The Definition of Insanity

by: David Sirota

Wed Apr 01, 2009 at 17:30


A few months ago, I did some posts and TV appearances discussing some of the problems that would inevitably occur with the appointment of Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson as the chief of staff at the Treasury Department. As Mother Jones subsequently reported, we've already seen some of those problems happen.

So while I can't pretend to be surprised by this Washington Post story, I'm still disgusted by it:

Tim Geithner's new nominee for number two at the Treasury Department, Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us.

The law that Wolin helped draft has been blamed by some critics, many of them Democrats, for easing up regulatory pressure on huge financial institutions, tangentially helping create today's mess - and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings.

What's the definition of insanity again? Oh, right - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In this case, the Obama administration - and, really, the public - got burned by putting a Wall Street lobbyist in a position of power and then watching the same issue the lobbyist worked on explode in our face. Now, it is putting another deregulator into a top position at a time when the White House promises to push for new and more robust financial regulations. If/when it comes out that those regulations are watered down, nobody should be surprised.

David Sirota :: The Definition of Insanity

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The Definition of Insanity | 25 comments
Stevens to be freed per WaPo (4.00 / 1)
The US Department of Justice is letting Ted Stevens go free because Stevens claims "prosecutorial misconduct" and DoJ 10 doesn't want to retry and 2)doesn't want to open up any dirty laundry.  

The DoJ already presented an extremely watered down set of charges avoiding the real thefts on Katrina relief funding (every trailer price was bumped $26 K or 50% to send the paperwork through Alaska; a native coop got $1 K and Stevens buddies $25 K per trailer).

They let the S&L oister boy Keating free and now this thief.  Get on em David!

Who says crime doesn't pay? (4.00 / 1)


"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates
[ Parent ]
Sigh (4.00 / 5)
I'm in this kind of mood:

The political class has failed us. At every level, they have failed us. Republican and Democrat, they have failed us. Liberal, conservative and centrist, they have failed us. They have lived on lies, and lived by lies, for so long that they no longer know how to comprehend the truth, much less communicate it or - God forbid - act on it. And so they plow on deeper into the darkness, in zombified pursuit of pointless goals, heedless of the signposts warning of danger, like some demented wagon train dragging a load of dead mules toward the edge of a cliff...

The new administration is openly transferring trillions of dollars to a small core of financial elites, in effect placing the rest of the country into a state of economic peonage to these remote and unaccountable overlords -- who have, astonishingly, used the fear and suffering created by their own actions as an opportunity to take their domination of society to even greater heights. What Obama and his economic team are abetting is, as Simon Johnson and others have noted, nothing less than an oligarchic coup d'etat. I lived through one of those in Russia in the 1990s, and it was not a pretty sight. And again, because the scale of the American power structure is so much greater, so too will be the far-reaching, long-lasting consequences of this coup.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/com...


Even if we cannot change this system led (4.00 / 4)
by Barack Obama, we can tell the truth about it.

During the years of slavery, people fought back.  The fight alone, and the truth telling, likely led to ending that system earlier than it would otherwise have ended.

Yes, Obama and his team are abetting a big shift of wealth from working people to elites, after a big shift the last 30 years.

This system will fail under its own weight.  By fighting back, perhaps we can make it end sooner.

It is untenable long term.
 

[ Parent ]
It's untenable long term (4.00 / 4)
Yes, and that's the key to how to deal with it. If we owe allegiance to the United States defined by The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, the people waving the flag in our faces these days might as well be a foreign army of occupation, and we might as well treat them as such. I don't think we should spend much time, or waste much energy arguing with them on their own terms.

Our task is to set out what we believe, and why we believe it, in as much detail as we can, and defend it on those terms. Before we can restore the country's future, we have to restore its past in the minds of the people who are currently bewildered, given the glories of America dinned into their ears every day, about how we got into the desperate situation we find ourself in today. If we're right, and the folks currently running the country are wrong, events will help us accomplish both.

The task isn't like directing a movie; we don't have a screenplay, and we don't know how it will end. The only thing we can be sure of is that it will last far longer than two hours....

[ Parent ]
Couldn't agree more (4.00 / 2)
...the people waving the flag in our faces these days might as well be a foreign army of occupation, and we might as well treat them as such. I don't think we should spend much time, or waste much energy arguing with them on their own terms.

The indirect approach. It's far easier to subvert illegitimate power than it is to maintain it. When power is stupid, it weakens itself. And great power is greatly stupid, as Obama's new "plan" for Af-Pak illustrates so well. The banking "bailout" is the dumbest of them all, especially once he puts a couple million people out of work around the globe with GM and Chrysler. Always makin' friends, that guy is...

A little quote from TE Lawrence, writing of bogging down the Turks in Arabia:

His stupidity would be our ally, for he would like to hold, or to think he held, as much of his old provinces as possible. This pride in his imperial heritage would keep him in his present absurd position - all flanks and no front."



"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
He "provided the technical and legal drafting". (4.00 / 1)
So you mean the Act wasn't his idea?  I guess when his boss, the Treasury Secretary, and 3 senators told him to work on drafting the bill, he just should have quit?  Do you think he slipped some language in that only he knew about?

