The latest from The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com
- Robert Scheer: No Tough Love for Wall Street
- Carl Sferrazza Anthony: Michelle Obama's "Wednesday Nights"....and Someone Else's Too
- Carl Sferrazza Anthony: Michelle Obama Breaks Precedent, Honors Tradition
| Robert Scheer: No Tough Love for Wall Street | Top |
| What an insipid anticlimax! Rising to "a challenge more complex than our financial system has ever faced," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised on Tuesday to give trillions more to the very folks who profited from that malignant complexity. For all the brave talk about transparency and accountability in the banking bailout, he gave the swindlers who got us into this mess yet another blank check to buy up the "toxic assets" they gleefully created. According to the Congressional Oversight Panel created by Congress to monitor the bailout, the Bush Treasury Department overpaid by $78 billion of our money in the first 10 purchases of those assets. Yet Geithner tells us "Congress acted quickly and courageously" in throwing that money at Wall Street without requiring any accountability. At the same time, there is still no commitment to directly help what Geithner admits are the millions of homeowners already foreclosed out of their homes, with millions more to come. The leaks from Treasury promise that $50 billion will eventually be allocated directly to helping homeowners, which is a day late and a dollar short in chump change compared to the trillion dollars that Geithner on Tuesday committed to the purchase of more bad bank debt. The Geithner speech betrayed the buildup to it offered by President Obama in his press conference the day before. I was such a sucker I found myself cheering at almost every line, agreeing that Republicans acted with total irresponsibility in opposing Obama's plan to stimulate an economy that was wrecked on their watch. But then came the hangover reality of Geithner's talk. Instead of the promised transparency we were treated to yet another "trust Big Brother" hustle. How wonderful that Geithner, who as head of the New York Federal Reserve was in on the first wasted $350 billion, now promises a brand new Web site to help us taxpayers follow the action. It means nothing, given that he specifically ruled out any of the serious means of holding Wall Street accountable. The New York Times got it right: "... the plan largely repeats the Bush administration's approach of deferring to many of the same companies and executives who had peddled risky loans and investments at the heart of the crisis. ..." Geithner and White House economic czar Lawrence Summers won out over David Axelrod and other Obama advisers more loyal to the wishes of grass-roots voters; "... as intended by Mr. Geithner, the plan stops short of intruding too significantly into bankers' affairs even as they come onto the public dole." The word dole is usually applied heartlessly to welfare mothers sustained in their dire poverty by meager government handouts, not to the top bankers now ripping off the taxpayers. But as opposed to welfare mothers, who must survive stringent monitoring, the bankers will be largely self-monitoring. No wonder that welfare rolls, because of onerous eligibility rules, are not rising commensurate to the degree of misery out there. There is no such tough love for bankers. Much has been made of the proposed $500,000 pay cap that applies only to the most senior executives, who, rest assured, have already salted away massive fortunes made while hustling unsuspecting consumers with teaser loans. But there is nothing from Geithner about replacing those top executives, who presided over the disintegration of financial institutions that the taxpayers must now salvage. Nor is there any "moral hazard" pain planned for the shareholders in those Ponzi-scheme companies of the sort reserved for ordinary folks losing their homes. Believe it or not, I fully expected this morning to write a cheerleading column hailing Geithner's reversal of course. Surely the man who as head of the New York Fed sat idly by while the Wall Street giants he was supposed to be monitoring imploded would have learned the error of his ways. Otherwise why would Obama have appointed him? \I don't have the answer. The Obama of Monday's press conference, a president in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, seemingly deeply feeling the average person's pain as he movingly speaks of the laid-off workers of Elkhart, Ind., was absent from the next day's speech by his treasury secretary. If like me you still get those chatty e-mails from the Obama campaign, it is time to remind them that we voted for the caring community organizer from the streets of Chicago and not some hack carrying water for the predators of Wall Street. Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig and author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America . More on Timothy Geithner | |
| Carl Sferrazza Anthony: Michelle Obama's "Wednesday Nights"....and Someone Else's Too | Top |
