Moral Rants

Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs writes about Capitalism and Moral Sentiments.

"In recent days, both Tom Friedman and David Brooks urged us to take our attention away from the trivialities of the AIG bonuses (just 0.001 percent of GDP, sniffed Brooks), to focus on truly weighty macroeconomic matters. Friedman bade us to look forward to, and support, the next mega-bailout of the banks, and Brooks applauded the leadership of Mssrs. Geithner and Summers in leading the G20 to macroeconomic stimulus and a rejuvenation of the International Monetary Fund.

Both pieces had the feel of planted stories, with insider tips about what's coming next and praise for the economics team as it battles against little minds in Europe and populist sentiments at home. Whether or not the stories came from Washington, both stories are wrong. There is no tradeoff of great macroeconomic themes and attention to little details like AIG and Merrill bonuses. We can focus on both the bonuses and the macro-economy. Indeed, we must. Nor is the concern over the bonuses mere populism. It is, rather, woefully overdue attention to the core issues of reckless greed and arrogance that did so much to get us into the current fix."

Paul Rosenberg writes in Embedded In Wall Street,

"Jbearlaw in quick hits points to an article by David Corn and Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones as "More Evidence Geithner in Wall Street's Pocket", but I don't quite think that's the right metaphor. Nor is Geithner necessarily the one to focus on. Rather, I come away from the article feeling, more than ever, that the entire Obama Administration is embedded in Wall Street. It's not a question of doing Wall Street's bidding, because they won't, necessarily. Rather, it's a question of thinking Wall Street's thoughts, of having absorbed them by osmosis for so long, and through so many channels that even when they seek to oppose Wall Street on some issue or another, the form it takes is virtually indistinguishable from agreement to anyone who's not an insider themselves."

And Glenn Greenwald writes about The virtues of public anger and the need for more. "This anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing."

And if you want rants, no one is more fun to read that Matt Taibbi who wrote The Big Takeover in Rolling Stone. A long detailed history of the crisis that begins "It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far." In the midst of lots of good details you'll read wonderful prose like this...

"In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers."

"As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below."

After reading these, I'm way more depressed. Then again, I see articles like this, Administration Seeks Increase in Oversight of Executive Pay and realize the headline is weak because the new regulations cover far more than just executive pay and I have some hope.