Haiti: "Stop Them Before They Shock Again"

Obama's Disappointing Appointments per Naomi Klein et Al.

Very rough transcript of video of Klein here, which is unfortunately interrupted by an odd interlude of pop-tuneship (emphasis supplied):

" . . . we're seeing these very disappointing appointments partly because we have not been honest about the Clinton years . . . it was a nice message to present the 90's as these "wonder years" in contrast to the Bush years; and that created a situation in which you could have a Larry Summers presented as a wise man instead of going down with Alan Greenspan -- Rubin and Summers should have gone down alongside him. It was an election strategy that relied on intellectual dishonesty. Now, Obama has already won, so there's no reason to be pandering in this way. Now, there's going to be a stimulus package, but how is it going to be paid for. Obama promised to increase taxes on the wealthy; Emmanuel has hinted they might not do that. And there's a huge fight over the kinds of taxes paid by hedge funds; and Larry Summers is coming straight from managing a hedge fund, one of the most secretive hedge funds around. The real question is not will they spend taxpayer money on infrastructure; they will. But will they rack up huge deficits, or will they actually pay for this with taxes on the wealthy, which is what they promised to do; because if they don't pay for this in an equitable, progressive way, there will be a huge economic crisis down the road, it will be blamed on Obama, and then there will be a wave of privatizations of these new investments in public spending, and there will be a whole new bubble."

Klein is i.m.h.o. a very smart person.

I've been keeping notes on Obama's appointments, and they're not totally reassuring. In particular, on the economic front, despite what corporate media types say, there were plenty of people who did see our current crisis coming. Not one of them has been given any responsibility for pulling us out of it; instead, we're entrusted entirely to those who helped engineer it.

I don't have time to edit the following info properly but I don't want to hold it back any longer, so here it is; sorry it's a bit raw:

Some Got It Right:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123086035502948067.html : For years, they were the party poopers: financial prognosticators who, amid the ebullient stock prices and effervescent home values that defined the early 21st century, warned of trouble. In hindsight, they're the ones who got it right -- or, at least, some of it.

Often mocked for predictions that seemed outlandish at the time -- big banks will fail, Fannie Mae will go bankrupt -- a few of these outliers, including money manager Jeremy Grantham, mutual-fund manager Bob Rodriguez and brokerage-house owner Peter Schiff, were among the first to describe key parts of the U.S. financial meltdown.
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http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/01/no-one-saw-it-coming-really/ : Mr. Rajan Was Unpopular (But Prescient) at Greenspan Party [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123086154114948151.html ]:

“It was August 2005, at an annual gathering of high-powered economists at Jackson Hole, Wyo. — and that year they were honoring Alan Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan, a giant of 20th-century economic policy, was about to retire as Federal Reserve chairman after presiding over a historic period of economic growth.

Mr. [Raghuram G.] Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth Graduate School of Business, chose that moment to deliver a paper called “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” [http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/sympos/2005/PDF/Rajan2005.pdf ]

His answer: Yes.

Mr. Rajan quickly came under attack as an antimarket Luddite, wistful for old days of regulation. Today, however, few are dismissing his ideas. The financial crisis has savaged the reputation of Mr. Greenspan and others now seen as having turned a blind eye toward excessive risk-taking.”
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From http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?print=true# : Michael Lewis, Meredith Whitney, Steve Eisman, Vincent Daniel, Danny Moses, Ivy Zelman, Jim Grant, Dan Gertner
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http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/economists-who-blew-it-agree-prosperity-is-just-around-corner
Henry Blodget

Now that we're mired in the worst economic crisis since the Depression, forecasters who didn't see it coming are consoling themselves by saying, "no one saw it coming." This is hogwash. Many people saw it coming: Gary Shilling, Nouriel Roubini, Jeremy Grantham, Dean Baker, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, et al. They just don't happen to work for major investment banks.

It is true that the folks who work for major investment banks didn't see it coming. Historians will eventually determine whether this is because the major investment banks uniformly employ boneheads, or, more likely, because, when you work for an investment bank, it is easier to conclude that now is always a good time to buy stocks.

(None of these people have been given any responsibility in Obama's admin.)

And Some Didn't:

See Naomi Klein at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDvRfkfMpp8&eurl=http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x265682
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/business/10rubin.html?_r=1&hp :

Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who is an influential director and senior adviser at Citigroup, will step down after coming under fire for his role in the bank’s current troubles, the bank confirmed Friday.

Since joining Citigroup in 1999 as an adviser to the bank’s senior executives, Mr. Rubin, 70, who is an economic adviser on the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama, has sat atop a bank that has made one misstep after another.

