Genius.

I’m not an economist, but I read a lot of economists, particularly economists who saw the current shit show coming from a ways off and have been consistently right in their assessments of why various attempts by first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration are likely to fail. When Paul Krugman writes this about the new Geithner bank plan, I get worried:

Why am I so vehement about this? Because I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second. So it’s just horrifying that Obama — and yes, the buck stops there — has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006.

It’s not just Krugman that is having a bad reaction. Duncan Black is bringing his trademarked gallows humor out in full force. John Cole does the same. James Galbraith call Geithner’s plan a “Rube Goldberg device.” As Digby says, “we are dealing with magical thinking again,”  which would at least make the Goldberg Geithner contraption make sense.

There’s often a lot of funny talk about having faith in markets or not scaring markets, as if saying the wrong thing will somehow offend the Dow Jones Industrial Average and cause everyone’s stock portfolios to tumble. I’ve never understood that. But what I do understand today is that the apparent inability for leaders at the highest level of government to grasp the severity of the problems facing us is likely to produce bad results for the future. Using big words like “sub-prime residential mortgage backed securities” and “$1 trillion” can be much scarier than words like “nationalize” or “fundamental reevaluation.”

I just hope that either Geithner turns out to be right or the severity of our financial circumstances compels the Obama administration to master enough political will to do whatever it has to do when this big shot from Geithner misses. I don’t know where we are if they only get this one shot and choose to use it on something that everyone who’s been right so far says is a horrible idea…

While like Atrios, I agree with all of what Paul Krugman is saying, I think the real point is that unless and until the Obama administration, Congressional leadership, and media influentials recognize that the only way out of this economic crisis is by empowering people capable of a fundamental reevaluation of how they look at the US and global economies and what factors contributed to putting us in the mess we are today, we cannot expect change. It is for this reason that Geithner, Summers, and Bernanke are absolutely incapable of solving the problems we face, as they still have faith that the people who caused this crisis with self-enriching voodoo economics are capable of charting course out of it. They are not.

One of the most noticable things in the fight against the Employee Free Choice Act is the willingness of the Big Business community and those on the right who are anti-American workers’ rights to deploy The Big Lie, namely, that Employee Free Choice ends the secret ballot. This is not a talking point, it is a lie. Fortunately today the Wall Street Journal editorial board (of all places) puts that lie to bed:

“The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act”

Thanks WSJ! Now hopefully all the wingnuts who have been trumpeting this lie will stop lying to the public and have a debate on the merits of the case. Should employers control when and how a union is formed? Or should working Americans get to decide when and how they will form a union?

If I were a shareholder of AIG, I would be very concerned that the company’s CEO was incapable and unwilling to name the 20-25 people who cost the company $100,000,000,000.00. That’s a lot of money for a company to lose without knowing who is responsible.

Of course Liddy does know who the 20-25 failures are. He’s just refusing to share the information with Congress, despite the fact that the U.S. Government owns 80% of AIG now. Which, I suppose, is to say that I am a shareholder of AIG. With that in mind, I’ll say this: Edward Liddy should be fired for (1) incompetence or (2) refusing to share information with company shareholders.

Lastly, Alan Grayson is a champion of working Americans and one of the greatest models of what a true civil servant looks like today. He’s in his first term in Congress and has taken a huge role in pushing for corporate accountability in these tough economic times. We got to where we are today for a reason and Alan Grayson seems to be one of the very few people in Washington who gets that we can only  identify, stop, and correct the economic forces that have brought us to where we are now through hardnosed questioning and unflinching investigation into economic wrongdoing.