Obama After Six Months

Somehow folks seem to forget, especially those nuts shouting down Democratic representatives at health care reform town meetings, that this entire mess--deficits, banking collapse, unemployment, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession--are the aftermath of the Bush administration. Not that greed is partisan. The greed that withdrew funding from the manufacturing segment of the economy was both Democratic and Republican. When a 5% profit margin isn't enough, and most investment bankers want a higher return on their money, we know we are screwed. So, yes we are screwed.

Rolling Stone has an interesting piece on just how Obama has worked out during the first six months of his presidency. The three commentators are Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, David Gergen, former aide to both Republican and Democratic presidents, and Michael Moore, the rebel filmmaker. It's an interesting read, so take a moment to check it out.

Who's Getting Rich From the TARP? Not You and Me!

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, whose alumni conceived and implemented the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program)-- remember Henry Paulsen, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bush Junior--he was a former chair of Goldman Sachs. Well, Goldman is about to announce today a quarterly profit of $2.7 billion, the largest in its history. Remember it was Goldman Sachs's influence that got the Bushies to save AIG (which Goldman needed to cover its losses) and to let Goldman's rival Lehman Brothers fail.

However, before you sink your last savings into the stock market, check out Matt Taibbi's latest article in Rolling Stone. The Great American Bubble Machine points a finger at Goldman Sachs as the master manipulator of the Stock Market.

Listen to Matt's interview and more on The Takeaway on NPR.org.: Damned if You Do: Profiting in the Recession.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi Puts It All Together

Still reeling from the IRS bill that our family has to pay, today I received a link to Matt Taibbi's latest article for Rolling Stone. It will make your blood boil! Essentially the country, and perhaps the world, has been taken over by Goldman Sachs. And they aren't very good at it, this ruling the world thing.

Current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and the guy who is allegedly overseeing the TARP payments, Neel Kashkari, well, they are all Goldman Sachs alum. It appears that the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was in the room when the decision was made to bail out AIG. The reason: Goldman was the largest purchaser of the "financial products" devised by Joe Cassano at the AIG London office. If AIG failed, then Goldman would have no coverage for the credit default swaps they had bought.

"Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS [credit default swap] book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG."

This is much more than bonuses, although surely it was greed and arrogance that propelled these insane risks. The entire banking system must be overhauled. Credit card companies have to be reined in from charging usurious fees.

Read The Big Takeover with a large martini in hand and then wonder: how the hell do we get ourselves out of this mess? It isn't by propping up the banks and insurance companies that got us here with their greed. But I don't know what to do. Do you?

Post script: The New York Times in its Deal Book blog, edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin (who will be on Bill Maher tonight), posted that Goldman disputes it had AIG exposure.

Further Post Script: Add Larry Summers to the list of Obama advisers who have a lot of hide in the financial crisis. According to Frank Rich in his NY Times column this morning, "An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary circumstances.”

"Given that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvard’s presidency at the bubble’s height, you have to wonder how he can now sell the administration’s plan for buying up toxic assets with the help of hedge funds. It will look like another giveaway to his own insiders’ club."

Rolling Stone Magazine's Expose of John McCain

As a group of us gathered around the hotel lobby television to watch the spectacle of Saturday Night Live's parody of the vice presidential debates, we realized that a McCain-Palin win would definitely give America better comedic theater, but aside from that, an Obama defeat would be a disaster for the nation and the planet.

Now Rolling Stone magazine has posted on its website a story, Make Believe Maverick, dated October 16, 2008, by Tom Dickinson, profiling a John McCain who is not fit for the presidency.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

This is must reading, along with its posting of Matt Taibbi's October 2, 2008 piece Mad-Dog Palin.

American electoral politics has never been polite or constrained. This election season is reaching new lows, however. I'm not sure how to combat the latest lies being spread by the McCain-Palin campaign, but after seeing the damage done by the Swift Boat ads to John Kerry, Obama has to fight back. According to one source, nearly all of McCain's national ads are now negative.

Obama wants to raise the level of discourse. Obama's newest ad is a preemptive strike.

All of this negativity is, of course, a distraction from the real issues: the economy and how it has punched the breath out of most of us; our stature among the community of nations; and whether as a country we will help solve the problems facing this troubled and crowded planet or whether we are the trouble itself.