The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 1st, 2010
Observations:
1) The budget sucks. There is no good angle to it. The OMB director came on the show, seemed competent, but just like Volker last week and Sommers at Davos, did not inspire confidence. Why? Birdie golf. When Orszag bases his whole premise on the fact that we are going to come within 33% of sustainability (4% deficit vs 3% deficit), and then need to do further soul searching to find that last percentage point, it seems failure is the doctrine. Birdie golf, karate, overwhelming force, these are all doctrines of success. You use your golf game to play one better than par, in karate the force of the punch doesn’t stop at the target, but 2 feet behind it, you get the point.
Orszag needed to say he won’t rest until the budget is at surplus. No one on the show even attempted to define why 3% of GDP as a budget deficit was sustainable. It sounds like if they had they would have said that, it was because we could afford the minimum payment.
The one foundation-building point made in the entire discussion was the aside that market conditions after World War II let the United States economy churn it’s way out of it’s postwar economic hole, and those conditions are not going to recur for the US economy at any point on the current time horizon. Kudos to Joe Scarborough for putting the WWII context into the conversation, but it’s not a pretty picture when your Budget Director can’t point to the surface of the water, only to a more modest drowning.
Further to this same point, what an awful appearance by Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling. The math contained in his chief point had the sole purpose to mislead grandmothers in Texas, and he needs to be called out. This atrocious month versus year deficit spending analysis uses another era’s budget surplus to claim Republican budget superiority. It also is undermined by using nominal dollar figures versus constant dollar figures. The picture is bad, but if you use 3rd grade algebra poorly on national TV twice in a week, we get to change your name to Jim, just to protect you from embarrassing yourself.
2) No one was defending the KSM trial today when Joe Scarborough temporarily lost his inner compass and went off the deep end. Look, when you repeat your point without furthering your point, that’s just agitation on display, think when that Senator on “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” slips into French on camera.
Lost in the shout downs was the ultimate point. Do we get any return on our investment if we use a public court? Is that return only some added credibility on the streets of Luxembourg? Or is that gone because of the taint put upon any public proceedings by the leading statements of the administration over the weekend?
If effectively managing your conversation, it should have gone one more step. The return on investment on any of this is whether on the margin we are creating or disenchanting the next round of potential terrorists. Take KSM’s face off the screen and stop showing it. Put the face of the suicide bomber that’s being recruited next week and have that supplant all others in this discussion. That is the calculus.
Your job as always is to aid and abet the multi-front conversation that is so complex that the leader of the free world and his administration are struggling with it. We need less Giuliani, less Robert Gibbs bizarre false bravado, less bellicose histrionics, and more sober analysis where it counts.
3) Mike Barnicle hit a ball out of the park today. At 8:15 EST, Mike connected the dots and is the first person to go on record saying that the Obama / Republican discussion Friday was great, but the similarly formatted Obama / Democrat discussion is the missing link to last year's failures and it should also be televised. The whole reason I got into this was that most days this critical connection goes unmade, that the format has to fight the tendency to repeat rather than evolve. I had already written, in my head, the scorched earth piece about you guys missing the boat again, then Barnicle went yard.
There had been little advances, like suggestions that the meetings be regular, but no one had made the ultimate connection. History will show the waste of 60 votes as a rare opportunity in 2009 was done with Democratic obstructionists like Stupak, Lieberman and Nelson able to hide in their office and deny their role in the damage done to the Obama administration. No part of the Legislature should be allowed to distort or obstruct in privacy or without an explanation to the President of the United States for their actions. The formula is so right and so timely, it might be the one part of the way forward that lights an optimistic path.
Of course, Joe Scarborough did the subscriber a great service by saying what no other Republican would say out loud: “having the Friday meeting was a {rare} mistake" in the Republican lockstep obstruction game. A mistake on par with Russia missing it's veto vote on the Korean War. Mike Pence must have an interesting list of voice mails today. If Chris Matthews calls your idea heroic, what does Roger Ailes say?
Speaking of Roger Ailes, the face off that Morning Joe repeated was only part of the story with Arianna Huffington and Ailes on ABC over the weekend. Huffington had him avoiding the subject of Fox dropping it’s coverage of the Friday Obama / Republican meeting early because it showed the Republicans in a bad light. Ailes directly avoided the question and slipped out the back door to avoid the green room part of the show. Ailes without words, agrees with Joe Scarborough that Mike Pence gave away part of the store with this invitation.
Because the store is power not progress.
That’s all today, see you tomorrow
Monday, February 1, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
The 58 Market Strategy
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 29th, 2010
Observations:
1) There are 472 elections coming to congress this year. For the first time in our lifetime, the mid term elections have an easy to access amalgamator on wikipedia that allows you to track competitive races and see where all of these Democratic seats are going to be lost.
What if Obama got there first? What if a designated marketing area analysis was made and each DMA of a competitive race was targeted for town halls, not cozy co-campaigns, but town halls where a voter felt like he was entering into a contract with the party to implement in a timely manner his will, not the will of lobbyist or incumbents.
As much as we would like to go to Iowa again, a state that Obama carried in the election, and get our revenge against Chuck Grassley, we know that Arkansas and Illinois are where better outcomes opportune themselves. It’s a wonderful double message: Arkansas and Illinois get a real contract for change, but Iowa, unless you can work out your issues, you’re stuck with Grassley for a 58th year, and he is a senile embarrassment.
The town halls, the Q and A’s, the letting the voter tell Obama directly how disappointing 2009 and his caving on health care were, these are the real messages voters want heard. The only way the message won’t be Scarborough’s distortion, '75% of America didn’t want health care’, and will be the true take of the independent voter, ‘keep lobbyist out of the equation like you promised, and protect consumers’, is if the voice of the voter gets 58 chances to be heard between now and November 2nd.
2) The interview with the leader of the teachers union was disgusting. I really felt like the cast of the show did a wonderful job pinning Randi Weingarten down that she, in fact, did cost the New York educational system $700 million dollars by her action. But, when it should have gotten further detailed, when she should have been forced to parse the ‘we want this for all teachers’ and ‘get the teachers the tools they need’ lines, to expose them for the self serving double speak they are, the cast stopped short.
‘We want this for all teachers and all students’ is a thinly veiled stiff arm to competition in the educational arena. If the quote could have also been ‘we don’t want to compete with the charter school for resources’ then the quote is double speak. Joe and Willie Geist are on top of this issue and need to mount a more vigorous campaign when facing the single biggest bottleneck to teacher accountability with unprecedented access. Randi Weingarten is a perfect example of the kind of obstruction that used to be rampant in the old municipal world, that can today be turned over like so many mossy rocks due to better availability of all angles of information on the matter.
Rather than call this a setback, I think of this missed opportunity as more of a call to action for the show as it looks for new ways to cover greater availability of information and evolves as an advocate of better educational results.
