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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News Writer's Guide To The Stock Market

Those That Know said today that the stock market dropped because of AIG's huge 4th quarter losses and, of course, the general worry about the state we're in.

The last time the market "bounced" was just a week ago, when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said something that downplayed bank takeover fears.

A week before that, the market fell because investors were afraid the stimulus bill the President signed that day wouldn't be enough.

A few days earlier, it was up because the president was working on a mortgage rescue plan.

The day after the president's inauguration, IBM's earnings and news that Tim Geithner was going to be nominated to be Treasury Secretary brought the market up, after dropping on the day of the inauguration because they were looking beyond it to what the new president faced.

The week before the inauguration ended up because investors were looking forward to the big event.

Notice a pattern? Yeah, me neither.

Wanna know what I think? I think that

1) the so-called experts have no fucking idea what they're talking about and

2) the investors are a buncha kids who are playing high-stakes games of chicken with money.

That's a pretty ugly thing to do, really. It messes with people's livelihoods. You and I, and the managers of most of our retirement funds, generally take pretty good care of our money. But when greedy sons of bitches are playing chicken with the money, it screws it up for everybody. You can't be conservative enough in the stock market to stay ahead of the assholes who are out to make millions at the expense of everybody else.

And they do the same things on the commodities markets, where it hurts people like farmers who depend on the Chicago exchange to set the prices for some of their goods. If these guys get scared that they might lose some money, well, there go the farmers.

These folks aren't "investors." They're gamblers, trying to stay in the game long enough to make a killing and get out before the whole thing crashes.

And y'know, if it only affected the gamblers, there'd be no problem. But it doesn't. It affects everybody who invests in the stock market.And, as we've clearly seen, everybody else too.

And what drives gamblers, aside from that weird addiction thing? Mostly greed.

That's the problem with unfettered capitalism. I have no problem with capitalism. Kinda like it, really. I have what I need, and a fair amount of what I want, even a few things I only think I want. Contrary to the depiction of liberals put out by the Supreme Leader of the GOP lately, I am not in favor of socialism, nor am I an unhappy liberal. I'm quite content.

I just lack the greed gene, I guess.

The Ayatollah Limbaugh, for example, has god knows how many cars, because "I like nice cars," along with five houses. He's not married, he has no children. Just a cat. And a $35 million contract.

Far be it for me to say that he's a greedy son of a bitch, but come on. Who needs all that?

Usually, it's greedy people. And they fuck it all up for the rest of us. They're why capitalism needs some regulation here and there to keep their stupid asses from doing what they've done to us for the last 30 years.

And rather than admit they're selfish assholes, they dole out more money to their congresscritters to keep them from doing anything that might make it harder for them to play the game.

Anyway, all of this is just a round-about way to tell you that I've decided I can explain the stock market as well as anybody else. I've set up a new category -- things that make the stock market go up and down -- and I'll use it to tell you what's going on in the high stakes world of finance. Here's today's good news:

Today, the market fell to 12 year lows after an unusual winter storm blanketed the south in snow over the weekend and headed for New England, dampening investors' hopes for riding around with top down on the convertible.

They were also made uneasy by the brewing conflict between Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele and the Supreme Leader.

On CNN's "D.L. Hughley Breaks the News," Steele called the ayatollah's schtick "incendiary" and "ugly" entertainment, and the ayatollah fired back that Steele should go back behind the scenes and work harder to destroy the liberals.


"Why do you claim to lead the Republican Party when you seem obsessed with seeing to it President Obama succeeds?" he said on his radio program.

Investors will probably feel better about it all tomorrow though, since Steele saw the error of his ways, just too late to save the market today.

"My intent was not to go after Rush -- I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh," Steele told Politico in a telephone interview. "I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. ... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership."

"I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking," Steele told Politico.

It wasn't yet clear whether rising Republican star Rep. Eric Cantor's mealy-mouthed repudiation of the ayatollah's oft-stated desire for the Obama presidency to fail will have any effect on the market, or draw fire from his Supreme Leadership.

"I don't think anyone wants anything to fail right now," the House Republican Whip said on ABC's "This Week on Sunday." "We have such challenges. What we need to do is we need to put forth solutions to the problems that real families are facing today."

Which, of course, is precisely why Cantor and his fellow GOP obstructionists want nothing more than to continue the same failed policies of the last 30 years and block any attempt to change our direction.

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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