The Carter Gilson Report

There’s a meme that’s been going around the government and the media for the last few months.  Some companies, they say, are too big to fail.  If these companies were to go under, declare bankruptcy, and fall off the face of the earth, the vacuum left in their absence would be too much for our economy to survive.

On the one hand, they’re right.  Companies like GM and Citigroup employ, directly and indirectly, millions of people across the world.  Losing them would drive this already sick economy into a death spiral.

But there’s something to think about in calling anything too big to fail.  Beyond abandoning the free market, which is supposedly God to many economic policy makers, it also points to the failure of deregulation.  These companies got so big because the anti-monopoly, regulatory, post-robber-baron financial world that was in control for most of the 20th Century got chucked out in the Reagan Revolution, and the trend continued through Clinton until Bush 2 got into power and totally screwed the pooch.

Yes, we should be bailing out the big companies right now.  But there have got to be strings included.  And one of those strings should be that no company be allowed to get where it is too big to fail.  Companies fail all the time, and new companies come along.  It’s financial natural selection.  That’s what commercial bankruptcy is for.  We shouldn’t get to a point where any company is too big to declare bankruptcy if that’s what is needed.

Just a couple weeks ago, GM was talking about buying Chrysler as a way to get both companies out of trouble.  That’s the opposite of what should happen.

The Telegraph gets a scoop that should really come as a surprise to no one.  We all remember just how ugly the campaign rallies with Sarah Palin were.  Seems that ugliness spread beyond the rallies and into the streets:

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling “terrorist” and “kill him” until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin’s attacks.

Again, this should not be surprising to anyone who was paying attention at the end.  The only good thing I can think of is that it finally forced some daylight onto the ugliness that still exists.  It’s been underground for a long time, not accepted in the public sphere. 

My hope is that, now that it’s more visible, it will get the push-back that it needs.

* corrected spelling in the title.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has what may be among the most important columns about the negatively-aged Obama administration to date:

Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.
…
This history offers important lessons for the incoming administration.

The political lesson is that economic missteps can quickly undermine an electoral mandate. Democrats won big last week — but they won even bigger in 1936, only to see their gains evaporate after the recession of 1937-38. Americans don’t expect instant economic results from the incoming administration, but they do expect results, and Democrats’ euphoria will be short-lived if they don’t deliver an economic recovery.

The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

FDR nearly failed because he didn’t go far enough.  That’s almost blasphemy, but it’s true.  Obama needs to do more, and do it fearlessly.

A new WPA based on a new power infrastructure is a first and necessary step.  Our current power grid is not just prone to failure but vulnerable to an attack.  It was just a few years ago that most of the eastern seaboard was shut down by a single outage, and we haven’t fixed it enough since then to avoid the same thing happening again.

Also, a new power grid could more efficiently transfer electricity generated from new sources.

This would need to be coupled with a reinvestment in physical infrastructure, the roads, bridges, railroads, waterways and other ways that we get our selves and our stuff from place to place.  It’s been 50 years since the last major project, the Eisenhower highways, and Obama has indicated that this is something to invest in.

These two projects alone would generate many jobs and a lot of revenue which would then fund more structure reinvestment.  America has been in a terrible accident, but we can rebuild her.  We have the technology.

First change: new theme.

Second change: more writing.  No, really.

Third change: still more to come.

TPM is reporting a direct anecdote from an Obama supporter in Maryland.

Friday night (which happens to be the start of our Sabbath) my wife answered the phone to hear a man stating he was from the McCain-Palin campaign. He asked who she was supporting. She replied that we will vote for Obama. He replied with “but he’s a f—–g n—er!”.

It gets better from there.  If by better, you mean, worse.

The horrific idea that John McCain might become president just got a bit more horrific:

But today, McCain raised a new question that could escalate that sound-bite campaign war: Who is he “gonna test” if elected president? And how?

“I have been tested,” McCain said, with a certain gritted-teeth look at the state fairgrounds in New Mexico. “I’m gonna test them. They’re not gonna test me.”

Oh, lord.  Does anything else actually need to be said?

I’m thinking Sarah Palin may not be invited to drop the puck at many more hockey games.

ST. LOUIS (AP)—Blues goalie Manny Legace left after one period Friday night with a hip injury that occurred when he slipped on the carpet placed on the ice for Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The Alaska governor dropped the ceremonial first puck before the Blues hosted the Los Angeles Kings. A narrow carpet walkway was placed from the gate at the Blues bench to center ice for Palin, her husband and two of her daughters.

That would be bad enough, but consider the last time she dropped a puck, it was for the Philadelphia Flyers, who went on to lose every game this season until last night, when the curse was passed on to the Blues.

This is teh awesome.

Billy Kristol (the unintentionally funny one) at the NYTimes wants McCain to fire everybody and start over:

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

This, of course, misses one of the truths of campaigns.  The longer a campaign goes on, the more it resembles the candidate.  In Obama’s case, it has led to a smart and focused campaign.  On McCain’s side, the impulsive, whiplash-inducing spins that make up most of what we’ve seen are actually indicative of John McCain’s character.

At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.  John Sidney McCain III has gone all-in, and if he doesn’t win, he has nothing left.

AP, reporting on the invocation given at a McCain speech on Saturday:

“I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons,” [Rev. Arnold Conrad, past pastor of the Grace Evangelical Free Church] said.

“And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day,” he said.

McCain on Friday, from the same article:

On Friday during a town hall-style meeting in Lakeville, Minn., a supporter told McCain that he feared what would happen if Obama were elected. McCain drew boos when he defended his rival as a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”

In another exchange, a woman told McCain that she didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” Shaking his head and taking the microphone from her, McCain replied: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent, family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Either the campaign is not vetting its guests properly (a distinct possibility) or once again McCain is not speaking for his own campaign.  Something tells me it’s the latter.

From an idea by Mur Lafferty, executed by me.

The Dow is currently at 9233.41, a further drop of 213.70 from yesterday’s close.  It’s not looking like the Fed’s cutting of the benchmark rate by .5% is actually making much of a difference in the markets, except for possibly a slowing of the freefall.

This is going to change everything.

Sorry, I can’t think of another way to put it.

McCain’s poll numbers have been going south since Lehman crashed.  It’s bad enough now that not only has McCain’s campaign dropped out of Michigan, but even Chuck Todd’s conservative electoral map has Obama winning.

The McCain campaign is going 100% negative, bringing up Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, when there’s no reason that Obama’s surrogates can’t bring up Charles Keating, G. Gordon Liddy, Sarah Palin’s ties to the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, etc.

And with the top of the ticket plummeting, so are races downticket that shouldn’t have been within reach.  Polls have shown that Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) are both in serious danger of losing their Senate seats, and that’s among those that aren’t open R seats.

Even better, though, John McCain has decided on a course of political suicide.  When discussing how the McCain-Care plan, with its $1.3 trillion pricetag would be paid for (keep in mind, this plan includes taxing healthcare benefits for the first time ever, and would only provide $5,000 to replace a $12,000 insurance plan), a spokesman said that they would be cutting into Medicare.

MEDICARE.  That’s going to play well in Florida.  And Arizona.

Now is not the time to get complacent, though.  Now is not the time to lean back and savor the moment.  Now is the time to bury them.  Now is the time to make sure that everyone in Washington knows that the old politics is over.

To paraphrase Karl Rove, we will fuck them.  We will fuck them like they have never been fucked before.  We will take them out of the equation and fix their mess.  Because we must.

Patriotism demands it.

Time quotes John McCain:

Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame. It’s time to fix the problem.

Um, John, didn’t you just fix the blame?  Just right there?

Oy.