Mo Dowd Gets It Right Today: 'Trillion Dollar Baby'

[flpoljunkie]

There’s a weaselly feel to the plan, a sense that tough decisions were postponed even as President Obama warns about our “perfect storm of financial problems.” The outrage is going only one way, as we pony up trillion after trillion.

Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets.

As Steve Labaton and Ed Andrews wrote in The Times on Tuesday, Geithner won an internal battle with David Axelrod and other Obama aides who wanted to impose pay caps on every employee at institutions taking the bailout and set stricter guidelines on how federal money is spent. Geithner prevailed over those who wanted to kick out negligent bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.

In a move that would have made his mentor, Robert Rubin, proud, Geithner beat back the populists and protected the economic royalists. The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/opinion/11dowd.html

[Thrill]

1. I'll let Dowd rant. But I have read his speech over twice and listened to him answering

questions from Senators yesterday. And I just don't get how she comes to this conclusion that he is somehow coddling to the banks. If that was the case Wall Street would have rallied yesterday. It sounded to me like he wants to be extra cautious with what he wants to do. And make sure he gets it right.

And he was so vague yesterday, that its too early to make a judgment either way.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Wall Street wants taxpayers to lose, and they did not like what they saw yesterday.

Geithner was vague, perhaps purposefully. We will see.

[meli224]

3. I agree, I think he said he wants congress more involved

in the specifics of the plan, which will make them happier.

[flpoljunkie]

4. MSNBC: Rethug Eric Cantor just said, not surprisingly, we need to guarantee the banks' assets.

Just what the banking oligarchs ordered! And, their lackeys, the Republicans want to give them what they want.

[CTyankee]

5. I turned of MJ as soon as they announced he'd be on next. I will not listen to that little prick.

Chuck Todd had an interesting theory about how Obama has planned this approach to ultimately appeal to the people out there, not to the screaming heads on TV in Washington and New York. This IS a game of chess and Obama is two moves ahead of these shitheads and they don't know it. All their yelling and "soiling the bed" remarks to the contrary...

[demokatgurrl]

6. Dowd knows as much about economics

as I do about brain surgery.

[Vattel]

10. Dowd never let's facts stand in the way of a good IMN

(idiotic media narrative)

[peaches2003]

7. Not a warm and fuzzy personality

Geithner is going to have to show results pretty darn fast. His speech yesterday was awful and his arrogant demeanor does nothing positive for Obama.

[Cha]

8. "Give Geithner a Break (from site 538)"

<snip>

"1. Nobody, absolutely nobody, has more incentive to get this right than the Obama Administration. If the economy collapses -- well, more than it already has collapsed -- then the Democrats get slaughtered in 2010, Obama is a one-termer, health care doesn't happen, the poverty rate increases by a couple orders of magnitude, and the imperative to fix the environment gets put on the backburner. To suggest that Obama or Geithner are tools of Wall Street and are looking out for something other than the country's best interest is freaking asinine. Maybe their ideas are wrong -- but their hearts are in the right place."

<much more>
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5030317

[MarjorieG]

9. Likable compared to sneers and arrogance of Shelby, Crocker, enablers of this mess.