In President Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress, he came down very hard on the banks.  Does he mean it?  Politicians often say one thing and mean another.  

It is interesting how universal the ire felt toward the banks and bankers is.  Conservatives like Lindsay Graham and George Will have not seen it unreasonable to talk about nationalization of banks, at least in the short run, like Sweden.  Other conservatives, of course, scream “Socialism!” and one-line doses of dogma about letting the market self-correct, the last gasps of a fundamentalist and failed free-market ideology.

Liberals are also divided into two or more camps.  For want of a better name, and because I live in Massachusetts, let me call them Tsongas and Anti-Tsongas Democrats.  The former are socially liberal (for example, society has a moral obligation to take care of the poor, particularly children and the elderly, in regards to health care, food, shelter, etc) but fiscally conservative (for example, you manifestly shouldn’t bankrupt the government, or even waste money through bad management while doing it).  The Tsongas Democrats might be members of the Rotary Club or Free Masons; the Antis wouldn’t have anything to do with these organizations (they’re more likely to spike trees that kill lumbermen or block Japanese whalers with rowboats and bullhorns).  The Antis would be perfectly fine with nationalizing everything, in particular, banks.

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I almost had my wish come true today.  Some time ago in this blog I wished that Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner would confront George Will together on ABC’s This Week.  Instead, today it was Nouriel Roubini and Krugman.  This potentially could have been almost as good, but old George disappointed me.  He was basically in agreement with my economic knights in shining armor, so I couldn’t enjoy the fireworks.

For those that don’t recognize these names immediately, Robert Kuttner is a sometimes Boston Globe columnist and author of the Squandering of America.  Nouriel Roubini is a prof at NYU and, more importantly, runs an in-depth blog about economic issues.  Both foresaw our present financial crisis and made plenty of noise about it.  Roubini is often called Dr. Doom due to that fact, although I’m sure he hates the monicker.  Paul Krugman is more a member of the old boy network – after all, he got a Nobel prize – but as a NY Times columnist he has also made in-depth analyses of the current financial crisis.

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What I will discuss in this post is the problem of creating really alien aliens.  Recent TV series offer a mixed bag here.  If memory serves me correctly, in one show, Babylon Five, we have everything from the Centaurians, obviously just human beings dressed for a costume party, to the mysterious Shadows, creatures stolen from someone’s nightmare.  Star Trek, in its various incarnations, had quite a menagerie, from sentient rocks to giant aliens that probably inspired the Greeks to invent their gods and a dwarf alien that the swashbuckling Captain Kirk outwitted (I guess he outwitted the baby boy of the Greek gods too – didn’t Spock ever do anything?).  We’ve had two versions of the series Battlestar Galactica, and I must say that I liked the original Cylons better than the present ones.  

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“We’ll lose our best talent” is a paraphrase of the common complaint about the $500 K cap on managers’ salaries of those corporations, notably banks, that take bailout money from Uncle Sam.  Are these people serious?  First, those being called the “best talent” really are management failures – I say the government should force these corporations to fire this “best talent.”  Second, let them walk and then see if they can get a job somewhere else.  Many might be in for a surprise, especially in this economy.

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Let’s all shed a tear for Wall Street.  They caused a mess but they don’t like the solution.  It wasn’t just the investment bankers but also all those irrationally exhuberant investors that wanted to cash in on a sure thing.  They took the risk, now they want the taxpayers to take the loss.  The transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich continues and the rich have figured how to make the middle class take both the risk and the loss.  Except they didn’t quite get away with it – the American people voted against their guy (remember Mr. “Seven Houses” McCain?  or was it eight?).

Listening to all the crying, moaning, and whining about lack of clarity in the Obama administration’s proposal for the other half of TARP is quite a bit like hearing A-Rod cry, moan, and whine about the pressures he felt those three years with his obscene salary.  I really can’t feel sorry for any of these folks.  They deserve all they’re getting, and then some.

In fact,  I’d like to also see some real jail time for these people.  But then we, the taxpayers, would have to pay that too!  

‘Nough said.

In a previous post, I complained that our politicos and commentators tend to rewrite history to further their own agendas.  Now, with respect to the stimulus package, I have to complain yet again.  The claim from the far right is that what brought us out of the Great Depression was WW II, not FDR’s spending policies (this evening our inimitable George Will used this claim in a face-off between him and Paul Krugman).  The irony is that the statement is true, because the conservatives hounding FDR had convinced him to cut out the spending back in 1937.  When Secretary Morgenthau made the statement in 1939, the reduction in spending on public works, etc, had already done its damage, so it did take WW II to pull us out of the depression.

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Many politicians, op-ed columnists, TV commentators, and other erstwhile champions of America, right or wrong, rewrite history to further their own agenda.  The most recent example is the Jeff Jacoby column in today’s Boston Globe.  I remember when everyone was aghast at how the Soviet Union rewrote history for its own purposes.  Even every important invention was Soviet.  Nowadays we are just as guilty of the same thing.  At least some of us.  

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