Arne Duncan just can’t get enough coverage, and a solid next step would be to have him back to look at the situation as the missing third element to this story. Unfortunately there is a fourth element to the story as well, and if the New York state legislature is anything like the California one, shame doesn’t work with those bag men.
3) One of the things that Morning Joe could be doing more often is showing available paths forward and strategies. I know that was done today with an analysis of the way forward for health care. But if, for a second, we looked at health care as a giant symptom of the more fundamental problems that are coming up over and over again, the Bernie Sanders ‘Congress is in the pocket of lobbyist’ and the Ron Brownstein ‘lets get 51 vote rule in the Senate if the megatrend is parliamentary in its partisan divide’, then the show should be at that level in it’s discussion. Aren’t these 2 subjects more important than even election reform, if it could be argued that election reform is also a symptom and would be diluted if tackled before congressional reform?
What are the paths forward to get lobbyist out? To get the cloture rule out? Is it referendum? Is it legal challenge? Could the Senate move to 51 vote rule with 51 votes on its session bylaws vote that starts every session? What experts can the show deliver to examine whether this is an attainable goal?
What I don’t want to see is these things covered as passing references in passionate statements by credible guests a fifteenth and sixteenth time without the show giving that more fundamental debate teeth. It’s all about the order of things and if you stick to the jobs vs. health debate, you are playing it safe, and all the while refusing to move the debate closer to the frustrations of the American people. Those voters wan’t government to be less paralyzed, and they want lobbyists out.
Randi Weingarten could’ve just as easily been a lobbyist for CIGNA or Senator Joe Lieberman with the doublespeak she got away with today.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) There are 472 elections coming to congress this year. For the first time in our lifetime, the mid term elections have an easy to access amalgamator on wikipedia that allows you to track competitive races and see where all of these Democratic seats are going to be lost.
What if Obama got there first? What if a designated marketing area analysis was made and each DMA of a competitive race was targeted for town halls, not cozy co-campaigns, but town halls where a voter felt like he was entering into a contract with the party to implement in a timely manner his will, not the will of lobbyist or incumbents.
As much as we would like to go to Iowa again, a state that Obama carried in the election, and get our revenge against Chuck Grassley, we know that Arkansas and Illinois are where better outcomes opportune themselves. It’s a wonderful double message: Arkansas and Illinois get a real contract for change, but Iowa, unless you can work out your issues, you’re stuck with Grassley for a 58th year, and he is a senile embarrassment.
The town halls, the Q and A’s, the letting the voter tell Obama directly how disappointing 2009 and his caving on health care were, these are the real messages voters want heard. The only way the message won’t be Scarborough’s distortion, '75% of America didn’t want health care’, and will be the true take of the independent voter, ‘keep lobbyist out of the equation like you promised, and protect consumers’, is if the voice of the voter gets 58 chances to be heard between now and November 2nd.
2) The interview with the leader of the teachers union was disgusting. I really felt like the cast of the show did a wonderful job pinning Randi Weingarten down that she, in fact, did cost the New York educational system $700 million dollars by her action. But, when it should have gotten further detailed, when she should have been forced to parse the ‘we want this for all teachers’ and ‘get the teachers the tools they need’ lines, to expose them for the self serving double speak they are, the cast stopped short.
‘We want this for all teachers and all students’ is a thinly veiled stiff arm to competition in the educational arena. If the quote could have also been ‘we don’t want to compete with the charter school for resources’ then the quote is double speak. Joe and Willie Geist are on top of this issue and need to mount a more vigorous campaign when facing the single biggest bottleneck to teacher accountability with unprecedented access. Randi Weingarten is a perfect example of the kind of obstruction that used to be rampant in the old municipal world, that can today be turned over like so many mossy rocks due to better availability of all angles of information on the matter.
Rather than call this a setback, I think of this missed opportunity as more of a call to action for the show as it looks for new ways to cover greater availability of information and evolves as an advocate of better educational results.
Arne Duncan just can’t get enough coverage, and a solid next step would be to have him back to look at the situation as the missing third element to this story. Unfortunately there is a fourth element to the story as well, and if the New York state legislature is anything like the California one, shame doesn’t work with those bag men.
3) One of the things that Morning Joe could be doing more often is showing available paths forward and strategies. I know that was done today with an analysis of the way forward for health care. But if, for a second, we looked at health care as a giant symptom of the more fundamental problems that are coming up over and over again, the Bernie Sanders ‘Congress is in the pocket of lobbyist’ and the Ron Brownstein ‘lets get 51 vote rule in the Senate if the megatrend is parliamentary in its partisan divide’, then the show should be at that level in it’s discussion. Aren’t these 2 subjects more important than even election reform, if it could be argued that election reform is also a symptom and would be diluted if tackled before congressional reform?
What are the paths forward to get lobbyist out? To get the cloture rule out? Is it referendum? Is it legal challenge? Could the Senate move to 51 vote rule with 51 votes on its session bylaws vote that starts every session? What experts can the show deliver to examine whether this is an attainable goal?
What I don’t want to see is these things covered as passing references in passionate statements by credible guests a fifteenth and sixteenth time without the show giving that more fundamental debate teeth. It’s all about the order of things and if you stick to the jobs vs. health debate, you are playing it safe, and all the while refusing to move the debate closer to the frustrations of the American people. Those voters wan’t government to be less paralyzed, and they want lobbyists out.
Randi Weingarten could’ve just as easily been a lobbyist for CIGNA or Senator Joe Lieberman with the doublespeak she got away with today.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
What We Learned Today is “That We Have A Broken Legislative Body That Will Cause The Country Problems For A Long Time”
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 28th, 2010
Observations:
1) That is a real quote above from Mort Zuckerman in the normally fluffy “What Did We Learn Today” segment of the show. When an absolute captain of industry is that depressed at the state of things, it has to be a front and center concern for all of us. Joe Scarborough claims that the rules of the legislative body prevent it from swinging wildly, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Paralysis seems to be the problem, the ‘broken’ in Mort’s statement.
Look at the Republicans during the state of the union address. They had all of the posture of an invading army just out of reach of the cannons. They had the confident look of ‘we will be in charge this time next year’. I am the first to admit that the claims of obstruction go both ways. But the motivations of those parallel actions are so vastly different that we have to take a second to understand them before we can digest what we’re seeing.
The Republicans are lockstep to a mantra of anti-big government. They obstruct because they feel like Democrats are giving away the store via new unfundable mandates and entitlements. Government run health care, government established pollution policy. They say let the free market take care of itself or you will inhibit business beyond it’s ability to grow the economy.
The Democrats when in a similar situation in 2004 made similarly desperate obstructions a daily occurrence and hissed at President Bush’s address. They felt the Bush administration had made calculated, disengenuious claims that took us into an unnecessary war, but that also the war and the prescription drug overhaul and the tax cuts and the actions by the EPA were all mechanisms to transfer power and wealth to a small elite segment of the private sector.
