Cretinous Lemmings

Sent to Michelle Obama on Mother's Day:

May 10, 2009

Dear Mrs. Obama:

You have the President’s ear, of course.

Well, please tell your man that the financial crises are now entirely his. He has surrounded himself with economic advisors who are chief among the cretinous lemmings who led us over the cliff. Summers worshipped at the alter of his mentor, Robert Rubin, who is now in disgrace for running CitiGroup over the same cliff. Timothy Not Ready for Prime Time Geithner is another Rubin clone who has been in bed with the Wall Street elite for years. Plus Geithner has admitted publicly that he is, as we learned, a failed regulator. (Talk about letting the fox guard the chicken coop before -- and after -- the fox got in!) Together with the likes of Alan Greenspan, Summers and Geithner are among those most responsible for the crises and global recession. (Greenspan, blinded by ideology, proved to be an idiot savant much like Chance, the anti-hero of Jerzy Kosinki’s Painted Bird: He spoke enough of the right, opaque, cryptic words to wander into power.) Hence, lunatics are still running the asylum.

Thanks to these lunatics, your husband has inherited a mess of Herculean proportions; has more than the Augean Stables to clean after eight years of the previous regime. But that is beside the point. Markets are not self-correcting, else your husband would not be in this mess, nor would captains of finance and industry now be on welfare. But your man’s advisors are famous for their deregulatory “leave it to the markets to solve the problem” madness. The markets failed. Further, Summers, Geithner and their ilk showered trillions on Wall Street, mere billions on Main Street. Yet as The Economist reported many times, the root cause of the mess is foreclosures, which are predicted to continue. Thus toxic debt will continue to infect the financial markets until this issue is resolved; thus the credit and financial markets will not heat up. There are good plans for dealing with this; Geithner’s is not one of them: He intends only to re-ignite the speculative bubble while privatizing rewards and socializing risk. He has no Plan B. If I were he in a corporate setting, I would be sacked for incompetence. Not to mention crony capitalism -- that is, corruption. For one example among many, legislation Geithner recently sent to Congress was drafted by Davis Polk and Wardwell, a law firm that not only represents banks but the professional lobbyists’ trade group specializing in the financial sector. I assume you do not wish the Obama legacy to be one of incompetence and corruption.

I voted for your husband; wish him only well; hope he can turn the country around. But he will be only a one-term president if he does not address Main Street issues by firing Geithner and Summers.

Please inform your husband. Or just scold him. He’ll listen, won’t he?

Looking forward to your reply.

Cheers and happy Mother’s Day,
Ned Boudreau

word count: 495

Ned Boudreau teaches economics in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program at Shanghai Pinghe High School. He can be reached at fireofwords@hotmail.com [1].