Homework

There is a post brewing around here. Probably a couple of posts. Here's a little background reading for what is coming up.

Money, Morality and Mittens

I've been following some of the back and forth in the MSM and the blogosphere about Mitt Romney, what did or did not happen with Bain and what it tells - or fails to tell - us about the Mittster. The crude analysis is that Bain robbed a certain company blind in the 90s and this tells us Romney is a Bad Guy, a vulture capitalist. OMG even Newt tells us it's true!!!!!

To me, it's another round of reducing political judgment to matters of morality.

To the Right of Lincoln

Blanche Lincoln, that is.

John Cassidy has an article in the most recent New York Review of Books, The Economy: Why They Failed, on just how badly the Obama administration has failed. None of this will come as any great surprise to regular readers, of course, but there are some interesting tidbits in Cassidy's article that deserve some attention. Part of the appeal of this article is the calm, almost dry, recounting of the actions the Obama administration has taken, granting them every claim they have made about why X was necessary or why Z wouldn't work. Cassidy then throws in the counter factuals, and blows the arguments out of the water.

Investments

Marshall Auerback on New Deal 2.0, lays into the Catfood Commission's disingenuous calls for sacrifice:

This latter development has now gathered pace and found its fullest expression through the US National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (an Orwellian title if ever there was one) established by President Obama. The Commission has proposed a $3.8 trillion deficit cutting plan that would trim Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates and eliminate tax breaks, including the mortgage-interest deduction. Yes, there are token cuts in Defense spending in the interests of “fairness”, but the cuts are heavily skewed toward middle class entitlements. (Which is a deceiving word because it implies that we’re just a bunch of weak supplicants, dependent on the graces of the government. Why don’t we call these programs “enablements”?) The priorities laid out by the Commission are truly symptomatic of the degeneracy of our governing class compared to the days of the Great Depression. Grand projects started then are still delivering value to communities and private business interests some 80 years after their completion.

The Failure of Team Obama

I've added two new blogs to my blog roll in the last week - Peter Daou, of "The Daou Report" and HRC campaigns's Internet director, and New Deal 2.0, "A project of the Roosevelt Institute, ND2.0 brings you commentary from the country’s leading thinkers: economists, historians, political scientists, policy experts and elected officials." Right on cue, Jamie Galbraith posts one of his smart, succinct, devastating critiques to ND 2.0:

Bruce Bartlett says it was a failure to focus. Paul Krugman says it was a failure of nerve. Nancy Pelosi says it was the economy’s failure. Barack Obama says it was his own failure — to explain that he was, in fact, focused on the economy. ...

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures

The New Gilded Age

I'm watching the balance of power wobble along (Boo, Rand Paul! Yay, Andrew Cuomo!) and have some special interest in local and state initiatives (Boo, Prop D! Yay, Prop 19!), but otherwise don't have much invested in the outcome.

The course for the next generation was set back in 2008, when the Stevensonian elite subverted their own party's electoral process (Be a Democrat for a Day!) so that they could feel morally superior voting for a black man. Obama himself has said quite clearly that no one would bother to vote for him if he was white. This says much of his political calculation, but even more of his supporters. They were truly the Joshua Generation, unwilling to do more than their political predecessors and envious that they could not be cultural heroes like the economic giants of FDR's era or the moral giants of MLK's. And, having aimed so low and compromised so much so they could pretend to stand up to the "racists", they now get to live with that legacy. Unfortunately, so do the rest of us.

The Crisis of Credit

This is simply brilliant:

The Crisis of Credit - a brief and illuminating video

It hs been posted on a number of econo-blogs and deserves wide exposure. When you have a friend or family member who doesn't get what happened with the financial collapse and doesn't understand the difference between a CDO and a CDS, give them this link.

Come to think about it, maybe someone should send this to the administration so they can see just who the guilty players are in the current crisis.

Anglachel

What a Tangled Web They Weave

When first they practice to decieve.
But now they've practiced up a bit,
They really are quite good at it.

Click for a very large (I mean huge, you'll scroll all directions) and fascinating graphic from the NYT on who is connected to whom in these financial deals.

Two things strike me. One, this is a very small circle of people who are involved in these mega-deals. No doubt there are armies of lawyers and analysts behind them, but, in the end, it is fewer than 30 people who are creating the majority of the conenctions between these firms.

Two, there is only one woman, Ruth Porat of Morgan Stanley, in the mix, having a hand in deals with AIG and the GSEs.

Click here for a timeline of major financial company mergers, also from the NYT. I realized I recognized most of these names and could repeat some of their advertisements from memory, and I have not watched TV advertisement in 20 years. Most of the mergers seem to have occured before 1995, but the massive mashups waited until @ 2000. Hmm, big bank maneuvers ahead of presidential elections in 2000, 2004 and now again in 2008.

I look at this and think there are fewer and fewer people in command of more and more money.

Anglachel