| As Amie Parnes of Politico reports today, the President and Mrs. Obama intend to make a custom of bipartisan gatherings at weekly cocktail parties on Wednesday night. It's another example of modern appropriation of a retro modus operandi - very retro. Not the Roosevelts, Bushes, Clintons, Carters, Fillmores, - no, not even the Kennedys held regular weekly social cocktail hours where they gathered political figures from both sides of the aisle. You have to go back exactly two hundred years to Dolley Madison to find the First Lady who opened the doors to the White House once a week, midweek, with the idea of currying favor with members of the anti-Madison Federalist Party. With Washington, D.C. being just a village society at the time, not only House and Senate members but also the general public was welcomed, even in their muddy boots and pedestrian clothes. The weekly event became something of an institution, known as "Mrs. Madison's Wednesday Nights," or "Wednesday Night crushes." Dolley Madison was the center of all attention, her buffet tables groaning with what she called "native victuals" and the silver bowls filled with her wickedly intoxicating whiskey punch. "Everyone loves Mrs. Madison," the impressed author and guest Washington Irving told her as one "Wednesday Night" was winding down. With a nod towards bipartisanship, she retorted, "Mrs. Madison loves everyone." As rumblings of a second war with England increased in the capital, President Madison sought to keep New England Federalists from making good on their threat to secede, the prospect of a potential embargo on their goods devastating to their largely merchant constituency. The shortest President, believed to be no taller than five feet, six inches, James Madison, described as a "withered apple john," was no social animal like Barack Obama. Instead he would ensconce in a quiet corner of one of the smaller state rooms, holding quiet political conferences with his antagonists, each one discreetly invited and directed there by Dolley, who always worked in concert with the President. Meanwhile, in her signature turban and with heavily rouged cheeks, the First Lady navigated the "crush," carrying a copy of Don Quixote to use as a conversation breaker. She asked guests if they'd read it. If they had, she asked about it. if they hadn't, she commiserated that neither had she. And if that didn't work, she pulled out her famous enamel snuff box which she offered a pinch from to her guests - and then took one herself. Like President Obama, Dolley Madison did have a slight tobacco dependency, though she made no promises it would be a "pinch-free" zone. More on Barack Obama | |
| Carl Sferrazza Anthony: Michelle Obama Breaks Precedent, Honors Tradition | Top |
| In her third trip to a federal department of the executive branch of government, First Lady Michelle Obama came to the Interior Department on Monday, February 9. Since Interior manages Native American affairs, the First Lady was welcomed with an "honor song" by an inter-tribal drum group, the "Black Bear Singers." To "engulf all the goodness" around her, she was also wrapped in a royal purple shawl, appliquéd with native symbols, and made by Marianne Hannsom of the Kiowa tribe, according to presenter Nedra Darling, the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs. Mrs. Obama's ongoing excursions to eventually visit each of the Cabinet departments to extend herself into the Washington community is unprecedented. Surprisingly, however, it echoes an earlier era when Cabinet members and the "ladies of the Cabinet" were the "official family" of a President and First Lady and regularly dined at each others' homes and even travelled together on official junkets that were part-vacation. In a time when the executive branch consisted of the State, War, Navy, Interior, Treasury, Justice and Agricultural departments, all clustered around the White House, several First Ladies took an active interest in the well-being of the clerks, typists and other Cabinet department employees. Dolley Madison thought nothing of finding jobs for Quakers seeking work (although expelled from the sect for marrying "out" she remained close to many friends from her meeting-house). War Secretary Edwin Stanton, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase and Secretary of State William Seward were exasperated - but dutiful - when Mary Lincoln sent them notes by messenger directing them to hire needy men and women, white and black who needed jobs and appealed to her. Frances Cleveland, concerned that many department clerks who worked all week were unable to attend her open-house receptions started holding them on Saturdays, so they could attend on their day off - much to the disgust of some snobbish White House officials. Eleanor Roosevelt held a series of lawn parties for thousands of "government girls" whose work she felt were unappreciated. None took as active a role in the welfare of the Cabinet department employees as did Nellie Taft, who held the position exactly a century ago. Feeling that, as wife of the chief executive, she was somehow responsible for their well-being, Mrs. Taft toured the various department work rooms and came back insisting to the President that the conditions were deplorable. In March 1912, he signed an executive order which demanded the first health and safety standards in the federal workplace - fresh running water, open windows, heat, restrooms, and lunchrooms. It was also the very first known instance of a First Lady involving herself in federal policy - and owning up to it. There is also a bit of irony in the location of the building the nation's first African-American First Lady visited on Monday. Perhaps as Mrs. Obama and her entourage entered and exited the 18th Street entrance of the Interior Department even they had little time to note that directly across the street was the entrance to Constitution Hall. Exactly seventy years earlier, the great contralto opera singer Marian Anderson was denied use of the hall for a concert performance by its owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution, simply because she was an African-American. And it was a First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped facilitate Anderson's famous performance on Easter Sunday, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where so many efforts associated with the Civil Rights Movement symbolically began - and where Barack Obama opened his Inauguration festivities. More on Michelle Obama | |
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