Halliburton was Dick Cheney’s first taste of real wealth in this world. He got that job because he was a Defense Secretary. Once installed as a CEO there, he was an interested party in their well being forever. The magnitude of their enrichment by the Iraq war is still not fully understood. The fact that they profited to a far greater extent because Cheney and Rumsfeld did such a lousy job prosecuting the first 90 days of post invasion occupation has never really been examined as a potential strategy for the greatest war profiteering scheme in human history.
Yea, Democrats were obstructing in congress in 2004. this has nothing to do with the size of government. Yea the Republicans are bent on a zero outcome for 2010, until they think they can regain power and possibly move the 2012 presidential election towards Mitt Romney. This also has nothing to do with the size of government. Ladies and gentlemen, the ‘broken’ in Mort Zuckerman’s statement is that the two parties are on either side of the transfer of wealth issue, and that sneering, arms crossed group of 41 Senators and 178 Congressmen will have a tough time explaining why a smaller government will help you keep your money away from their clients Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Eli Lilly, CIGNA, Exxon Mobil, and Comcast. Do your job as a voter and make them explain that before you put them back in power.
2) Katrina Vanden Heuvel had a spot at the table when Tim Kaine was on the show today and really missed a great opportunity. It is so crucial, and was literally set up for her by a fantastic grenade by Mika when she asked the DNC chairman if he was sucking up in his state of the union analysis and made Kaine explain himself on a reality check basis.
We all want to know where Kaine was in the Massachusetts election. There he was, there was Katrina, and nothing. Everyone on the set at that time is responsible for this misstep, you’ve as a cast setback your journalistic goals, but Katrina, cmon!
Kaine should have spent the entire time squirming out of his role in the Massachusetts debacle and been asked to compare and contrast his contribution to the DNC chairmanship to Howard Dean’s, and then he should’ve been asked if he should still be getting paid for that job, or was he actually being paid by CIGNA. Kaine should literally be fighting for his life right now and I’m shocked by the softballs.
3) I am impressed by the Joe Scarborough stand on the Justice Alito issue. I’m not taking sides, I think the campaign finance issue is horrible, the Supreme Court decision makes it worse, but it does us no good to argue from a distorted platform. As an optimist, I feel like the Supreme Court may have paved the way to get campaign finance reformed fully and finally. Our sister nations don’t allow paid television advertising and strictly limit the nature of campaign funding. We have to look at the equation of campaign finance and conflict of interest. We can’t keep putting loophole creators in with doublespeak names claiming to be campaign finance reform. We also can’t violate free speech. We also can’t deny market and profit impact of elections.
Just like healthcare reform is a lot simpler than 2600 pages. Campaign finance reform is a lot simpler than McCain Feingold. When it gets complicated, you’re being wagged.
McCain Feingold could be best described as a finger in the dike. Eventually it and everything else that only halfway accomplishes reform will be eroded away fully by a lawsuit or a planted loophole. That concept is not limited to this singular issue. It extends fully across our broken legislative and executive branches of government.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow
Observations:
1) That is a real quote above from Mort Zuckerman in the normally fluffy “What Did We Learn Today” segment of the show. When an absolute captain of industry is that depressed at the state of things, it has to be a front and center concern for all of us. Joe Scarborough claims that the rules of the legislative body prevent it from swinging wildly, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Paralysis seems to be the problem, the ‘broken’ in Mort’s statement.
Look at the Republicans during the state of the union address. They had all of the posture of an invading army just out of reach of the cannons. They had the confident look of ‘we will be in charge this time next year’. I am the first to admit that the claims of obstruction go both ways. But the motivations of those parallel actions are so vastly different that we have to take a second to understand them before we can digest what we’re seeing.
The Republicans are lockstep to a mantra of anti-big government. They obstruct because they feel like Democrats are giving away the store via new unfundable mandates and entitlements. Government run health care, government established pollution policy. They say let the free market take care of itself or you will inhibit business beyond it’s ability to grow the economy.
The Democrats when in a similar situation in 2004 made similarly desperate obstructions a daily occurrence and hissed at President Bush’s address. They felt the Bush administration had made calculated, disengenuious claims that took us into an unnecessary war, but that also the war and the prescription drug overhaul and the tax cuts and the actions by the EPA were all mechanisms to transfer power and wealth to a small elite segment of the private sector.
Halliburton was Dick Cheney’s first taste of real wealth in this world. He got that job because he was a Defense Secretary. Once installed as a CEO there, he was an interested party in their well being forever. The magnitude of their enrichment by the Iraq war is still not fully understood. The fact that they profited to a far greater extent because Cheney and Rumsfeld did such a lousy job prosecuting the first 90 days of post invasion occupation has never really been examined as a potential strategy for the greatest war profiteering scheme in human history.
Yea, Democrats were obstructing in congress in 2004. this has nothing to do with the size of government. Yea the Republicans are bent on a zero outcome for 2010, until they think they can regain power and possibly move the 2012 presidential election towards Mitt Romney. This also has nothing to do with the size of government. Ladies and gentlemen, the ‘broken’ in Mort Zuckerman’s statement is that the two parties are on either side of the transfer of wealth issue, and that sneering, arms crossed group of 41 Senators and 178 Congressmen will have a tough time explaining why a smaller government will help you keep your money away from their clients Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Eli Lilly, CIGNA, Exxon Mobil, and Comcast. Do your job as a voter and make them explain that before you put them back in power.
2) Katrina Vanden Heuvel had a spot at the table when Tim Kaine was on the show today and really missed a great opportunity. It is so crucial, and was literally set up for her by a fantastic grenade by Mika when she asked the DNC chairman if he was sucking up in his state of the union analysis and made Kaine explain himself on a reality check basis.
We all want to know where Kaine was in the Massachusetts election. There he was, there was Katrina, and nothing. Everyone on the set at that time is responsible for this misstep, you’ve as a cast setback your journalistic goals, but Katrina, cmon!
Kaine should have spent the entire time squirming out of his role in the Massachusetts debacle and been asked to compare and contrast his contribution to the DNC chairmanship to Howard Dean’s, and then he should’ve been asked if he should still be getting paid for that job, or was he actually being paid by CIGNA. Kaine should literally be fighting for his life right now and I’m shocked by the softballs.
3) I am impressed by the Joe Scarborough stand on the Justice Alito issue. I’m not taking sides, I think the campaign finance issue is horrible, the Supreme Court decision makes it worse, but it does us no good to argue from a distorted platform. As an optimist, I feel like the Supreme Court may have paved the way to get campaign finance reformed fully and finally. Our sister nations don’t allow paid television advertising and strictly limit the nature of campaign funding. We have to look at the equation of campaign finance and conflict of interest. We can’t keep putting loophole creators in with doublespeak names claiming to be campaign finance reform. We also can’t violate free speech. We also can’t deny market and profit impact of elections.
