people from Bakersfield, or slept with Glenn Reynolds.
These are good points, but I think there’s been too much emphasis on what idiots these people are and not enough on how childish they are. Quitting work because of a slight tax increase isn’t akin to anything from any sort of philosophy, not even one as crude and simplistic as Ayn Rand’s; it’s more akin to a child’s decision to take his ball and go home. It’s probably worse, though, since when a typical ten year-old gets home, stops crying, and wipes his nose, he doesn’t then fantasize about how the world will now suffer from the loss of his inestimable brilliance. I don’t know if Vincent Gallo is a Randian or not (it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if he was), but this quote summarizes Galtism in its current form perfectly: “I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings; and I did it out of spite.”
What I think is more insidious, though, than wingnut dentists’ cutting back their hours or Mrs. Instapundit cutting back on whatever it is that she normally does, is the widespread belief among elites that they and their colleagues are indispensable men. Like one of JMM’s readers, I fear that Geithner thinks that our economy would be decimated if we forcibly Galted the geniuses who ran our financial industry into the ground. I fear that when Andrew Sullivan and Joe Klein gush about the greatness of David Brooks, it’s because they view themselves and each other as a d’Anconia-Danneskjöld-Galt punditocratic triumvirate that may yet save the world from unseriousness and blogofascism. I even fear that when Villagers praise Obama’s “political gifts”, they’re doing so for the same reason they praised George Bush’s cowboy gut instincts; that is, because they feel that the talents of leaders in Washington reflect upon its scribes.
To put it simply, I fear that we are now ruled by incompetent egomaniacs who will never blow the whistle on each other, no matter how bad things get, because to do so would be to admit that none of them is indispensable or brilliant after all.
Kitty Lobster
A reader just sent this in:
That cat has no dignity whatsoever.
Again, the quickest way to get your pet up here is to have it in a compromising position. Like, for example, a cat wearing a lobster costume.
*** Update ***
I have no idea how I missed this until now:
Excellent.
How Is This Possible?
I don’t understand:
Factory jobs disappeared. Inflation soared. Unemployment climbed to alarming levels. The hungry lined up at soup kitchens.
It wasn’t the Great Depression. It was the 1981-82 recession, widely considered America’s worst since the depression.
That painful time during Ronald Reagan’s presidency is a grim marker of how bad things can get. Yet the current recession could slice deeper into the U.S. economy.
If it lasts into April — as it almost surely will — this one will go on record as the longest in the postwar era. The 1981-82 and 1973-75 recessions each lasted 16 months.
Unemployment hasn’t reached 1982 levels and the gross domestic product hasn’t fallen quite as far. But the hurt from this recession is spread more widely and uncertainty about the country’s economic health is worse today than it was in 1982.
I don’t get it. The Republicans and some in the media are calling this the Obama recession and the Obama bear market and the Obama economy, but this says it will be the longest recession on record. Yet Obama has only been President for a few weeks. The math just doesn’t seem to work.
Sometimes I think the media and the Republicans are just making shit up.
On a serious note, the last few years have been really eye opening for me. I was never one of the Republicans who thought the media was liberally biased. I always felt they were just lazy and superficial (and MoDo is a fine example) and on issues outside their safety zone (faith and religion, for example), and they just were not equipped to discuss them. However, it becomes more and more clear every day that the media is not biased towards liberal or conservatives, but rather, it is simply in the business of defending the status quo for the wealthier members of society. The reason social conservatives and progressives both hate the media is because they really don’t care about either group or their issues. This is about protecting the amassed wealth of the few.
The past couple of weeks we have faced nothing but story after story about how the market (translation, the folks who created this mess) are nervous about the Obama plans, when no one will admit that the “markets” will only react positively to bail out after bail out with no pain for the people at fault. The same people who created this mess are now bitching about the attempts to fix it, and upset because it might not continue to reward them. The MSM is providing no critical analysis but serves merely as a platform for people kvetching about reverting to the tax rates that were in place just a few years ago. The fact that the same people whose buddies are receiving trillions in taxpayer dollars to fix their mistakes are allowed to go on television and chant socialism is mind-numbing.
It really is breathtaking (especially since most families in the country just got a tax cut from the Obama administration). Can anyone give me any reason why Jim Cramer is asked for advice on anything, let alone given a broad forum to savage the attempts to fix the mess he helped to create?
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[poll id = 8]
Pick up to three.
Fair And Balanced
David Gregory has Mortimer Zuckerman, Newt Gingrich, Erin Burnett, and some historian on discussing the economic crisis. Newt went on a diatribe, blaming the economic woes on the Obama “war on those making over 250,000,” Claire McCaskill, and compared letting the Bush tax cuts expire to Smoot-Hawley.
No one on the panel so much as flinched.
There were no Democrats or anyone there to rebut Mr. Gingrich.
Liberal media.
*** Update ***
Gingrich has, for all intents and purposes, been given this entire show just to peddle talking points. It amazes me how he is able to do it all with a straight face. Not once does he break down, even when giving the “no one had time to read the stimulus bill” nonsense. I couldn’t do it. I would get halfway through, start laughing, and have to admit “I am so full of shit. I have no idea why any of you are even listening to me.”
It is impressive. All these guys care about is regaining political power. I’m afraid I am just done with Meet the Press.
Slow on the Uptake
David Frum is starting to figure it out:
In the days since I stumbled into this controversy, I’ve received a great deal of e-mail. (Most of it on days when Levin or Hannity or Hugh Hewitt or Limbaugh himself has had something especially disobliging to say about me.) Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don’t agree with Rush, quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.
The problem is he thinks he can deprogram this cult. Good luck with that.