Wanna Piss Off Geithner? Support Elizabeth Warren

[bobbyw24]

Still Hold A Grudge Against Geithner? Here's Your Last Opportunity To Piss Him Off Royally Before He Starts Taking Paychecks From Goldman.

Rarely are we so lucky as to ascertain what our enemy fears most. Geithner opens his heart of darkness, and we now know how to make him very, very angry, and more than a little bit frightened.

This is really getting good. I have a ton to throw at you in this post, so it'll be easiest to consume as links. First some background.

Elizabeth Warren is the literal inspiration for the CFPA (Consumer Financial Protection Agency), or as it is now called the CFPB (bureau replaces agency in the acronym). The entire idea came from an op-ed she wrote to the WSJ back in 2007. She has been fighting tirelessly on its behalf since that day. Wall Street and the banking industry are scared to death that she will be named chief enforcer. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers are owned by the banks and so they are fighting her nomination.

Now the good news. The pushback from advocay groups and voters has been off the charts. Pundits, members of Congress and academia are all coming to Warren's defense and demanding that Obama appoint her as soon as possible.

"Make them vote against this hard-as-nails woman from Oklahoma who grew up poor, and who's tough on big banks," the advocate noted. "Force the vote."

There are 2 petitions up and flying (not just running) as we speak. The first originally had a goal of 100,000 total signatures by July 20 (started on July 16). And they passed that number after 2 days. So the goal has changed to 150,000, and that looks as though it will be passed this afternoon. And these signatures are being delivered directly to the White House and Obama.

Tell Obama to appoint Elizabeth Warren

http://act.boldprogressives.org/cms/...rce=e2bwin&t=3

Now please sign the 2nd petition:

Forget what Geithner thinks -- We want Elizabeth Warren to police Wall Street!

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/...063121-iwIObbx

Please sign both petitions and pass this story on to friends. This is perhaps your last and best opportunity to make a real difference in the life of Treasury Secretary Geithner. After the November elections, his paychecks will likely be coming from Goldman Sachs, so this is your chance to put Warren in charge of the CFPB, and make Turbo's post-government stroll through investment banking not as pleasant as he hopes.

Do this. Then pass it on. Share it with anyone who cares. Try to get your sheeple, clueless coworkers to sign. Tell them it's a petition for 24-hour broadcasting of every season of American Idol.

www.dailybail.com

[Aratus]

way cooooooool idea!

[buck000]

IMHO, having Warren look after Geithner et al would be like making a toddler the lone prison guard at a SuperMax facility.

She seems to me to be a most classic bureaucrat. Geithner, Bernanke, and the others would probably love to have her "watching over" them.

[bobbyw24]

Monday 26 July 2010

by: Richard Eskow | The Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed

photo
Elizabeth Warren. (Photo: New America Foundation)

Somebody really, really doesn't want Elizabeth Warren to run the new Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, or "CFPB," which she first envisioned and proposed. Who? The big banks, for sure, as well as others who don't want their misbehavior brought to light. And Tim Geithner, whose vision of Wall Street and its problems is fundamentally different from Warren's. There are others, too - ideologues like Megan McArdle of the Atlantic, who has made something of a cottage industry out of attacking Warren on specious grounds.

The President's attempting to split the baby when it comes to appointing Ms. Warren, but the facts and public perception are aligned. They present him with a stark reality: He must choose between appointing Ms. Warren or placating the big banks. There is no Third Way. Unfortunately for the President, Elizabeth Warren is a yes or no question.

The ideological opposition to Warren's appointment is usually grounded in the false notion that the relationship between, say, a bank and a lender, is a symmetrical exchange between equals taking place in a mythical "free market." They've failed to heed the lesson taught by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents: "Civilization ... obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."

An agency outside the individual is necessary to a well-functioning civilization, too, especially when confronting an oligopolistic banking system with a history of fraud and predation.

There have been at least two empty and ineffective lines of attack against Elizabeth Warren: The first is that she's opposed to "financial innovation," and the second is that she lacks the necessary "managerial experience." Ms. McArdle attempts to open a third: That Prof. Warren is a bad scholar. McArdle fails miserably, misquoting or misunderstanding other academic papers and Warren's own work while failing some basic analytical challenges. She does succeed, however, in showing the lengths to which some will go to block this appointment.

Despite the fact that McArdle is " the business and economics editor for The Atlantic," numbers don't seem to be her thing. She infamously miscalculated the effect of repealing Bush's tax cuts for each American by a factor of 10, arriving at $25 instead of $250 per person, and then blithely explained: "The calculator on my computer won't go into the billions, and I truncated incorrectly. The main point stands; even a very optimistic set of assumptions doesn't yield huge net benefit." Actually, $250 for every man, woman, and child in the US - and that's only for the next two years - is serious money. And as for that calculator problem, Ms. McArdle, there's only one word for that: Spreadsheets. You've heard of them, I trust.

Spreadsheets are particularly handy when you're making statements like this: "Does it matter if we have a regulator that can use data consistently?" In this piece McArdle leans on an old Wall Street Journal anti-tax screed by Todd Wysocki. "More weird metrics for Elizabeth Warren," her headline quavers. McArdle eagerly repeats Wysocki's suggestion that family living expenses are actually less than they were in the 1970s. But Wysocki's stacking the deck (and making a comopletely different point) by using pre-tax rather than after-tax figures. Warren's point is that two-earner families have less disposable income today than one-earner families did in the seventies, even with both adults working.

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She's right. I used a spreadsheet (highly recommended) to look at the increases in expenses, using the figures Wysocki (and the McArdle) cites. Here's what I found: Mortgage costs increased from 18% to nearly 20% of after-tax income. Health insurance premiums increased from 3.5% to 3.63%. (That doesn't include increases in out of pocket expenses like copays and deductibles.) And there was a whopping new expense of nearly 20% for day care, which wasn't needed with a one-earner family. Add in car payments and the expenses Wysocki cites went from 39% of after-tax income to 62.3% - which pretty effectively underscores Prof. Warren's point, don't you think?

McArdle saves her real "firepower," such as it is, for a piece she calls "Considering Elizabeth Warren, the Scholar." It's a blend of deception, misdirection, and poor analysis, chock full of comments like this one about Warren't book on two-earner families: "... Warren simply fails to grapple with what her thesis suggests ... Admittedly, I don't quite know what to say, but at least I can acknowledge that it's a pretty powerful problem for the current family model. Warren kind of waves her hands and mumbles about social programs and more supportive work environments. There is no possible solution outside of a more left-wing government."

Got it? McArdle says Warren's book is a failure because a) Warren fails to solve one of the problems she identifies, b) not that McArdle knows what the answer is, but c) "Warren kind of waves her hands" (get me rewrite!) and "d) mumbles about social programs etc." - which means she does propose solutions, but they're ones that involve e) "more left-wing government." Which McArdle doesn't think is the solution, even though she acknowledges that she doesn't have a solution.

Does it matter if we have a "business and economics editor" who can use data ... and logic ... consistently?

http://www.truth-out.org/elizabeth-w...scontents61737

[heavenlyboy34]

Somehow I don't think appointed beaurocrats like Geithner get "pissed off" over this kind of thing. They just go away when their term is up so they can go be parasites elsewhere. (much likes fleas scratched off a dog) You guys take political soap operas in the media WAY too seriously.