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Spengler has thoughts on Obama’s team.
One wants to ask the Wall Street wizards who comprise the talent pool for the incoming administration, “If you so smart, how come you ain’t rich no more?”
Manhattan’s toniest private schools, harder to get into than Harvard, quietly are looking for full-tuition pupils now that the children of sacked Wall Street bankers are departing for public schools in cheaper suburbs. Harvard University president Drew Faust has warned of budget cuts to come due to “unprecedented losses” to its US$39 billion endowment.
Shares of Citibank, the current firm of Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary Robert Rubin, last week traded at less than a tenth of their year-earlier market price and may require yet another federal bailout. [Citigroup will have more than $300 billion of troubled mortgages and other assets guaranteed by the US government under a federal plan to stabilize the lender after its stock fell 60% last week, Bloomberg reported today, November 24. Citigroup also will get a $20 billion cash infusion from the Treasury Department, adding to the $25 billion the bank received last month under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. In return for the cash and guarantees, the government will get $27 billion of preferred shares paying an 8% dividend.]
Rubin, a transition advisor to president-elect Barack Obama, was mentor to Treasury secretary designate Timothy Geithner. Even Goldman Sachs, the thoroughbred trading machine that gave us Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as well as Rubin, is trading at a fifth of its peak value.
These facts came to mind while reading David Brooks’ November 21 New York Times panegyric to Obama’s prospective cabinet, which gushes, “Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.” Brooks added, “… as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons … I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.”
Has Brooks checked the markets? The cleverest people in the United States, the Ivy-pedigreed investment bankers, have fouled their own nests as well as their own net worth, and persuaded the taxpayers to bail them out. If these are the best and the brightest of 2008, America is in very deep trouble. …
Now they tell us. Time’s political blogger, Mark Halperin says the media was biased.
… “The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” Halperin said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”
The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is,” according to Halperin. …
Since Barack Obama will soon have a chance to save DC’s voucher system, the example he set sending his children to private school is important. WSJ editors weigh in first.
Obama supporter says it’s time from the Dems to break with the teacher’s unions.
… Democrats also have to get serious about school choice. The unions oppose it because they don’t want one student or one dollar to leave the regular public schools, where their members teach. So the Democrats have been timid and weak in putting choice to productive use — even though their constituents are the ones trapped in deplorably bad urban schools, whose futures are being ruined, and who are desperate for new educational opportunities.
If children were their sole concern, Democrats would be the champions of school choice. They would help parents put their kids into whatever good schools are out there, including private schools. They would vastly increase the number of charter schools. They would see competition as healthy and necessary for the regular public schools, which should never be allowed to take kids and money for granted. …
NY Times Op-Ed on Holder’s role in the Marc Rich pardon.
WHEN President Bill Clinton pardoned a billionaire fugitive from justice on his last day in office, even usually loyal Democrats were dismayed. Representative Henry Waxman of California called it “bad precedent” and “an end run around the judicial process.” He said it appeared to set a double standard for the wealthy and powerful.
The billionaire was Marc Rich, a commodities trader, and his pardon is a subject of discussion again because Eric Holder, Mr. Clinton’s deputy attorney general at the time and a key figure in the clemency process, is reported to be Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general. In the years since the Rich pardon, Mr. Holder has said he “never devoted a great deal of time to this matter.” He also told an interviewer that, in hindsight, he wished that the Justice Department had been “more fully informed” about the case. As someone who helped cover the story for The Washington Post, I think the issue is far more complicated and deserves more scrutiny if Mr. Holder is to become our top law-enforcement official. …
Lisa Schiffren Corner post on Hillary at State.
… Will Barack Obama be a great foreign-policy president? Unlikely. Aside from his instinctual, and at the time professionally inconsequential opinion that the war in Iraq was “wrong,” it is unclear that he has given 15 minutes worth of thought to geo-politics. Yes, he wants to “restore America’s image” abroad. But that is a marketing cliché, not a foreign policy or an indication of any kind of deeper and more complicated thought about the various levels of threat and the ultimate goals and positioning useful for the U.S. as the century evolves. Is he going to fix what’s wrong in the Middle East, or between the Afghans and the Paks? Win the war on terror? Outsmart the Chinese? Contain the axis of evil?
Given his lack of depth, he does not need someone who will adhere to his views strictly. He needs someone who is a reliable reporter and who can evaluate what she sees with harsh clarity, and work with him — and bring in people with substantive experience — to devise appropriate responses. That would be a more mature relationship than one where the SoS is merely an emissary, or someone who, as pundits keep saying, “has his back.”
Hillary may or may not run for president again. Either way her execution in office matters — as a credential or for the sake of history. That gives her an incentive to see things clearly and to help P-E Obama do the same. In the Middle East, for instance, whatever sympathies she had, years ago, for Arafat and his pals, must have evolved as she watched the Palestinians devolve into terror factions in Gaza and the West Bank. She knows what they did to her husband’s hopes of brokering that chimera of a “peace agreement.” Tough and realistic is better than arrogant and naive. And I don’t see a third choice.
Tyler Cowen, George Mason econ prof with NY Times Op-Ed on some of the ways FDR made the depression worse.
MANY people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems. But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school.
The traditional story is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued capitalism by resorting to extensive government intervention; the truth is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying a mix of policies, some good and some bad. It’s worth sorting through this grab bag now, to evaluate whether any of these policies might be helpful.
If I were preparing a “New Deal crib sheet,” I would start with the following lessons: …
Jonah Goldberg with some thoughts on the subject.
More still from 2004 UCLA press release.
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.” …
According to Borowitz, Obama names Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie to “Team of Rivals.”