When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent . . . .
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WSJ Says That Crash Promulgator Plays Central Role in Planning Obama Economic Policy

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press

The Wall Street Journal told readers that former Treasury secretary and Citigroup honcho Robert Rubin is playing a central role in designing President Obama's economic policy. It would have been appropriate to note that with the possible exception of Alan Greenspan, Mr. Rubin is the person most responsible for the policies that lead to the current crisis.

Mr. Rubin was a staunch advocate the policy of one-sided financial deregulation under which the government ignored prudential regulation while continuing to allow major banks to benefit from the government's "too big to fail" insurance policy. Mr Rubin also actively promoted an over-valued dollar which led to the enormous trade deficit of recent years. In addition, he had a "bubbles are fine" approach that allowed huge asset bubbles to grow unchecked.

The WSJ does note that Mr. Rubin personally profited from these policies in his role as a top Citigroup executive, but it does not point out the extent to which he was directly responsible for the policies that have produced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. If Mr. Rubin is in fact playing a large role in determining the economic policies of the Obama administration, this should be serious cause for public concern.
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http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/01/january-10-2009-hornswoggled.html :

Ilargi: . . . . Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin are the finance powerhouses in the upcoming Obama administration. They were in the exact same place 10 years ago. This time, they bring along a protégé in Tim Geithner, who will be the fall guy if all goes wrong. And they know it will go wrong; they've seen it before. They're not dumb. They're just sick, not stupid. They know it will go wrong, because everything they've done so far has failed. Only, that's not what they see. They can't see it, because they are gambling addicts. And as you can find out in Gambling Anonymous meetings, the addicts are masters in distorting their own perception of reality. Rubin and Summers differ from most addicts in that they are in positions to control what is legal, which is quite close to what is real, and what is not.

The November 12, 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (officially named the Banking Act of 1933), enforced through the signing into law of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by Slick Billy Clinton, gave them access to depositors’ money, and thus made it legal to use people's savings for "investments". 9 years later, those savings were all gone. Today they have an even larger pool of dough: the money of all Americans, and all of their children. This is what you're looking at when you see Henry Paulson, Barney Frank, Ben Bernanke or Barack Obama talk about bail-outs and rescue plans. It's all about providing the world's most megalomaniac gamblers with cash for their addictions. There's nothing else, that’s all there is.

The banking industry had tried to get rid of Glass-Steagall for a decade, but, aside from minor changes in 1980 and 1982, it wouldn't be until Rubin and Summers were at the helm, as Treasury Secretary and Deputy Secretary, that they succeeded in pushing through the repeal. After setting up the procedure, Rubin left the government on July 1, 1999, and joined the newly formed Citigroup, leaving Summers as Treasury Secretary to execute the plan and have President Clinton sign the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law.

Citigroup was put together in 1998 by combining Citibank and insurance slash finance company Travelers. The only way this combination made sense was for the Glass-Steagall Act to be gone, since the Act barred banks merging with insurers. Citi would have had to shed many valuable assets within the next 2-5 years to remain within the law. But then-CEO Sandy Weill stated at the time: "that over that time the legislation will change...we have had enough discussions to believe this will not be a problem“. In other words, the fix was in. The fact that Rubin joined the company months before Clinton signed Gramm-Leach-Bliley only serves to confirm that.

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Of course the Fed chairman during all this time was Alan Greenspan. In 2000, the trio of Rubin, Summers and Greenspan successfully argued for the deregulation of the derivatives trade. This enabled Citi and Goldman Sachs, as well as other major Wall Street players, to increase their bets and gambles manyfold. And let me repeat: it took just 9 years for them to burn through all customer deposits. And then some.

[More at link above.]
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The nomination of Admiral Dennis Blair for Director of National Intelligence cannot be permitted to pass under any circumstances.

As reported by Democracy Now, when genocidal monsters in the Indonesian military were committing massacres in East Timor, Admiral Blair DEFIED his orders to get them to stop, and instead gave them encouragement to continue. He then lied to Congress about it all. No such loose cannon with such blood on his hands can be allowed in the new administration. The links to both these video stories can be found on the Reject Blair Action Page below:

Reject Blair Action Page: http://www.usalone.com/reject_blair.php
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x417019
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Re- Dennis Ross, to be retained under the Obama admin.:

"In 2006, Ross joined a cast of neoconservatives and foreign policy hawks in supporting the I. Lewis Libby Defense Fund, an initiative aimed at raising money for the disgraced former assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted in connection to the investigation into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name. Ross served on the group’s steering committee along with Fred Thompson, Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes, Bernard Lewis, and Francis Fukuyama.24 The group’s chairman was Mel Sembler, a real estate magnate who serves as a trustee at AEI and has funded the group Freedom’s Watch."

