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FROM AP: 10 Things to Know for Friday
If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Note to media: Please stop referring to Eliot Spitzer as the Sheriff of Wall Street. The title certainly doesn't fit now, and arguably didn't fit a decade ago when he took Wall Street to task for putting out conflicted research on stocks.
With its latest sweetheart deal for Wall Street, the Obama administration is choosing a path which will be devastating both economically and for them politically in 2012.
Naming Bloomberg Treasury secretary would be a bold move by Obama to seek a post-partisan truce against gridlock in Washington and to escalate an urgent bid to create jobs, revitalize housing and revive the economy.
She may not know it yet, but the nation needs Sheila Bair. Her persona, her values, her experience would be an enormously timely gift to all of us.
Populist rhetoric when angry people are in the streets demanding accountability for bankers is a start, but talk is cheap. If the banking mess turns critical again, we will see what this president has learned, and what he is made of.
Corporate and financial elites have largely succeeded in seizing the current economic crisis of their own making to ram through attacks on social programs they've always despised. With Washington in their pockets they apparently believe that now is their time to contort the institutions of American society into a consortium servicing their narrow class interests. But the protests in Europe and on Wall Street are evidence that a growing number of people are on to them. The primordial moment for the pursuit of justice has begun.
Two and a half years ago I would have given long odds that Ron Suskind's book would provide me with a lot of the answers to the questions I had about why the Obama economic team chose the policies it did. Unfortunately, it does not.
Like the classic, slapstick TV show in which three bumbling, harebrained, imbeciles run around directionless and without adult supervision, the Secretaries of Treasury, Homeland Security and Justice carry on endlessly and ineffectually.
In the conventional wisdom, there is nothing President Obama can do to put Americans back to work in large numbers. He is a president supposedly held ...
Back in March, when he still enjoyed remove from the policy fray as an academic at Princeton, Alan Krueger used unusually blunt language to sound the alarm that the American economy was staring at the sort of crisis that seemed unlikely to be fixed absent sustained and aggressive action. So the real question now is whether Krueger's appointment to the top spot on President Obama's economic advisory team will in fact alter the policies coming out of Washington, delivering initiatives that can create jobs. On that score, unfortunately, there is limited reason for optimism.
Let us examine Obama by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences. His taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus has released the following statement concerning the continuing and dangerous deterioration of the U.S. economy.
Drew Westen's leaving race out of his critique of how Barack Obama is playing the game is like leaving computers out of Bill Gates' story, or leaving love out of Paris.
The world's most powerful country was brought to the edge of financial chaos by Mrs. Bachmann and her Tea Party cohorts. Americans should never forget the damage that they have caused the whole nation.
Treasury's warnings raise two important questions. Why has it served up visions of the apocalypse time and again and what have been the costs of it being wrong?
