Friends,
Nothing like it has ever happened. The President of the United States,
the elected representative of the people, has just told the head of
General Motors -- a company that's spent more years at #1 on the
Fortune 500 list than anyone else -- "You're fired!"
WASHINGTON - A group of African-American lawmakers summoned Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to Capitol Hill on Monday for a closed-door meeting aimed at making sure minorities and women get their share of the billions of dollars in federal bailout funds.
"We are not going to sit back and allow billions of dollars to be dumped into this economy and watch the same old players be advantaged by it," said Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat and the co-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Economic Security Taskforce.
In the movie Lars and the Real Girl,
the main character imagines that a female blow-up doll is his fiancé.
To humor Lars, his brother and sister-in-law go along with the charade.
Over the course of the movie, more people are drawn into the circle,
until eventually the whole town is treating Bianca the blow-up doll as
one of its leading citizens.
A U.S. Capitol Police officer stopped me as I tried to make my way
inside the House Financial Services Subcommittee hearing on AIG
compensation last week wearing a sign pinned to my butt that read,
"Bonus? My ass!" "I was told by the committee that you can't go in with
signs that have profanity," the officer said. "So you'll have to take
that off." Then, as I unpinned the sign from my skirt, he whispered,
"Not that I don't agree with you."
Though the stock market may have
lifted off on news of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's purchase
plan for toxic assets, don't be fooled by Wall Street's optimism. The
plan is even worse than the one floated by Geithner's predecessor,
Henry Paulson, last fall. At least Paulson wanted the government simply
to buy the banking industry's junk outright-and spend less doing so.
Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont
who is independent in spirit as well as party label, has placed a hold
on President Obama's nomination of Gary Gensler to head the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up
about, but the senator is right. Like most Americans, I am eager for
Barack Obama to succeed, but I see this appointment as further evidence
that the president has entrusted his economic policy to the wrong
people.
Tim Geithner’s at it again, doing somersaults, with hundreds of
billions of federal money flying out of his pockets in the process, all
to distract us from the more sensible course of action, which is to
nationalize the insolvent banks.
Instead, he wants to scrub their assets clean by having the government and some private speculators buy up their bad bets.
Geithner calls it the Public Private Partnership Investment Program, and if he were playing scrabble, he’d be all out of Ps.
Let's
be clear: President Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall and
could not possibly have turned things around in the short time since
his election. Unfortunately, what he is doing is not enough.
