Don't go there

Chalk up Grovel No. 4 for GOP Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Limbaugh. Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, who is running for the congressional seat left vacant when New York Gov. David Paterson appointed Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary Clinton's senate seat, made a boo-boo during an interview with the Oneonta Daily Star.

Rush Limbaugh is meaningless to me. The only constituency I'm worried about are the residents of the 20th Congressional District,

he said. And now he knows how Michael Steele, Phil Gingrey and Mark Sanford all feel. Within hours, Tedisco's spokesman had issued a statement.

Jim's comments were in response to a question about what voters are asking him about on the campaign trail. So far, the concerns he has been hearing from voters on the campaign trail have been local in nature, such as his support for lower property taxes, fiscal responsibility, and his opponents appalling support for the AIG bonus loophole. That was his point and any effort to characterize it otherwise is a distortion of the facts.

Right. That certainly explains why he said the ayatollah is meaningless.

Speaking of meaningless, Congress still is, and the Democrats have not grown a backbone since Obama's election, nor have they done much to develop their brains. Rather than paraphrase, here's Robert Reich's entire take:

It's nice to see that when the public gets sufficiently angry about something, Congress responds. In a rare show of bipartisanship, members are eagerly registering shock and outrage at AIG's bonus payments by coming up with an assortment of ways to reclaim the bonanza, including taxing them away retroactively. Who says democracy is dead?

But much of this is for show. When the public isn't looking, Congress reverts to its old ways. The Obama-supported plan to allow distressed homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages under the protection of bankruptcy has run into a Wall Street wall. Although Citigroup temporarily broke ranks a few months ago when it was receiving one of the most generous bailouts, the rest of Wall Street has remained adamantly opposed, and apparently Democratic leaders have decided not to push back.

Meanwhile, Obama's plan to limit itemized deductions for the richest 1.2 percent of taxpayers (including the top 1.9 percent of small business owners) to 28 percent, starting in 2011, is also in trouble on the Hill. Wealthy contributors and friends of congressional leaders involved in setting tax policy have balked. So Congress is telling the White House to look elsewhere for the $320 billion it needs over ten years to finance half of the tab for health care reform. Congressional leaders have also informed the White House that they don't have the votes to pass Obama's proposal for treating the earnings of hedge-fund and private-equity managers as income rather than capital gains.

Angry populism thrives on stories about the rich and privileged who use their influence to get cushy deals for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. AIG's bonuses provide a perfect example. It's too bad the same populist outrage doesn't extend to issues involving far more money, affecting many more people, and entailing far more insidious abuses of power. Congress's potemkin populism over AIG's bonuses disguises business as usual when it comes to the really big stuff.

Exactly. Congress can puff out its collective chests and act all high and mighty on something like AIG's bonuses (although, we must not forget that the Republicans have consistently opposed any limitation whatsoever on executive compensation, so their feigned outrage is especially egregiously hypocritical). But god forbid they do actually do something that will help Americans at the expense of these same rich bastards who are soaking up every ounce of decency America has left, abetted by Congress.

And that must secretly delight the Republicans and their Supreme Leader, because this kind of non-action will lead to failure, which, they've made perfectly clear, is what they want.

It's when I think about things like this that I wonder if the conspiracy theorists are right -- that a "global elite" controlled on Wall Street is slowly siphoning all the wealth of the world to itself and will soon emerge openly as the Rulers of the Universe.

For now, I can only conclude that the whole of Congress is no more capable of stopping the greed and grand theft of the Wall Streeters than Republicans are capable of standing up to their Supreme Leader.

And neither, apparently is the Obama administration. Paul Krugman:

I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the bonus firestorm was coming; but it’s part of a pattern. At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.

This was bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics. This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.

So the masses have their pitchforks out and, with my colleagues leading the way, they are heading for AIG, now a symbol of all that's wrong on Wall Street.

That's a dangerous way to affect public policy, particularly since hot heads are quite often wrong-headed, and my colleagues have Beltway amnesia, which affects their ability to remember anything that happened more than a week ago. And that means there's no context for what's happening right now -- there's no recollection that it was the Bush administration that negotiated this bailout, that Tim Geithner, as chairman of the New York Fed, was part of that original process, that Chris Dodd actually tried to put in some real limitations on "retention payments, " only to be blocked by Geithner's Treasury Department.

But, as symbols go, AIG's a pretty good one -- Arrogance, Irresponsibility, Greed.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual in Congress -- the party of no, the party that won't fight back and the outside party that waves all the money in front of campaign committees.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press Blog

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Peace Y'all