Surreal is the only way I know how to describe it. Everything is smoke and mirrors. It’s all non-stop political theater, carefully choreographed to make the people believe something is going on, when nothing really is.
Take the debate over the stimulus package. CNN News had an interesting snippet yesterday where we have one Wall Street whore, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, debating another Wall Street whore, Lawrence Summers, the head of the Obama administration’s National Economic Council. Shelby blasts the stimulus, saying it will lead to “disaster,” and Summers counters that said Republicans have lost their credibility on the issue. “Those who presided over the last eight years — the eight years that brought us to the point where we inherit trillions of dollars of deficit, an economy that’s collapsing more rapidly than at any time in the last 50 years — don’t seem to me in a strong position to lecture about the lessons of history,” he said.
Of course this is all just diversionary entertainment to distract the public from where the real action is, which is the bank bailout. The $800 billion stimulus package is peanuts compared to the $10+ trillion the government has already lavished on the finance industry in various loans, loan guarantees and direct bailouts. And here’s where our road to surrealdom really begins. For it is those who supported Obama, folks on the left like Frank Rich and Salon, who are most critical of Timothy Geithner and his new cash for trash scheme:
There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.
This includes Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary…
A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman chosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy.
Of course, that lockstep uniformity pales in comparison to the White House’s economic team — a squad of corporate lackeys disguised as public servants.
At the top is Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council. As Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary in the late 1990s, Summers worked with his deputy, Tim Geithner (now Obama’s treasury secretary), and Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel (now Obama’s chief of staff) to champion job-killing trade deals and deregulation that Obama Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg helped shepherd through Congress as a Republican senator. Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a “cash for trash” scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry’s bad loans. It’s another ploy “to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms,” says economist Dean Baker — and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a “rival” voice inside the White House.
But here’s where the real wierdness starts. Because it is the right that is now cooing and purring over Geithner, as this mornings column by David Brooks illustrates:
But another part of the administration’s economic strategy is being unveiled today by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and at first blush the news is much happier. Geithner’s plan is huge but also disciplined. It’s designed by someone aware of government’s limitations.
Go read the whole thing to see how the right has rushed in to fill the vacuum of Obama sycophancy that was created when the left left.
