There’s still quite a few holdovers like this guy:
John C. Dugan, a former bank lobbyist, has been comptroller since 2005 — when the mortgage boom was in full force — and he’s responsible for regulating banks with national charters, including giants like Citibank and Chase. Like his recent predecessors, Mr. Dugan often takes positions that align with banks, even as they have come under withering attack for their role in the financial crisis.
For instance, he has opposed efforts by state officials who try to crack down on abusive consumer-lending practices, arguing that national banks aren’t in their jurisdiction. At the same time, he rarely imposes serious penalties related to consumer protection, particularly against the big banks.
“To have a regulator this partial and this helpful to the people he is supposed to regulate is, to say the least, very troubling,” says the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, who has tangled with the O.C.C. “It’s a pretty warped view of public responsibility.”
Free markets! Deregulation! Ayn Rand! That’s all I’ve got.
dmsilev
Oy.
Definitely a Bushie.
-dms
El Cid
When Reagan couldn’t get away with eliminating the regulations or evaporating the regulatory agencies, he installed anti-regulatory leaders and/or made the task of lower-level regulatory officials impossible. Including the tasks of food safety inspections. There’s a lot more money involved for the super-rich in finances, given that finance has basically taken the heights of the modern U.S. economy, so there’s even more post-Reaganite tendency to assist in fighting effective regulations. Keeping these sorts in their offices is, of course, one more strategy.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Have you heard, the GOP is back and favored by voters. About the dumbest on the planet btw, that when asked say democrats aren’t listening enough to the wingnuts.
George Bush who?
Ash Can
My second-greatest fear wrt the Bush
AdministrationClusterfuck — after the fear that he’d pick a fight with someone able and willing to fight back, and finish off the USA once and for all — was that his appointments to the various agencies would hamstring the government for years afterward. I’m not sure what can be done about ticks like Dugan now, but it has to be a good thing when they’re brought to light, at least, and I’d like to think there’s a way to fire them.El Cid
A couple of good essays on recent economics perspectives among the left (meaning, including the actual soshullists, not just anyone an inch leftward of Ayn Rand) in Monthly Review.
From one, re-evaluating the recent attention to and, it is argued, over-emphasized praise for Minsky’s view of financial crises:
No one could have anticipated…
And a critique of the post-war deployment of Keynesianism as well:
rob!
You forgot to throw in some bullshit about Burke or whatever. Oh, and its all the fault of minorities for buying those huge houses they couldn’t afford.
Also, fags.
cmorenc
Randoid economic glibertarians anchor their discussion on the fundamental wisdom and productive efficiency of “free markets” as if it was first cousin to the second law of thermodynamics, and just as pure, fundamental and involable. Accordingly, they believe that attempts to circumvent or tamper with this fundamental principle will meet with the same kind of success as perpetual-motion machines do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics – either outright unsuccessful, or else inevitably containing substantial disguised inputs and outputs that more than negate any supposed “improvements” gained by the regulatory device.
Trying to argue with people with an unshakable axiom of belief like this is like trying to argue with “young earth” creationists whose fundamental worldview is literal biblical – you cannot argue with someone who thinks their positions come straight from god (or rather, god’s official “word”), except in the case of Randoids, free-market glibertarianism is like a deity.
BethanyAnne
Shouldn’t this be filed under “Obama is worse than Bush! He sold us out!” ?
:)
scav
dmsilev #1
I don’t know, that little gem invoking cheap shots instead of petty gossip is almost Vaticanesque. They’re really making things too obvious for the conspiracy minded. that or there is a simply stunning stupidity virus attacking the PR minds of the world.
jwb
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: “Have you heard, the GOP is back and favored by voters.”
And if the Goopers actually believe this they are going to be blindsided by the voters in November. Evidence. For one thing, the teabaggers assembled only a comically small group to protest the local congresscritters vote for HCR—though the demographic was younger, the group was very small and the focus was on abortion. Then, too, the tone in the local paper has definitely shifted over the past two weeks. There was actually a uncharacteristically sunny article (and even more uncharacteristically positive headline) after the jobs report came out on Friday. The Dems would be wrong to think that they have this in the bag, but if the economy continues to turn positive and if they Dems can get themselves running against the banks, I think the Dems will come out of the November election in fine shape.
Napoleon
Several years ago I read a long detailed piece on how the economy was predictive of how a party would do, but the twist was that the writer/researcher found that the best correlation of the state of the economy to election results was the state of the economy 6 months ahead of the election, which is about a month from now (as if at a certain point most people fix in their mind what they think of what is going on and become immune to changes in their views).
If there was anything to that this is the time we need the sunny stories and the feeling out there in the country that things are getting better.
Walker
@cmorenc:
Considering that Galt’s invention in Atlas Shrugged is a perpetual motion machine (it is the only way that they are able to free themselves of society), this is quite ironic.
LarsThorwald
McNabb!
That is all.
d0n camillo
A bank lobbyist as Comptroller of the Currency. There’s a reason I was so glad to watch Bush’s helicopter leaving the White House in January 2009. I remember reading a Businessweek article a year or two ago where some state attorneys general were complaining about the OCC’s blocking them from acting on predatory lending before the crash. Dugan’s only response was that evrything he’d done had been perfectly legal. No doubt it was, but it also turned out to be bugfuck insane.
Martian Buddy
OT, but ThinkProgress has some good news for conservatives:
Heckuva job there, Bachmann and Erickson.