Just like healthcare reform is a lot simpler than 2600 pages. Campaign finance reform is a lot simpler than McCain Feingold. When it gets complicated, you’re being wagged.
McCain Feingold could be best described as a finger in the dike. Eventually it and everything else that only halfway accomplishes reform will be eroded away fully by a lawsuit or a planted loophole. That concept is not limited to this singular issue. It extends fully across our broken legislative and executive branches of government.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
A Shopping Mall Full Of News And You’ve Only Got One Bag
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 27th, 2010
Observations:
1) A failure to communicate. Tim Dickinson and Paul Ryan appear on the show within 2 minutes of each other. Ryan claims one of the biggest travesties of the Obama administration is the 132% increase in the budget of the EPA, Dickinson says the EPA is one of the few bright spots of the Obama administration.
This is a blooper of a scale I have not seen since Farrah Fawcett was on Charlie’s Angels. Did it just slip your mind to attempt to reconcile those two disparate takes? You called out 7 Senators for obstructing the people’s business for their counterproductive action on the deficit panel today, so fair is fair. Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and Chris Licht were all three present for both interviews, Dylan Ratigan, Joe Scarborough, and Willie Geist were there for one or the other. Those top three names are called out for a class A fumble on national television.
What should've happened:
Mike Barnicle: “You know, Tim Dickinson, we just had Congressman Paul Ryan on the show in the last segment with a completely opposite take on the EPA, do you think his interest is citizen based or based on a relationship with the coal industry?”
Mika Brzezinski: “Tim, do you demonize Paul Ryan like you demonize Warren Buffet”
Chris Licht “Can we get Rep. Ryan back for a quick retort?”
You can salvage this by forensically showing the clips tomorrow and asking the two camps for comment. And for the sake of completion, Tim, you deserve some of the blame, as you saw the Ryan interview and missed a chance to show your point in the context of the previous guest. Sometimes, you have to lead them to water.
2) Who was that guest dressed like Dylan Ratigan? Why, that was Dylan Ratigan, who apparently is going to night school as no question had more than two qualifiers and actually had a grenade like precision. That was Dylan leveling ‘be more than rhetoric’ mandates without waving the camera to himself. Less broken, more effective, and subscribers can see the fear he raises in guests who are hiding any conflict.
The other part of this feel good story is a fierce determination by the entire cast, and Chuck Todd, and David Gregory to make a concise Dylan Ratigan their CNBC-on-a-stick. That is an ensemble comprehension that the reward for this strategy is to empower your Wall Street Kryptonite. Joe Scarborough was the best at this with strong cuts at any run on question from any angle that undermined the flow of a 7 way discussion, making it not just training wheels for Ratigan but the whole group to try and get this to be the discussion that carries the most weight on any air wave in today’s complex media.
That of course should be the course and your future. You have the same mandate the President has: to make sense as an ensemble of the time between tonight and November 2nd. This first step, if clipped against Ratigan’s last appearance, progresses the agenda: real right, real left, real Washington, real finance, all as one analytical measure of the road ahead.
3) But as proof that there is a perilous road ahead: the beef, part 2, with Scarborough and Goldman is Scarborough defending Goldman Sachs today. The take that ‘you can’t blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009’ is an indefensible statement and chapter two of a lack of comprehension of the situation on the ground. You certainly can blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009. Here’s a list of reasons and a timeline:
· Goldman manipulated the housing market bubble on both sides of the transaction: selling mortgage backed securities while also shorting them
· Goldman knew the level of the impending disaster 15 months before it occurred
· Goldman placed an executable strategy over the disaster based on that prior understanding of it and let it unfold for profit
· Goldman used it’s influence over Paulson and Geithner to engineer a resolution to the disaster it helped create that reduced its only real competitor in market making to rubble, opened the Fed window to it for the first time, and got it an undeserved 100 cents on the dollar buyout by the government of its illegitimately placed (see item 1 above) short play with AIG
· Goldman used the Fed window to it’s sole advantage for the entire 2009 year, not to rebuild domestic economies, but to move paper in proprietary trading that, like we’ve covered before, continues to drain our nation’s middle class of it’s wealth one pension evaluation at a time
· Goldman used all this momentum plus it's continued influence to have the recent bank tax initiative further it’s dominant position in the industry by being the least affected while it’s competitors will be far more significantly tethered. Erin Burnett said GS 'stepped on JP Morgan Chase’s neck' with this move on your show.
And you can’t blame Goldman Sachs for making a profit when that profit is chapter 5 of the “greatest transfer of wealth” quote you made how many times today? How can you not feel like one of the Washington dupes who let it happen when this gets by you? Ratigan? Apparently all the Elizabeth Warrens, Andrew Ross Sorkins and Dylan Ratigans in the world are still not an adequate failsafe system when you are at the center of the informational universe, yet still get fundamentally tripped up in real time.
As an optimist, this is a learning moment. We all got duped, we all sometimes feel envious of that guy, think Mark Cuban, who prospered via some Wall Street hijinks and now owns sports teams and a jet. Joe Scaroborough’s job as America’s everyman is to share a learning moment like this one with the people who trust him.
Hey, I could be wrong, tell me I’m wrong.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) A failure to communicate. Tim Dickinson and Paul Ryan appear on the show within 2 minutes of each other. Ryan claims one of the biggest travesties of the Obama administration is the 132% increase in the budget of the EPA, Dickinson says the EPA is one of the few bright spots of the Obama administration.
This is a blooper of a scale I have not seen since Farrah Fawcett was on Charlie’s Angels. Did it just slip your mind to attempt to reconcile those two disparate takes? You called out 7 Senators for obstructing the people’s business for their counterproductive action on the deficit panel today, so fair is fair. Mika Brzezinski, Mike Barnicle and Chris Licht were all three present for both interviews, Dylan Ratigan, Joe Scarborough, and Willie Geist were there for one or the other. Those top three names are called out for a class A fumble on national television.
What should've happened:
Mike Barnicle: “You know, Tim Dickinson, we just had Congressman Paul Ryan on the show in the last segment with a completely opposite take on the EPA, do you think his interest is citizen based or based on a relationship with the coal industry?”
Mika Brzezinski: “Tim, do you demonize Paul Ryan like you demonize Warren Buffet”
Chris Licht “Can we get Rep. Ryan back for a quick retort?”
You can salvage this by forensically showing the clips tomorrow and asking the two camps for comment. And for the sake of completion, Tim, you deserve some of the blame, as you saw the Ryan interview and missed a chance to show your point in the context of the previous guest. Sometimes, you have to lead them to water.
2) Who was that guest dressed like Dylan Ratigan? Why, that was Dylan Ratigan, who apparently is going to night school as no question had more than two qualifiers and actually had a grenade like precision. That was Dylan leveling ‘be more than rhetoric’ mandates without waving the camera to himself. Less broken, more effective, and subscribers can see the fear he raises in guests who are hiding any conflict.
