Pundit Country

From this morning’s E.J. Dionne’s opinion piece about why Obama is still having some trouble getting ahead of the poor economic numbers and the nation’s increasingly dour attitude of those in Washington.

The president’s supporters comfort themselves that Obama’s numbers will improve as the economy gets better. This is a form of intellectual complacency. Ronald Reagan’s numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.

Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper’s method to offer their own critique of the conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be.

With the public perception of Wall Street bankers being uncaring, unsympathetic raiders of the public trust who enrich themselves with bonuses while a growing number of Americans are losing their jobs and houses. Perhaps this wasn’t the wisest idea from an image standpoint. Not to say it wasn’t an honest and accurate one, so I guess there’s that, but still guys….

Related articles

• The Galactic Empire Has Taken Over Wall Street [Star Wars] (gizmodo.com)
• Trader earns $2.5bn in bet on US banks (guardian.co.uk)
• Bankrupt and failed Lehman to pay massive bonuses (americablog.com)
• A Low, Dishonest Decade (online.wsj.com)

This clip, from the PBS investigative news program Frontline, covers their report on the credit card industry since before and immediately after the crash.It’s an eye-opening look at what is essentially and industry that has bribed it’s way into making usury both a legal and desirable business practice.

I have to admit I was stunned at the some of the practices the industry is allowed to continue with, even after the most recent attempt at Congressional reform. It makes me glad that I bank with a credit union and discarded my credit cards years ago. In fact, it’s doubtful I’ll ever go bank to a bank after watching this.

The entire program runs about an hour in length, but is well worth your time. My immedaite takeaway from the piece was this:

1) Elizabeth Warren should be hired immediately to serve a larger role than adviser to Congress on financial matters. She really is that smart and capable of explaining this mess in layman’s terms.

2) Tim Geithner needs to be let go (despite my earlier assertion) if for no other reason than he simply doesn’t command the respect or fear that he needs to from the banking industry to get them to comply with his demands. That or he’s just incompetent.

3) President Obama needs to stop craving the approval of the system he needs to radically reform and just do it. People will wait (even for him) for only so long.

4) The idea of a federal Consumer Protection Agency is one of the better ones this crisis has precipitated and should be pushed for the greatest determination.

Related articles

• Advocating For A Consumer Financial Protection Association (themoderatevoice.com)
• Elizabeth Warren: Financial Rules ‘Literally Don’t Work Anymore,’ Regulations Should Be ‘Clear And Painful’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Joel B. Schwartzberg: Elizabeth Warren: Hard Truths About the Economy (huffingtonpost.com)
• Audio: Hidden Fees on Credit Cards (usnews.com)
• The beginning of the end of meaningful regulatory reform (blogs.reuters.com)

from an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in the U.S. are expected to increase by 200,000 workers to 11 million by the end of 2009, says Ray Boggs, a vice president of IDC, Framingham, Mass., a market-research firm; he sees another 200,000-worker increase in 2010

…Applicants are stacking up by the hundreds of thousands, however. Based on my survey of a dozen companies that use home workers, your odds of actually landing one of these positions range from about 25-to-1 to 300-to-1.

Robert Reich is one of the clearer voices (along with Krugman and at times, Stiglitz) in the field of experts who have been trying the last several months to explain why the much-touted recovery is not stemming the job losses that many states are experiencing. Simply put, the attention has been to the major players in the economy and not to smaller business.

The problem is, our newly expanded government isn’t doing much for average working Americans who continue to lose their jobs and whose belts continue to tighten, and who are getting almost nothing out of the rising Dow because they own few if any shares of stock. Despite the happy Dow and notwithstanding the upbeat corporate earnings, most corporations are still shedding workers and slashing payrolls. And the big banks still aren’t lending to Main Street.

Trickle-down economics didn’t work when the supply-siders were in charge. And it’s not working now, at a time when — despite all their cries of “socialism” — big business and Wall Street are more politically potent than ever.

The whole piece is here.

Related articles

• “Socialism” saved Wall Street (americablog.com)
• Economist Stiglitz sees need for global reserve currency system (dailyfinance.com)
• Why the Dow is Hitting 10,000 Even When Consumers Can’t Buy And Business Cries “Socialism” (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)
• Paul Krugman: We Are In Economic “Purgatory” (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)