Score this one in Headlines & Coverage We Like to See:
Obama Scores Early Victory of Historic Proportions
By Michael D. Shear and Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 14, 2009; Page A09CHICAGO, Feb. 13 — Twenty-four days into his presidency, Barack Obama recorded last night a legislative achievement of the sort that few of his predecessors achieved at any point in their tenure.
In size and scope, there is almost nothing in history to rival the economic stimulus legislation that Obama shepherded through Congress in just over three weeks. And the result — produced largely without Republican participation — was remarkably similar to the terms Obama’s team outlined even before he was inaugurated: a package of tax cuts and spending totaling about $775 billion.
…The feat compares only with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s banking system overhaul in 1933, which cleared Congress within days of his inauguration.
Speaking of Franklin Roosevelt, how does this legislation compare to the New Deal?
The New Deal of the 1930s equaled no more than 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. The new legislation represents over 5 percent and is probably no more than an opening bid…
Remember…Barack Obama? Not a progressive.
In under a month, Obama passes a bill more than double the size of the New Deal and Jeb Bush thinks that nothing ideological happened last November?
Humility would be nice but getting a grasp of reality would be better.
So he wants to set up a shadow cabinet? I wonder who he thinks would be the shadow president of that shadow cabinet? Rush?
I assume he is planning a run in ’12. Somebody needs to tell him that Republicans NEVER have humility or show recognition that the other guys won. Once he said that he shot any chance he had down. He is now a defeatist in their eyes.
nalbar
and in a few months to ensure success, President Obama will be compelled take on the banksters as FDR did:
James Saft, Reuters blog: Nationalisation by autumn, bank on it
Yeah, they’re pulling a fast caper:
the hidden bonuses –
BTW, I thought SARs was a disease. It continues in another form.
Huffpost’s Arianna ask when will Obama allow zombie banks to go bye, bye – the Zombie Banks Threatening Our Economy?
and the creation of toxic bonds continues:
beyond the $12 trillion already committed what’s another $30 trillion..how will this be financed?
it appears dodd already has.
seems he snuck this stinger into the stimulus bill, causing much consternation amongst the banksters:
ya think?
my, my, no wonder the RATs are so upset.
I think got dropped in conference.
nope…it’s in there. and the wailing and gnashing of teethhas begun. see is here, and here, and any number of other sources for confirmation.
yeah, it’s a set-up to be diluted, in Feb, 15 Bloombergs.com:
Obama to Work on Executive-Pay Limits After Industry Complaints
if we don’t get our candy, we’ll pick up and leave
Next step and coming from the most unlikely side of the aisle;
Bank Nationalization
via Huffpost
Switching rolesAlways carrying water for Wall Street Sen Schumer rails against the idea.The roar to nationalize will get louder in the April-June 2009 window. By fall a done deal.
Shred the $683 trillion of OTC derivatives, and add to that the $586 trillion interest rate and credit default swaps. There’s no practical way that amount of obligations can be sustained by a $50 trillion world GDP.
I don’t know if this part is correct:
“…The feat compares only with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s banking system overhaul in 1933, which cleared Congress within days of his inauguration.”
iirc, immediately upon inauguration FDR declared the ‘bank holiday’ which averted further panic. But I don’t think the meat of the financial overhaul came until his 99th day in office with the establishment of Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act in June. As part of the early bank holiday, banks were classified into catagories…solvent/insolvent, etc but I don’t think this compares in scale to Obama’s first bill.
It’s also interesting that the first major bill by FDR, the Economy Bill, signed at the end of March, actually severely slashed federal spending.
In addition, iirc at the time the large New Deal initiatives were passed unemployment was at 25% and FDR had a huge mandate that dwarfs Obama’s. FDR’s 1933 Congress was senate 59D/36R and the House was 313D/117R.
It saddens me that this major accomplishment by Obama, done in record time, is not being appreciated and instead people seem to only want to bitch about their pet issue x got less money then someone else’s issue y. Or that Obama somehow got played. Or that his reach out to republicans, (which drove down approval ratings for the congressional GOP and raised his own)and got the necessary votes to get couture in the senate, was somehow misguided. Complete, total, utter nonsense.
might it benefit Obama that so many so underestimate him? How his admin is written about (naive, bumbling) vs. what it’s really doing reminds me of Peter Falk’s detective Columbo. I love the implication that, naive, trusting soul that he is, he sort of became president accidentally.
A friend attended a Democratic confeence in Florida about 10 days ago, and reported that the general wisdom was how Obama had let the Republicans control the spin cycle and wasn’t be forceful enough.
My answer was, “Didn’t they pay attention to the way Obama ran his campaign? He was always criticized for giving the Republicans too much leeway in their hyperbole. And who won the election?” The guy is smart and, as importantly, he has a good sense of timing.
I think that some people get dumbed down by watching too much cable news.
It’s also worth noting that while FDR was elected in November, he wasn’t inaugurated until March, which gave him a couple of extra months before his first hundred days that Obama didn’t have.
Obama rocked it. Or rather, WE rocked it. He wouldn’t have been able to do this had not the people voted for him in dramatic numbers.
Washington ain’t beanball, Barack. You can’t come in there wet behind the ears, singing kumbaya, pretending to be a community organizer, with all that post-partisan junk that the brilliant tacticians of the blogosphere have already dissected and found wanting, and expect to get anything done. Hillary will hand him his ass in Iowa, and then Rove/MCcain will crush him, and then he’ll be run over in DC as President.
Poor guy. Naive as all hell all the way to Mount Rushmore.
Ya,
but what has he done lately?
; )
nalbar
And after this…how can the rethugs explain money money for the banks. They can’t. First step to nationalization.
“They can’t. First step to nationalization.”
We’ll see. FDR was against nationalization, even tho at the time the left had a fit, just as they are already screaming for Obama to nationalize. But it turned out FDR was right: if the banks were regulated properly, they could be saved from their own excesses. And largely, he was proven correct in that regard as our only major problems in the ensuing ~75 years occurred when regulations were ignored/not enforced/skirted/rescinded.
I see where some economists are for nationalization, some against, the pro-people saying the Swedish model shows it can work. But I’ve seen on the web that at the time, Sweden had only like 6 banks and of those only one was in very poor shape and a second was already under quasi-gvt control. (I have no idea if those numbers are correct, but Obama himself mentioned this in an interview this week)
Krugman argued this week that banks are taken over constantly by FDIC, so nationalization shouldn’t be a big deal from a logistic standpoint. But I don’t know if the many banks that have been taken over on a weekly basis are comparable in scale to the Wall Street behemouths that are currently insolvent. (What I’m trying to say is that it might be that 1,000 of these little community banks that have gone under and are under federal magagement might not even equal to 1 troubled Wall Street firm. I don’t know anything about these banks or economics, I’m just skeptical about claims of economists on both sides of this issue.)
OTOH, Geithner’s mention of ‘stress tests’ must be scaring the crap outta Wall Street. We’ll see.
yes, wonder if Geithner is opposing caps so as not to scare them too much, knowing that Dodd has it covered. A very different picture takes shape if one assumes the Obama admin knows what they’re doing and Obama is not Chance the Gardner.