"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Taibbi Again: Hank Paulson is a Prick Who Took Down the Economy...
Posted by Melina | 10:09 AM

Ah the dulcet tones of truth...There is something about digging to the bottom of this shit hole, unraveling the lies, and getting to the horrible truth, that gets me all tingly like Tweety. If he didn't remind me so much of a certain kid in high school who had way too much gangly, explosive energy, I might be in love with this guy, (Taibbi, not Paulson!) But here we are again; Alternet, June 9th:

"Hank Paulson is a national hero. I said it last October and I'm sticking by it. And now, there's actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over." -- by Evan Newmark from "Mean Street: It's Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero" -- Wall Street Journal.

So here's the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark's paean to Hank Paulson last week:

Dear WSJ,

Just out of curiosity -- did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman, Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don't you think that might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank Paulson in his "Mean Street" column?

Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you'd have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a "national hero" -- in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior like this, you usually don't see it outside prison trusties who spend their evenings shining the guards' boots. I can't even think of a political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a hero? Are you fucking kidding us?


I wonder if the WSJ is gonna print that little missive?
Im not saying that Taibbi is just the the kind of angry crank that I like, because you know that there is a certain type of angry crank that gets me all weak in the knees; I'm saying that he knows whereof he speaks, and as much as I disagree with him on certain issues, (Elliot Spitzer, for one, and I almost cried when he said that on Maher a few weeks ago...as if anyone could understand the ins and outs of complex economics and crime!...we cant all be YOU, Matt!) But seriously, I cant say enough about his depth of knowledge about this thing and how, again, his Rolling Stone article, The Big Takeover, is a must-read, if you read nothing else about what went into the financial crisis that we're right now suffering through.

Its just too bad that Ive got to run, because I've got more to say on this. But, Taibbi sums it all up pretty nicely in his succinct way:

Even if it weren't about five years too early to make any kind of judgment at all about whether or not TARP helped, the notion that Henry Paulson is a hero is complete and utter madness because TARP would never have been necessary if someone, anyone who wasn't a greed-addled incompetent like Paulson had actually been regulating the economy in the last years of the Bush administration. If anyone besides Paulson had been running Goldman Sachs earlier in this decade -- if a person with a serious brain injury had been in his place, for instance, or a horse, or a head of lettuce -- we'd all be better off today, because there wouldn't be so many toxic Goldman-underwritten mortgage-backed CDOs on the market.


Fuck, yeah! Now, can we start investigating these assholes and maybe even put some of them in jail?

c/p RIP Coco

Labels: , , ,

3 comments
Bookmark and Share
3 Comments:
Blogger Unknown said...
I agree with the assessment of Paulson here, but it's hard to imagine the Obama Administration prosecuting him when they're so busy running faster and further down the bailout trail that Paulson blazed.
6/9/09, 10:32 AM  
Blogger Cirze said...
And now 10 banks have been allowed to "repay" their loans.

As if.

Thanks for your coverage of these country-sinking issues.

S
6/9/09, 11:37 AM  
Blogger Bob said...
With GM, they said, "You screwed it up, now get out." With the banks they said, "You broke it, but we'll trust you to fix it."
6/9/09, 2:38 PM  
Post a Comment
<< Home