The other part of this feel good story is a fierce determination by the entire cast, and Chuck Todd, and David Gregory to make a concise Dylan Ratigan their CNBC-on-a-stick. That is an ensemble comprehension that the reward for this strategy is to empower your Wall Street Kryptonite. Joe Scarborough was the best at this with strong cuts at any run on question from any angle that undermined the flow of a 7 way discussion, making it not just training wheels for Ratigan but the whole group to try and get this to be the discussion that carries the most weight on any air wave in today’s complex media.
That of course should be the course and your future. You have the same mandate the President has: to make sense as an ensemble of the time between tonight and November 2nd. This first step, if clipped against Ratigan’s last appearance, progresses the agenda: real right, real left, real Washington, real finance, all as one analytical measure of the road ahead.
3) But as proof that there is a perilous road ahead: the beef, part 2, with Scarborough and Goldman is Scarborough defending Goldman Sachs today. The take that ‘you can’t blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009’ is an indefensible statement and chapter two of a lack of comprehension of the situation on the ground. You certainly can blame Goldman for making a profit in 2009. Here’s a list of reasons and a timeline:
· Goldman manipulated the housing market bubble on both sides of the transaction: selling mortgage backed securities while also shorting them
· Goldman knew the level of the impending disaster 15 months before it occurred
· Goldman placed an executable strategy over the disaster based on that prior understanding of it and let it unfold for profit
· Goldman used it’s influence over Paulson and Geithner to engineer a resolution to the disaster it helped create that reduced its only real competitor in market making to rubble, opened the Fed window to it for the first time, and got it an undeserved 100 cents on the dollar buyout by the government of its illegitimately placed (see item 1 above) short play with AIG
· Goldman used the Fed window to it’s sole advantage for the entire 2009 year, not to rebuild domestic economies, but to move paper in proprietary trading that, like we’ve covered before, continues to drain our nation’s middle class of it’s wealth one pension evaluation at a time
· Goldman used all this momentum plus it's continued influence to have the recent bank tax initiative further it’s dominant position in the industry by being the least affected while it’s competitors will be far more significantly tethered. Erin Burnett said GS 'stepped on JP Morgan Chase’s neck' with this move on your show.
And you can’t blame Goldman Sachs for making a profit when that profit is chapter 5 of the “greatest transfer of wealth” quote you made how many times today? How can you not feel like one of the Washington dupes who let it happen when this gets by you? Ratigan? Apparently all the Elizabeth Warrens, Andrew Ross Sorkins and Dylan Ratigans in the world are still not an adequate failsafe system when you are at the center of the informational universe, yet still get fundamentally tripped up in real time.
As an optimist, this is a learning moment. We all got duped, we all sometimes feel envious of that guy, think Mark Cuban, who prospered via some Wall Street hijinks and now owns sports teams and a jet. Joe Scaroborough’s job as America’s everyman is to share a learning moment like this one with the people who trust him.
Hey, I could be wrong, tell me I’m wrong.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
When Outnumbered: Name, Rank, And Serial Number
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 26th, 2010
Observations:
1) Chris Hayes and Michael Crowley had Joe Scarborough cornered. Joe had played possum along the incumbent point we’ve all made recently: that Dems and Republicans alike are in trouble if incumbent. Then Joe took a leap of faith when he claimed this is all the sign of a center right nation. Both guests didn’t react emotionally to the claim, they dropped science: Chris Hayes said this isn’t center anything, it’s anti incompletion because no administration can do the people’s business and appear to be at the service of Wall Street and special interests, while Michael Crowley took a dismissive interpretation by JS of Chris Hayes and knocked it out of the park with the simple science that between cloture and the redefining of the national demographic by the Senate, where California and Alabama have equal representation, the center right as a population is over represented by the most severe magnitude in government. The two takes, one the peoples judgment, and one the peoples representation, Joe Scarborough could only mutter his new catch phrase “nothing to see here, move along people”. Implying the guests were somehow misconstruing his altruistic version of the tea leaves.
The music played over loud protests by the two guests who were being mis-paraphrased to such an extent that Chris Hayes got a further question in asking Joe if there was a double standard or if JS the candidate would fall within the same expectations and use anti incumbency to his benefit in any case, revealing that the voter is getting duped whether the administration accomplishes it’s goals or not.
I call it possum because it’s the same thing that Mike Pence is doing in Indiana, but from a façade of equal peril for both parties. Joe knows full well that anti incumbent has nothing to do with an anti big government platform but is instead cyclical. The size of government is coincidental with whomever resides in power at the time of the next upheaval. The voter is triggered by a feeling of powerlessness that corporate interests will continue to rule the day, and is continuing to send incumbents home in increasing droves.
2) This point was furthered by the Bob Herbert segment. All the same objections are there: we would’ve been in financial meltdown if we hadn’t acted when we did, and possibly the problems we face are ungovernable in our current structure. But there are two results of the actions we took financially, one good and one cataclysmic: we staved off a depression, but we gave every dollar we had to Wall Street, who traded the apocalypse for personal enrichment without recourse. Simultaneously, there is a worsening situation regarding doing the people’s business in Washington: the insiders are intent on holding on to power, and the war chest for doing so comes from the anti-populist interests, and the last vestiges of control over how that war chest is distributed just got thrown out by the supreme court.
The coming election will be the most obscene thing anyone has ever seen. Up will be down. Truth will be heresy. Over 100 people with the same look in their eyes as Mitt Romney will look into the camera and say literally whatever placation is available to them to make their base (the weakest, most fear based voters) walk in lockstep. It will be the disintegration of any inconvenient science or math or economic theory by sheer white noise in opposition, sort’ve like what we’ve seen on the global warming front, but on steroids.
Unfortunately, the anti-incumbent tendency of the independent voter favors a dramatic swing back to the pro-corporate profit camp, not by any wisdom, but simply by cyclical, emotional mechanics. If we said above that big or small government was accidental in the cyclical anti-incumbent tendency, we are about to face the most unhappy of accidents.
3) What’s missing from all of this gloom and doom? As my daily optimistic aside, I give you what’s missing is the synthesis of the soaring rhetoric that turned us all into believers not once but at least 5 different times with Obama, and governing.
Everyone is really mad at Barack Obama. They are mad not at his intent or belief, but at the symptoms of his inaction. We are all convinced that we’ve made a bad choice because he got into office and was reduced to George Bush II showing even a Harvard-ite struggles with the learning curve of the job. We have interpreted that as incompetence.
What’s missing is that just like a quarterback just entering the professional level, the speed of the game is a demon early on and you look like an absolute moron. While he may have thought that he needed to keep the Goldman guys close in the first post apocalyptic year, for fear that they would engineer an outright meltdown if the financial crisis wasn’t managed to their liking, he may have thought he had to use his majority in Congress to accomplish his toughest mission in his first year, he could not have thought that the sheer speed of the game would make him seem like he was a step late or outright invisible on issues that needed out front leadership.
