Think about it, have any Fed member banks been left to fail?

Won’t tomorrow be a hoot getting to see how the Fed took liberty to put 23trillion on their balance sheet even though only 700billion was authorized by Congress? HMMMM sounds illegal to me…better audit the fed–call your elected officials and let them know that you expect it HR 1207. If they don’t listen, vote them out of office.

Nothing will shape public perception of the problem any more profoundly than the “real crisis” to which Paul Craig Roberts referred at Counterpunch yesterday:

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162009.html

And we’re not quite there as yet. In the meantime The Elizabeth Warrens and the Sheila Bairs of the exercise serve to provide the Bill Moyers crowd with the illusion that there is as yet reason to hope. But it is too late, there is no hope. In any serious contestation, Elizabeth Warren would be emasculated – if such were even possible for her – then eaten for lunch by those owning the enterprise. Any more than you might expect the House of Representatives to pass an anti-Iranian resolution by less than 95% given its predictible response to the threats and financial inducements of AIPAC, should you look for anything effectual in the Warren appointment. Elizabeth Warren is simply a prop on the set, she means and will mean nothing.

The economy has hit bottom, as many deep thinkers have reported, and it would be a tragedy to let CIT fail.

The current government’s only goal seems to be government growth and financial consolidation and Americans are buying into sucking on the tit of government for every desire. It’s time for the private sector to kick government out of its’ business. Start by supporting CIT.

http://www.beaconintegration.com/service.htm

Did appreciate the vision of Paul Newman in his prime…

I substantially agree with your description of what is wrong and what ultimately needs to take place. However in the contest to shape public perception of the problem, which is the most crucial contest for any revolutionary project right now, it is obviously the case that Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren and others like them are allies.

No?

Since much of the pain of a CIT failure will be borne by small to medium sized business, rather than large to mega sized multinationals, have we made the right judgments about who to save and who to throw to the wolves? The CIT saga only reinforces the notion that if you don’t have the right political clout in DC, you won’t be able to maneuver the financial waters. If the IMF were involved, they would have taken over the management of the economy, asserting that this was third world kleptocracy that needed to be thoroughly cleansed before it could return to the global marketplace.

The problem we face here has little to do with who in the system might be more and who might be less destructive. The problem is the system itself, now so utterly corrupted by financial, foreign policy, arms and drug interests as to be irreformable. To think of it as a functioning democracy with meaningfully contending majority and opposition parties is today the very definition of disordered perception. Sheila Bair IS Timothy Geithner and Timothy Geithner Is Sheila Bair. They are interchangeable, creatures solely of the vermin that own them. We have a government of poseurs, whores and it will remain that way as long as people continue to entertain the myth that things are otherwise, that they have real choices to make and that party labels or political philosophy have any meaning in such a context.

I hope that this really is a signal for the future of all institutions, not just the mid-sized ones. Time to get on with separating the chaff from the valid businesses.

From Bloomberg:

Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has argued Bair isn’t a team player and is too focused on protecting her agency rather than the financial system as a whole, according to two congressional officials and a person familiar with his thinking. Bair has battled with Geithner and fellow regulators over aid to Citigroup Inc. and other emergency actions, making her enemies in the Bush administration.

“The idea of having an independent actor on the stage with you who might not be singing the same tune can make you nervous,” said Wayne Abernathy, a former Treasury official who is now executive vice president with the American Bankers Association in Washington. “They recognize that she’s a very independent person.”

I was surprised that NakedCapitalism

and

ZeroHedge

got no mention.

…(new) Beautiful Lady in Red