Do you know what happened to the secretary who typed the Bill?  Maybe she went to work for AIG.  Check into it.

I keep coming to this site to read discussions of issues and policies, and instead read your screeds of vendettas and witch hunts.  I guess if I keep coming back, THAT is the definition of insanity.

if wolin drove this legislation or not isn't the main point IMO (0.00 / 0)
It is irrelevant in some ways becoz he's a member of the same echo chamber that brought us to this situation.

where are the team of rivals on the economic side of obama's team? There is one, he is jewish too but he's not a corrupt self-centered person like so many of these jackasses that obama invites into their government to assist wall street interests that have looted this country. he is a team of rival and his name is Paul Volker and summers has him locked into a corner office far far away from any policy decisions becoz Volker don't get it like the rest of these scumbags do: they're here to serve wall street not the people.

obama is a fraud.

Z

[ Parent ]
"He is Jewish too" (0.00 / 0)
"but he's not a corrupt self-centered person".

Ok.

[ Parent ]
In reference to rubin, emanuel, summers, etc. etc., etc. (0.00 / 0)
that don't seem to be concerned about much more than their pals on wall street.

I ordered the posts incorrectly first placing my one below it and then the one below that which is very similar to the one that you have commented on.  I later saw that that post pertained to the post above so I posted it there as well.

So, basically those comments were originally made in reference to my post below.

Z

[ Parent ]
I am leaning toward agreeing (4.00 / 1)
With Steviez314. David, you are a great muckraker and castigator, and you do get down to the meat of things, but we can all finger-point, blame and criticize,we can all ridicule. We could, however,  all use some constructive input, some positive suggestions and some insightful alternatives from time to time. With all of your clout, you should be calling for real process overhaul and actuation of the transparency we were promised and was conveniently lost after the election. This latest nominee represents a symptom of old,bad and stale thinking, not the cause. Time to freshen up your act.  
Let's mix things up David (0.00 / 0)
Why don't you suggest some candidates for this post that:

1. are qualified
2. pass your purity test
3. are actually interested in the job

It'd be constructive.

You are a troll (4.00 / 2)
In post after post after post, I have repeatedly said there are scores of people to put in spots like that - Stiglitz, Krugman, Dean Baker, Galbraith, Elizabeth Warren, Hill staffers from relevant committees, EPI officials, etc.

But you are a troll - you don't read. You spew hate - and frankly, you shouldn't be here anymore. You should be banned.

[ Parent ]
did you read #3 (0.00 / 0)
"actually interested in the job"

Krugman isn't.

[ Parent ]
Stiglitz (0.00 / 0)
not interested.


"In my position in life, it's much better to be in academia, to be able to talk freely"

[ Parent ]
Elizabeth Warren (0.00 / 0)
[ Parent ]
What about Roubini? (0.00 / 0)
It was only two weeks ago that you were suggesting he woul-

oh.


Secretary Timothy Geithner's new toxic asset plan is a serious step in the right direction in that it creates a public-private partnership to buy the troubled assets of financial firms - in other words, to do the necessary cleansing. Up until now, with all the government bailouts, the financial system has been barely treading water. With this plan, it will still be a hard swim, but, at least, there is a path to shore.

[ Parent ]
Are you saying that… (4.00 / 2)
...it's impossible to find a "qualified", "interested" candidate for these Treasury positions who doesn't has worked for Rubin, GoldmanSachs, or both?  That's a set of "qualifications" that might please the current population of the Dept. of GoldmanSachs, but it's a bit too restrictive, IMO.

(No, I don't have names, but give me a month to sort through resumes, and I bet I could do better than hiring Wolin.)

[ Parent ]
Apparently (0.00 / 0)
Wolin - who was picked after several other candidates passed on the slot - did the legal work under then-Treasury Secretary  Larry Summers, who is now Obama's head of the National Economic Council.

[ Parent ]
It's only insane if you're taking the "public interest" POV (0.00 / 0)
It's not insane by any stretch if you're an executive at Goldman Sucks looking to protect and expand your turf... and profits. It makes perfect sense and I would argue that is the perspective or context to all this. At this point, why don't they just add a parenthetical to the sign in front of Treasury, "(A Division of Goldman Sachs)"?

For these fine folks, it's just about "rational self-interest." The fact it's a nightmare for the rest of the country simply isn't relevant.

But today we have a new crack in the façade, courtesy of the Harvard Crimson, via TPM. In which a certain professional was fired from Harvard's endowment management firm for emailing Larry Summers about some scary derivatives trades. Trades which lost the University endowment a serious chunk of change. Here:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpoi...

After reading this, a question popped into my head: OK, given that when Summers got the boot from Harvard, he went to work for a hedge fund and made a ton of money. Is it possible he went to work for the same hedge fund that sold the derivatives to Harvard, resulting in their loss of roughly $7 Billion?

If Matt Drudge gets a hold of this, we'll be seeing it on the TeeVee mighty quick, eh? It looks really bad for Summers (not to mention the incompetents who "vetted" him) if this is true.

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

The Definition of Insanity | 25 comments
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