We may not have been wrong about Barack Obama after all. There may be a tornado coming. But the stakes are clear: even though it’s conventional wisdom that it’s the 3rd year where even a great quarterback adjusts to the speed of the game, if you are the chosen one, you’re period to deliver is from right now until November 2nd, 2010.
This isn’t an endorsement, but my optimism is that sometimes it’s the stakes that deliver the goods.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Chris Hayes and Michael Crowley had Joe Scarborough cornered. Joe had played possum along the incumbent point we’ve all made recently: that Dems and Republicans alike are in trouble if incumbent. Then Joe took a leap of faith when he claimed this is all the sign of a center right nation. Both guests didn’t react emotionally to the claim, they dropped science: Chris Hayes said this isn’t center anything, it’s anti incompletion because no administration can do the people’s business and appear to be at the service of Wall Street and special interests, while Michael Crowley took a dismissive interpretation by JS of Chris Hayes and knocked it out of the park with the simple science that between cloture and the redefining of the national demographic by the Senate, where California and Alabama have equal representation, the center right as a population is over represented by the most severe magnitude in government. The two takes, one the peoples judgment, and one the peoples representation, Joe Scarborough could only mutter his new catch phrase “nothing to see here, move along people”. Implying the guests were somehow misconstruing his altruistic version of the tea leaves.
The music played over loud protests by the two guests who were being mis-paraphrased to such an extent that Chris Hayes got a further question in asking Joe if there was a double standard or if JS the candidate would fall within the same expectations and use anti incumbency to his benefit in any case, revealing that the voter is getting duped whether the administration accomplishes it’s goals or not.
I call it possum because it’s the same thing that Mike Pence is doing in Indiana, but from a façade of equal peril for both parties. Joe knows full well that anti incumbent has nothing to do with an anti big government platform but is instead cyclical. The size of government is coincidental with whomever resides in power at the time of the next upheaval. The voter is triggered by a feeling of powerlessness that corporate interests will continue to rule the day, and is continuing to send incumbents home in increasing droves.
2) This point was furthered by the Bob Herbert segment. All the same objections are there: we would’ve been in financial meltdown if we hadn’t acted when we did, and possibly the problems we face are ungovernable in our current structure. But there are two results of the actions we took financially, one good and one cataclysmic: we staved off a depression, but we gave every dollar we had to Wall Street, who traded the apocalypse for personal enrichment without recourse. Simultaneously, there is a worsening situation regarding doing the people’s business in Washington: the insiders are intent on holding on to power, and the war chest for doing so comes from the anti-populist interests, and the last vestiges of control over how that war chest is distributed just got thrown out by the supreme court.
The coming election will be the most obscene thing anyone has ever seen. Up will be down. Truth will be heresy. Over 100 people with the same look in their eyes as Mitt Romney will look into the camera and say literally whatever placation is available to them to make their base (the weakest, most fear based voters) walk in lockstep. It will be the disintegration of any inconvenient science or math or economic theory by sheer white noise in opposition, sort’ve like what we’ve seen on the global warming front, but on steroids.
Unfortunately, the anti-incumbent tendency of the independent voter favors a dramatic swing back to the pro-corporate profit camp, not by any wisdom, but simply by cyclical, emotional mechanics. If we said above that big or small government was accidental in the cyclical anti-incumbent tendency, we are about to face the most unhappy of accidents.
3) What’s missing from all of this gloom and doom? As my daily optimistic aside, I give you what’s missing is the synthesis of the soaring rhetoric that turned us all into believers not once but at least 5 different times with Obama, and governing.
Everyone is really mad at Barack Obama. They are mad not at his intent or belief, but at the symptoms of his inaction. We are all convinced that we’ve made a bad choice because he got into office and was reduced to George Bush II showing even a Harvard-ite struggles with the learning curve of the job. We have interpreted that as incompetence.
What’s missing is that just like a quarterback just entering the professional level, the speed of the game is a demon early on and you look like an absolute moron. While he may have thought that he needed to keep the Goldman guys close in the first post apocalyptic year, for fear that they would engineer an outright meltdown if the financial crisis wasn’t managed to their liking, he may have thought he had to use his majority in Congress to accomplish his toughest mission in his first year, he could not have thought that the sheer speed of the game would make him seem like he was a step late or outright invisible on issues that needed out front leadership.
We may not have been wrong about Barack Obama after all. There may be a tornado coming. But the stakes are clear: even though it’s conventional wisdom that it’s the 3rd year where even a great quarterback adjusts to the speed of the game, if you are the chosen one, you’re period to deliver is from right now until November 2nd, 2010.
This isn’t an endorsement, but my optimism is that sometimes it’s the stakes that deliver the goods.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Chaos – It’s What’s For Breakfast
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) Why are the cast members fighting? Why does Willie refer to his segment on the show as ‘trotting out’ the news no one else is willing to associate themselves with? Why does Chris Licht act as though he has had ‘just about enough’ of Mika, and why is Joe Scarborough oblivious?
How on earth was this the backdrop to 3 of the most intense philosophical debates concerning the way forward anyone could have hoped for?
A word of warning if any of the cast take this forward: I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. Mika Brzezinski does not have an ego problem, it’s the psycho mechanical defense mechanism that you have to put a label on everything, and if you had to swim upstream everyday in a world not really trying to ween itself of nonessential pop culture, you might seem during the grind of a 3 hour daily show to be driven by something beyond the normal pale. That’s not ego, that is determination.
The fallout of mis-diagnosis is disintegrative. Its plain that there are giant egos everywhere you look on MSNBC. But those bonfires are of necessity. Your entry into the female lead category for which there is no Emmy, is fighting with you like a psychotic sister and you either argue on the merits, or stay on the sidelines.
2) In the fallout of Massachusetts, everyone is finding consensus rapidly. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs very efficiently speaks on this matter as condensed as Richard Hass speaks to foreign affairs. His take is that dilution of Obama’s economic objectives is what the protest is all about. About the same number of people voted for a public option as voted for a giant industry handout: zero. And when sausage making was the story of the entire first year, revolt ensued.
Everyone is finding consensus that is, except Obama, Congress and Washington. It would seem to the naked eye that this denial is some form of gravy train maintenance. The most effective use of the media in the second year is to amplify this disconnect as loudly as possible. I am enamored with the clarity with which Joe Scarborough basically told Republicans today ‘wipe that smile off of your face, this apocalypse is yours as well’. Obstruction is sausage as well.
This denial, as has been well documented on Morning Joe for some time, was mine as well. And if you look back at my defense of public options and the Obama technique, it was that there must be a secret weapon waiting in the wings. Howard Dean? Reconciliation? Conference? I never thought that was the whole strategy I was watching. The what you see is what you get, we never really had a plan, plan. As it became apparent that no silver bullet existed and that Obama had retreated from the high ground without a plan to fight for it, no megaphone was loud enough for me to shout alongside those on the center right: that’s not leadership, that’s not even realism, that’s attrition. And further, I smell a rat.