Balconesfault
The Bush Administration, besides all their obvious flaws, dumped an infestation of termites into the Federal bureaucracy with the obvious goal of debilitating it. This guy is just one more termite.
Balconesfault
I remember reading a Businessweek article a year or two ago where some state attorneys general were complaining about the OCC’s blocking them from acting on predatory lending before the crash. Dugan’s only response was that evrything he’d done had been perfectly legal. No doubt it was, but it also turned out to be bugfuck insane.
Just wait until Republicans succeed in getting healthcare sold across state lines, effectively gutting state AGs ability to functionally regulate the products sold in their states.
Kirk Spencer
@11, Napoleon
The economy at six months out is almost right. The better test is which way the economy is MOVING six months out, which is reinforced if it continues moving the same over the next few months.
GDP going up? Unemployment going down? If the answer to both is “yes” the incumbent gets an edge. If the answer to both is “no” the incumbent is handicapped.
The GOP as a whole is trying to run as challengers to incumbents, the incumbents being the Democratic party. Fear and doom have been their watchwords since Obama was elected. Well, before then, but since then it’s it’s because of the people in charge. It’s still bad in some areas so they’ll have traction, but for the most part it’s going to be less effective than they expect.
Will
This NYT piece on Palin has to be one of the worst pieces of writing they’ve ever published:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/business/media/05carr.html?emc=eta1
“When Sarah Palin made her debut as the host of “Real American Stories” on Fox News on Thursday night, she described several triumphs of regular people over insurmountable odds, but she missed an obvious one: her own.
After her failed bid for the vice presidency, she was more or less told to head back to Alaska to serve out her term as governor — a kind of metaphorical kitchen.”
******************************************************
Yes, of course. When Sarah Palin had to go back to her humble origins as the democratically elected Governor of Alaska, it was no different than being told to get back in the kitchen.
Brian J
One has to wonder what it would take to simply dismiss a lot of the Bush holdovers all at once. There would surely be a piss and moan fest at Fox, but that’s bound to happen unless Obama makes love to a picture of Reagan each day. Is it the sort of controversy that would blow over in a week? Would it help to do it on a Friday holiday weekend, or some other slow news day dump?
I’ve wondered the same thing about the Justice Department, which was supposedly infested with Monica Goodling-like simps. I’m sure there are plenty of agencies where the people in them don’t have the government’s best interests at heart, to say the least. If it’s possible, why not just get rid of them all at once and then move on?
I know he’s been trying to repair the damage done to regulatory agencies, but this could speed up the process.
someguy
They should probably fire pretty much every federal employee who is a registered Republican (or has been say, any time since1996). Yeah, the lawsuits would take a long time to sort out but if you just quit paying their paychecks they’d go elsewhere and the government would get a whole lot less messed up real fast. Nevermind ending a lot of the corruption, the average IQ would go up 10 or 15 points immediately…
ericblair
They should probably fire pretty much every federal employee who is a registered Republican (or has been say, any time since1996). Yeah, the lawsuits would take a long time to sort out but if you just quit paying their paychecks they’d go elsewhere and the government would get a whole lot less messed up real fast.
I doubt you’d actually get as far as firing them: they’d protest and I believe the whole thing would be put on hold pending hearings and the like. It would probably be easier to transfer them to some sort of “turkey farm” so they could sit around and do nothing until they quit, or better engineer a transfer to, say, Barrow, Alaska, and force them to go or quit. These things can happen, but I’m not sure how much it takes to force it through or who (like in Congress) could stop it.
kid bitzer
interesting that you should post about embedded bushies.
just this morning i was looking over my social security statement (i’m not drawing down yet, just paying in).
and what struck me was that the top page was *still* largely taken up with inflammatory fear-mongering about how soc sec is going to die and it won’t be there and something must be done oh my god it’s going broke and busted and bankrupt.
so i looked at the name of the commissioner, “michael j. astrue”, and i looked him up on wikipedia.
yup, sure enough: a bush appointee who refuses to resign. and is still doing his best to poison people’s minds about social security.
despicable people.
Llelldorin
If these guys are embedded at the civil service level, it’s actually hard to fire them (this is why so many decent scientists were still rattling around inside the Bush administration for so long). The best you can do is make their lives miserable by ordering them to do their jobs (the way the Bush administration made those scientists’ lives miserable by ordering them not to).
Mnemosyne
Given that Bush turned many of those jobs into civil service jobs rather than appointees, it will probably require changing the laws that govern civil service jobs and removing some of the protections that those employees get, and even then it probably wouldn’t affect the people who are already there.
As ericblair said, the best bet is probably to “promote” them to someplace where they can’t do any harm, but those positions will have to be created.
El Cid
What Reagan did with agencies like food inspection in order to hamstring them vs. the producers he favored was to slash funding and then have the agents have to cover a much, much larger territory along with shifting many into management rather than field coverage.
BruinKid
Woot. They interviewed West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw, who has tangled with the OCC when suing Capital One. He somehow appeared in the amicus brief filed by the (mostly) Republican state attorneys general who are suing the federal government over Obama’s health care bill, even though he’s against this sham, because his daughter (a friend of mine from UCLA) is head of her college Dem group in law school.
Little Dreamer
El Cid:
That’s called doing a Norquist.
Dr. Psycho
We have had no de-Bushification, and we have never had a government that needed a thorough house-cleaning the way this one does.