Money, Money, Money

Why do we put Friedmanite bankers in charge of regulating banks and globalist free-traders (who are also Friedmanite bankers) in charge of handling Keynesian stimulus money?

On the one hand, we have Tim Geithner, a former employee of the Federal Reserve bank (think Federal Express is a government institution? neither is the Federal Reserve ["the Fed"]), our boy-genius Treasury Secretary playing with TARP funds, Ben Bernanke (his former boss and head of the Fed), playing with TARP funds, and Lawrence Summers (Clintonista, NAFTA supporter, and pretty much an a$$hole, who once famously said that Africa is "vastly underpolluted"), deciding how the stimulus package should be divided.

Nice progressive values, there, buddy...

Overall, Lawrence Summers has proved, time and again, that he doen't know anything about anything, but by God he's got an opinion, and a lot of people want to hear it. A friend of Enron, he worked with Kenneth Lay and Alan Greenspan to deregulate California's energy markets, thus causing the bankruptcy of the state of California, and putting Gray Davis' head on the block.

While everyone talks about how Obama is President, and what he says will be what goes in his administration, the people he hired to throw money at the problems of the American public tend to be more squarely in the "business knows what's best" category of economists.

Bonuses, bonuses, bonuses, bonuses, life is but a dream...

AIG got bailed out so they could pay all the folks who were losing money on AIG's phony insurance policy scam things that they were selling. Credit default swaps, I believe. So, AIG got a bunch of money. So they could pay back CITI, Chase, Wachovia, B of A, etc., etc., all of whom have either been bought by other banks or been bailed out by the Federal Government (us), and the banks who bought the failing banks also got bailed out. Because AIG wasn't going to be able to pay them back. Oh, wait...

I know, confusing conspiracies abound. Then there's the bonus money, paid to executives of AIG as "retension bonuses" to keep them from leaving the firm and running off to make some other firm fat, dumb and happy until the rug got pulled out. Except, of course, that many of the folks being paid retension bonuses are either quitting or will be fired. And the other top talent is staying on so that they can maintain the wonderful fiscal order of AIG's books for at least another year.

My head hurts.