3) But as always, optimism must prevail. Obama is having a hard time making a fairly obvious move, and Congress is having a difficult time making a parallel move. Bernanke and Somers have got to be shown the door. Volker, Goolsbee and Elizabeth Warren have to be injected into the conversation, and the first order of business is whether Tim Geithner is a useful conduit in a checks and balances infused financial team or if he needs to go as well. If they fail at this, and I daresay the decision is more evident in the Plouff hiring, as he will be effective in communicating to the administration how damaging a continued Goldman tie is, that failure would be a voter trigger.
That Joe Scarborough is finding optimism in what a better balanced health care move would look like with the stuff the middle of America wanted in that bill back on the table from death’s door, is a very good sign that the voter may get a result after all. If I had one beef with Congress it’s its inability to multi-task. The fact that it’s been broken trying to write health care for months, that the results were failure, that no side looked like a finisher, and that the jobs work was set aside the entire time Congress was busy failing, that fact is a voter trigger.
Congress needs a supervisor much like the cashier at McDonalds needs one. They need to be told that only 20% of their productivity can be allocated to the health care debate but they must come forward with a bipartisan product, post conference, by the summer break. 30% budget, 40% job creation, 10% everything else, no failure permitted or else the voter will be triggered by that lack of accomplishment. That supervisor is meant to be Obama, not by constitution, but as a representative of the revolting voter.
In a dream world, on Wednesday, during the state of the union address, Obama would ask Pelosi, Reid, McConnell and Boehner to stand with him, and they would unveil an 8 item bipartisan health bill where each got a fair bit of representation, and that the majority only determined the order of choice, not the exclusion of choice. Then Obama would reveal that the plan was hammered out in 3 hours in the oval office the day before over Chinese food, and that no longer will the Congress of the United States obstruct the nation’s business for it’s own selfish benefit.
That would be a voter trigger.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Why are the cast members fighting? Why does Willie refer to his segment on the show as ‘trotting out’ the news no one else is willing to associate themselves with? Why does Chris Licht act as though he has had ‘just about enough’ of Mika, and why is Joe Scarborough oblivious?
How on earth was this the backdrop to 3 of the most intense philosophical debates concerning the way forward anyone could have hoped for?
A word of warning if any of the cast take this forward: I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. Mika Brzezinski does not have an ego problem, it’s the psycho mechanical defense mechanism that you have to put a label on everything, and if you had to swim upstream everyday in a world not really trying to ween itself of nonessential pop culture, you might seem during the grind of a 3 hour daily show to be driven by something beyond the normal pale. That’s not ego, that is determination.
The fallout of mis-diagnosis is disintegrative. Its plain that there are giant egos everywhere you look on MSNBC. But those bonfires are of necessity. Your entry into the female lead category for which there is no Emmy, is fighting with you like a psychotic sister and you either argue on the merits, or stay on the sidelines.
2) In the fallout of Massachusetts, everyone is finding consensus rapidly. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs very efficiently speaks on this matter as condensed as Richard Hass speaks to foreign affairs. His take is that dilution of Obama’s economic objectives is what the protest is all about. About the same number of people voted for a public option as voted for a giant industry handout: zero. And when sausage making was the story of the entire first year, revolt ensued.
Everyone is finding consensus that is, except Obama, Congress and Washington. It would seem to the naked eye that this denial is some form of gravy train maintenance. The most effective use of the media in the second year is to amplify this disconnect as loudly as possible. I am enamored with the clarity with which Joe Scarborough basically told Republicans today ‘wipe that smile off of your face, this apocalypse is yours as well’. Obstruction is sausage as well.
This denial, as has been well documented on Morning Joe for some time, was mine as well. And if you look back at my defense of public options and the Obama technique, it was that there must be a secret weapon waiting in the wings. Howard Dean? Reconciliation? Conference? I never thought that was the whole strategy I was watching. The what you see is what you get, we never really had a plan, plan. As it became apparent that no silver bullet existed and that Obama had retreated from the high ground without a plan to fight for it, no megaphone was loud enough for me to shout alongside those on the center right: that’s not leadership, that’s not even realism, that’s attrition. And further, I smell a rat.
3) But as always, optimism must prevail. Obama is having a hard time making a fairly obvious move, and Congress is having a difficult time making a parallel move. Bernanke and Somers have got to be shown the door. Volker, Goolsbee and Elizabeth Warren have to be injected into the conversation, and the first order of business is whether Tim Geithner is a useful conduit in a checks and balances infused financial team or if he needs to go as well. If they fail at this, and I daresay the decision is more evident in the Plouff hiring, as he will be effective in communicating to the administration how damaging a continued Goldman tie is, that failure would be a voter trigger.
That Joe Scarborough is finding optimism in what a better balanced health care move would look like with the stuff the middle of America wanted in that bill back on the table from death’s door, is a very good sign that the voter may get a result after all. If I had one beef with Congress it’s its inability to multi-task. The fact that it’s been broken trying to write health care for months, that the results were failure, that no side looked like a finisher, and that the jobs work was set aside the entire time Congress was busy failing, that fact is a voter trigger.
Congress needs a supervisor much like the cashier at McDonalds needs one. They need to be told that only 20% of their productivity can be allocated to the health care debate but they must come forward with a bipartisan product, post conference, by the summer break. 30% budget, 40% job creation, 10% everything else, no failure permitted or else the voter will be triggered by that lack of accomplishment. That supervisor is meant to be Obama, not by constitution, but as a representative of the revolting voter.
In a dream world, on Wednesday, during the state of the union address, Obama would ask Pelosi, Reid, McConnell and Boehner to stand with him, and they would unveil an 8 item bipartisan health bill where each got a fair bit of representation, and that the majority only determined the order of choice, not the exclusion of choice. Then Obama would reveal that the plan was hammered out in 3 hours in the oval office the day before over Chinese food, and that no longer will the Congress of the United States obstruct the nation’s business for it’s own selfish benefit.
That would be a voter trigger.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, January 22, 2010
The Dems Get The Memo Early
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 22nd, 2010
Observations:
1) The most prescient thing I’ve heard all week came from Joe Scarborough and his guests in the last hour of this Friday show: that the Massachusetts election solving the Democratic tone deafness 10 ½ months earlier than would’ve otherwise occurred could be the biggest blessing ever for the Democratic party. The fact that the state of the union address will not be a false cheerleading and ‘where’s the carfax’ sales job by the President of an omnibus health care bill that by all accounts is the single largest occurrence of myopia and citizen betrayal in western history, is a great victory for me: a registered Democrat who voted for Obama.
