Entries for November 2008

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

President Bush has been rather irrelevant for the better part of the last year. The country is over and done with him and IMHO he will go down as the worst president in American history. Bush and Nero have much in common. They both fiddled as their empires went down. President Bush could have cut spending, he could have avoided launching a useless war, he could have run roughshod over Wall Street so risky mortgages weren't bundled into investment vehicles and sold to investors backed by nonexistent insurance. But he did not. Here we are, and will be paying for his feckless leadership.

Congress should not go easy on GM if it does approve a bailout, but Congress has shown no sign of going easy on the auto giant. The idea of setting auto executives scurrying to produce a business plan is nothing short of brilliant. I've got suggestions for what such a plan should include. But first and foremost, it should be focused on one word and one word alone: green.

No more SUVs and gas guzzlers. Even in the truck division, GM could make its heavy-duty vehicles much more fuel efficient and price them so that they could only be purchased by commercial ventures. Private citizens who want to drive guzzlers should be priced out of the market and should instead be forced into low-mileage cars. GM got into this mess because instead of leading the consumer market in the right (read that: green) direction, it catered to America's sick addiction to gas guzzlers. Now's the time to lead, not cave in.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

It will be years before we know whether government bailouts of financial and other institutions were a good idea or not. My Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Michael Barone has some crackling commentary on the topic.

While we're in the midst of bailing out the planet (or so it seems) one question comes to mind. If Citicorp, why not GM? Congress will hear from the big three automakers this coming Tuesday on whether to bail out the auto giants and their executives, meanwhile are devising a business plan to explain to members of the House and Senate how taxpayers' dollars will keep the companies, including GM, alive. But if the U.S. government is going to bail out Citicorp, the once-largest bank in the country, why not do the same for GM, the once-largest automaker in the world?

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has some riveting thoughts on the topic. In a commentary for Marketplace he notes Citicorp has lost a huge chunk of market valuation, which hurts the company's executives, shareholders and creditors. But if it went into Chapter 11, mutual fund shareholders and people holding Citicorp CDs would have their assets protected. If GM tanks, on the other hand:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

I should just like to point out to my inimitable, irreplaceable and sui generis Thomas Jefferson Street colleague, Michael Barone, the dean of political journalists, that apparently President-elect Obama has decided to drop his pledge of hiking taxes on upper-income earners. That's one reason I have more hope for the Obama administration than I did while Sen. Obama was running for president.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Investors excited about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's decision to bail out Citigroup are thrilled to see their portfolios rise in value, but some news media are reporting that taxpayers shouldn't be as thrilled:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Accolades to Dr. Patricia Fox, an Albany surgeon who has the courage of her convictions and the temerity to take on the medical community in her hometown. She wrote a stunning op-ed in the Albany Times-Union, which I will share here in a moment.

Her point is that medical testing has been made obsolete by technology and should go the way of trephining. She opposes the use of pigs at the Albany Medical Center to train young doctors how to treat human trauma victims. But it has been widely proven that testing drugs for humans on animals is also ineffective. As Dr. John J. Pippin of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine recently wrote:

Will President-elect Obama be the next FDR? If he pulls the nation out of its economic slump, he has a shot at becoming just as beloved. If he doesn't, the opposite could occur.

His aides disclosed on weekend TV talk shows that: