A Little Of The Old In And Out



(image via justgetthere.us)

In: The G-20. Internationalism is on the rise as an historical corrective to the narrow fucking provincialism of George Walker Bush, 43. Going-at-it-alone is no longer a viable option, neither, it seems are the finance ministers from a group of seven industrialized nations. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who failed miserably in convincing skeptics as to the merits of the stimulus plan is tasked with convincing the G7 and the G20 about how the US plans to turn around the economic crisis which many abroad blame on Western bankers. From Bloomberg:

"The Group of Seven, whose finance chiefs convene this weekend in Rome, is ceding its traditional power to rebuild the world economy to a broader body of governments that now wield greater sway over global growth.

"As U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet join their G-7 counterparts, it’s the Group of 20 that occupies the vanguard responding to the financial crisis.

"The shift in influence to the group, whose membership ranges from the U.S. to China to Saudi Arabia, reflects the fact that industrial nations lack the resources to fix the world’s economic woes alone. That curbs the G-7’s scope to deliver new initiatives this week, say economists and former officials.

"'The world has changed,' said Paul Martin, Canada’s former prime and finance minister who attended G-7 meetings and helped establish the G-20 a decade ago. 'The G-20 reflects the realities of the global economy. Its finance ministers are becoming the dominant policy-making body.'"

The G20 is chaired by the UK in 2009. It will be there in that forum where the strengths or weaknesses of the rising Protectionist movement will be rightly gauged.



Out: Senator Judd Gregg. There is something more than a little douchy about leaving a newly-minted popular president in the lurches in the middle of a crisis. Add to the mix the fact that the Commerce position already suffered a withdrawal, veering the whole damn thing in the direction of political radioactivity. Then, throw in the fact that it "is not the Presidents fault," in the form of a meandering press conference that not only made the President look bad, but it also made the senior Senator from New Hampshire look worse, unforthcoming, thoroughly louche. It is a bad look all around. From David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy gets the tone right:

"Judd Gregg, are you serious? Hasn't Commerce gone through enough humiliation over the years without becoming the cabinet department no one wants? Could it really and truly be that you didn't consider that being a Republican and all (not to mention being from New Hampshire) you might have some differences from the President? Until now? Really?

"A former senior government official with whom I spoke (a Dem) said:

'We're not getting the whole story here. My guess is -- if he didn't have tax problems -- that he just decided that given the partisan rifts growing in DC in the past couple weeks and the traction he may have perceived some on the right were getting, that he wanted to be back on that side of aisle.'

"This is what happens when you give a Senator a little 'fuck you' money (Gregg won something like $855,000 the lottery in Virginia a couple years ago.) Wait, virtually all Senators are rich so that can't be it. Well anyway, Gregg now returns to the well-deserved obscurity from whence he came."

The Turner Report also captured the mood with precision.



In: Senator George Voinovich. Despite all the tony references to the classical authors by our Founding Fathers, America appears to have inherited the vices of the Romans and not the virtues of the Greeks. Whatever happened to the Senate being the "deliberative" body of the legislative branch of the United States government. Senator Voinovich is the only Senator that a journalist could find who read the whole stimulus package. From CNSNews:

"Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) predicted on Thursday that none of his Senate colleagues would "have the chance" to read the entire final version of the $790-billion stimulus bill before the bill comes up for a final vote in Congress.

"'No, I don’t think anyone will have the chance to [read the entire bill],' Lautenberg told CNSNews.com.

"... The first PDF was 424 pages long and the second PDF was 575 pages long, making the total bill 999 pages long.

"... Of the several senators that CNSNews.com interviewed on Thursday, only Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) claimed to have read the entire bill--and he was speaking of the preliminary version that had been approved by the Senate, not the final 999-page version that the House-Senate conference committee was still haggling over on Thursday afternoon.

"When CNSNews.com asked members of both parties on Capitol Hill on Thursday whether they had read the full, final bill, not one member could say, 'Yes.'

"And only one--Voinovich--volunteered that he had actually read the version of the bill that had passed the Senate."

More here.



Out: Bank of America and Citigroup. This week's Congressional hearing on the big bankers was not only an opportunity for grandstanding with the questions -- where Congresswomen and men could use up their allotted time to bloviate instead of asking questions their constituents might like to have to answers to -- it was also an opportunity to see these so-called "Masters of the Universe" in action, at the heights of their rhetorical powers. It was underwhelming. From TheJohnBatchelorShow:

"The facts are that at least two of the bankers at the table of eight ... are leaders of zombie banks. Citigroup is insolvent. Bank of America is insolvent. Both are being kept alive artificially with Federal Reserve power and Treasury maneuvers. How long can they be kept stumbling around like creatures from the Night of the Living Dead? No one has given a firm date but a good guess is about 6 months. We can either nationalize them now and take over their assets to be administered by the FDIC -- polite terminology, let the failure happen -- or we can nationalize them later. I am told that Citi and BofA cannot survive. We are delaying the inevitable."