"After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ross supported the advocacy work of PNAC, a neoconservative-led letterhead group that advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein in response to the attacks, even if he was not tied to the them.26 Ross signed two PNAC open letters on the situation in post-war Iraq, both published in March 2003. The first of these, “Statement on Post-War Iraq,” was issued on March 19, 2003, the day before the United States began its invasion. The letter argued that Iraq should be seen as the first step in a larger reshaping of the region’s political landscape, contending that the invasion and rebuilding of Iraq could “contribute decisively to the democratization of the wider Middle East.” Other signatories included Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Thomas Donnelly, Joshua Muravchik, and several other core neoconservatives."

(The above quotes are from Right Web's Profile of Dennis Ross.
http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/4786.html )
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The Trouble with Sanjay Gupta
By Paul Krugman / The New York Times

So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Link: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikeinthenews/index.php?id=12995
NY Times link: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-trouble-with-sanjay-gupta/
MORE at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4779242

Just sayin' . . . .

UPDATE: Per USAToday,

This morning's reports about Health and Human Services secretary-designate Tom Daschle, his tax troubles and the money he earned in recent years from interests in the health care industry that he would oversee, include:

• A New York Times report that Daschle, "was aware as early as last June that he might have to pay back taxes for the use of a car and driver provided by a private equity firm, but did not inform the Obama transition team until weeks after Mr. Obama named him to the health secretary's post."

• Word in The Washington Post that financial disclosure forms show that "Daschle's expertise and insights, gleaned over 26 years in Congress, earned him more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry, and perks such as a chauffeured Cadillac, according to the documents." The Times comes up with a larger figure. Daschle earned "more than $300,000 in income from health-related companies that he might regulate as secretary," it says.

The NYT notes,

As a politician, Mr. Daschle often struck a populist note, but his financial disclosure report shows that in the last two years, he received $2.1 million from a law firm, Alston & Bird; $2 million in consulting fees from a private equity firm run by a major Democratic fundraiser, Leo Hindery Jr. (which provided him with the car and driver); and at least $220,000 for speeches to health care, pharmaceutical and insurance companies. He also received nearly $100,000 from health-related companies affected by federal regulation.

Also, according to Common Dreams (citing WaPo), Daschle was among the Dems who voted for the bankruptcy reform bill, which made it much for difficult for consumers to actually discharge their debt, after receiving $45,000 in political contributions from CitiGroup during the previous six years. "I've never seen a bill that was so one-sided. The cries, claims and concerns of vulnerable Americans who have suffered a financial emergency have been drowned out by the political might of the credit card industry," said former Dem. Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum now head of Consumer Federation of America. A similar bill had been vetoed by President Clinton.

Further UPDATE: Per Juan Cole,

Meanwhile, it is rumored that among the main shapers of Obama's Iran policy will be Dennis Ross, the head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the think tank of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. During Ross's tenure there, the WINEP website carried a call to bomb Iran; a paper arguing that nothing bad would happen if the US did bomb Iran; and it listed as a WINEP associate Daniel Pipes, who spent most of his waking hours during the past year decrying Barack Obama as a stealth Muslim and an apostate (which was it?) and who has repeatedly said racist things about Muslims. Turning Iran policy over to the Israel lobbies, the major agitators for a US war on Iran, is a very bad idea . . . .

Further UPDATE: Via boingboing,

Snip from a post by Alan Wexelblat on the alarming number of copyright maximalist lawyers being appointed by the Obama administration to the Department of Justice. Bad news for people who believe in copyright reform, and greater freedom to share, remix, and reuse content online. Snip:

First off, there's the #3 man at Justice, Thomas Perrelli, accurately described by CNET as "beloved by the RIAA". Not only has this guy been on the wrong side in the courtroom, he's fingered as instrumental in convincing the Copyright Board to strangle Web radio in its crib by imposing impossible fee structures.

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Then there's the #2 man, currently slated to be David Ogden. If that name only rings a faint bell it's because you have to cast your mind back to Eldred v Ashcroft, the argument on whether retroactive copyright term extensions were legal. Sitting over there on Ashcroft's side? That's Mr. Odgen. For extra-bonus ick points, Ogden also was involved in defending the heinous COPA legislation, fortunately now dead and buried (but not forgotten).

The capper on this line-up of suspicious characters is Donald Verrilli, now up for Associate Deputy Attorney General. This specimen of legal acumen is front and center in the Cartel's jihad, having appeared for Viacom when it sued YouTube, for the RIAA against Jammie Thomas, single mother. And if we peer back a little farther, we find Verrilli's dirty fingerprints on MGM v Grokster.