Must Burn Through Political Capital

Seriously, Barack, did you not learn anything from your predecessor? Did you not see him burn through political capital by ignoring the people, and only listening to his "trusted" advisors, who got everything wrong? People are pissed off, and for good reason. We elected you, not AIG, or any of these other failing institutions. Matt Taibbi, at Rolling Stones, sums it up best.

In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

Read the whole thing.

Open up the Fed and Treasury to Congressional oversight, because without that, there are no checks and balances. The stimulus package won't matter when the money is still controlled Geitner, who is just a chip off the old block of Paulson, who helped fucking run these companies into the ground in the first place.

H/T to Mike the Mad Biologist