No, it’s back to the drawing board for the advocates of health care reform, and still on the table are all the things Axelrod was pointing to in the Dean flap up: preexisting condition insurability, additional coverage options for uninsured, etc. But it is far more important to look at what’s likely off the table: a mandate, the Nebraska compromise, the Louisiana compromise, anything for Lieberman, the pharma handout, the insurer handout, and the bad stuff that hasn’t even been found out yet. And it’s far more important to see whats back from the dead: repeal of anti trust, portability, repeal of interstate restriction, and tort reform.
Why? Because horse trading as I described earlier this week is the only way to go. The free market will get a fair chance of insuring the health of America before we enact Medicare for all one incremental horse trade at a time. Axelrod and Obama could get the four or five good pages of the 2600 deal with the devil bill passed into law by the fall elections and tell the electorate: we got the memo. Thanks, Massachusetts, you’re leaders.
2) That all sounds nice, but what do we think the various associations representing the health insurers and pharmaceutical companies are making of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling? Do you think that the game has changed for the 2010 elections? If Goldman Sachs pays out $14 Billion in bonuses over $12 Billion in profits, what percentage of the estimated $1 Trillion dollars in aggregate corporate profit would be allocated to the new return on investment bonanza of shaping government for growth of said profit?
As if it wasn’t bad enough. It’s as if two memos were in the inbox this week. ‘Wake up!’ read one, while the other said ‘We regret to inform you that we now retain the right to freely distort civil elections going forward, and in fact have an obligation to our stockholders and stakeholders to do so as efficiently as possible in order to grow our profitability at the highest rate possible. Sincerely, your Chamber of Commerce’.
3) I have a beef with the common theme of Joe Scarborough fawning over Goldman Sachs. They are not crooks, they are not evil, but they do not have any conscience or obligation regarding main street and are defiant in their refusal to curate any domestic job growth not associated with their bottom line. That’s understandable. The proprietary trading in unregulated private markets is not as understandable, but in a capitalist society market manipulation is an open secret. Yea, it’s brilliant. But it’s also damaging the world we live in by siphoning goods and services through a private tariff process and leading us towards an entropic abyss. When oil or corn is traded 50 times on it’s way to market, it’s not to benefit farmers or Mexico. It’s to charge pension funds a fee to create paper wealth, which is then taken back systematically later.
Joe, please take a second to understand that if the smartest guy in the room is stealing from you, albeit legally, he is not your friend and you’re going to need to find recourse at some point before you’re broke.
I have suggested an alteration to the capital gains tax that encourages trades with a domestic job benefit. I have heard others ask that all markets be made transparent. I have heard Tim Geithner resist these things on the basis that proprietary markets would simply move overseas. But before we can get anywhere or battle any apparent conflicts of interest, there has to be a starting point for reflection by the American people.
Your fawning delays and obstructs that necessary process. Therefore everyday you tell America that ‘You want to be Goldman Sachs when you grow up’ sends another batch of American jobs to China. Erin Burnett indirectly told you you’re doing it when she tried to explain that they really aren’t any smarter but are benefiting from the perception they are via empowering statements like the one you made today.
S T O P D O I N G I T.
I mean really, what if there was video of you out there saying 'I want to be Bernie Madoff when I grow up'.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
Observations:
1) The most prescient thing I’ve heard all week came from Joe Scarborough and his guests in the last hour of this Friday show: that the Massachusetts election solving the Democratic tone deafness 10 ½ months earlier than would’ve otherwise occurred could be the biggest blessing ever for the Democratic party. The fact that the state of the union address will not be a false cheerleading and ‘where’s the carfax’ sales job by the President of an omnibus health care bill that by all accounts is the single largest occurrence of myopia and citizen betrayal in western history, is a great victory for me: a registered Democrat who voted for Obama.
No, it’s back to the drawing board for the advocates of health care reform, and still on the table are all the things Axelrod was pointing to in the Dean flap up: preexisting condition insurability, additional coverage options for uninsured, etc. But it is far more important to look at what’s likely off the table: a mandate, the Nebraska compromise, the Louisiana compromise, anything for Lieberman, the pharma handout, the insurer handout, and the bad stuff that hasn’t even been found out yet. And it’s far more important to see whats back from the dead: repeal of anti trust, portability, repeal of interstate restriction, and tort reform.
Why? Because horse trading as I described earlier this week is the only way to go. The free market will get a fair chance of insuring the health of America before we enact Medicare for all one incremental horse trade at a time. Axelrod and Obama could get the four or five good pages of the 2600 deal with the devil bill passed into law by the fall elections and tell the electorate: we got the memo. Thanks, Massachusetts, you’re leaders.
2) That all sounds nice, but what do we think the various associations representing the health insurers and pharmaceutical companies are making of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling? Do you think that the game has changed for the 2010 elections? If Goldman Sachs pays out $14 Billion in bonuses over $12 Billion in profits, what percentage of the estimated $1 Trillion dollars in aggregate corporate profit would be allocated to the new return on investment bonanza of shaping government for growth of said profit?
As if it wasn’t bad enough. It’s as if two memos were in the inbox this week. ‘Wake up!’ read one, while the other said ‘We regret to inform you that we now retain the right to freely distort civil elections going forward, and in fact have an obligation to our stockholders and stakeholders to do so as efficiently as possible in order to grow our profitability at the highest rate possible. Sincerely, your Chamber of Commerce’.
3) I have a beef with the common theme of Joe Scarborough fawning over Goldman Sachs. They are not crooks, they are not evil, but they do not have any conscience or obligation regarding main street and are defiant in their refusal to curate any domestic job growth not associated with their bottom line. That’s understandable. The proprietary trading in unregulated private markets is not as understandable, but in a capitalist society market manipulation is an open secret. Yea, it’s brilliant. But it’s also damaging the world we live in by siphoning goods and services through a private tariff process and leading us towards an entropic abyss. When oil or corn is traded 50 times on it’s way to market, it’s not to benefit farmers or Mexico. It’s to charge pension funds a fee to create paper wealth, which is then taken back systematically later.
Joe, please take a second to understand that if the smartest guy in the room is stealing from you, albeit legally, he is not your friend and you’re going to need to find recourse at some point before you’re broke.
I have suggested an alteration to the capital gains tax that encourages trades with a domestic job benefit. I have heard others ask that all markets be made transparent. I have heard Tim Geithner resist these things on the basis that proprietary markets would simply move overseas. But before we can get anywhere or battle any apparent conflicts of interest, there has to be a starting point for reflection by the American people.
Your fawning delays and obstructs that necessary process. Therefore everyday you tell America that ‘You want to be Goldman Sachs when you grow up’ sends another batch of American jobs to China. Erin Burnett indirectly told you you’re doing it when she tried to explain that they really aren’t any smarter but are benefiting from the perception they are via empowering statements like the one you made today.
S T O P D O I N G I T.
I mean really, what if there was video of you out there saying 'I want to be Bernie Madoff when I grow up'.
That’s all for today, see you Monday.
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