"What Is Truth?" Said Jesting Pilate

Another fun tidbit: FAIR has a blog post by Peter Hart about Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes fussing over new polling data which showed that a majority even of Republicans believe that there is "too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations." Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe this, compared to 91 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Independents, or 77 percent of all respondents. (I find it significant that 80 percent of Independents agree, since the Independents are the mythic Center that Democrats like Obama are always trying to placate by moving to the right.)

I've written about this before myself:

Now, the White House is obsessed with the opinion polls. It is not possible that Obama and his people don't know what most Americans think and want. For that matter, the Republicans must know it too. So, when Obama sold out a public option in his health-insurance bill, when he put the deficit rather than jobs front and center, when he put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, when he extended and escalated US military adventures, he knew that if public opinion meant anything, he was chopping away at his chances of re-election with every budget cut. Yet he avowedly defied his base. Maybe he believes and hopes that he can spend his way into a second term; and maybe he can.

(To clarify: I know that although professional politicians watch the polls, they don't let them guide policy or practice. My point is that you can't claim they aren't aware of them.) The difference between me and those MSNBC stalwarts is that they thought that these poll results reflected a new development, even though (as FAIR showed) similarly large majorities of Americans have said the same thing for decades.

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

True, but what about the Democrats, who, as I pointed out above, must have the same polling data? As the FAIR blogger pointed out, "the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take." The only connection between the Democrats and "populist" American came later, when Maddow said: "But I think right now, if they [Democratic politicians] were calculating the domestic political cost of ending the Afghanistan war, there would be none. I do not think that the Republican Party has either the credibility or the energy on foreign policy to resist Democratic White House if they wanted to end the Afghanistan war sooner." Of course, Obama has no intention of ending the war in Afghanistan until he's damn good and ready, political cost or no -- he has no Bush-era Status of Forces Agreement to push him, as he did in Iraq.

So anyway, another good commentary from FAIR. What prompted me to write this post was a comment below the post, from someone who wrote:

Perhaps if we demand that a requirement be made into law that news broadcasts and public political meet a minimum threshold of honesty we might see things change. They manage to do this in Canada and yet here Fox News was able to win a lawsuit by claiming they had no legal requirement to tell the truth. Demand Honesty.

He included a couple of links to online petitions which he had evidently started. (The one on Facebook has 4 likes so far!) I was disappointed, because I was looking for evidence that they "manage to do this in Canada." Judging by right-wing Canadian politicians' ability to be voted into office, I am skeptical.

But the real question is, what would a law look like which required "that news broadcasts and public political [sic] meet a minimum threshold of honesty"? Who would decide what is honest and what isn't? I wouldn't trust any government to make that decision. Much as I dislike Fox News, I'm glad they won the right to lie; "We Fought the Courts for Our Right to Lie to You" should replace "Fair and Balanced" as their tagline. The alternative would be that the government can decide that any news outlet wasn't meeting "a minimum threshold of honesty" if it published information -- about the economy, say, or about American war crimes -- the government disliked. Before anyone advocates such a law, they should imagine it being enforced by the Bush administration, though I'm sure Obama would love it just as well. In the real world it would replace journalism with government and corporate propaganda. Indeed, the corporate media already "meet a minimum threshold of honesty," with the stress on "minimum."

The problem, as far as I can see, is that too many Americans don't "demand honesty." There are plenty of alternative media in the US. Nobody is required to listen to the corporate media; just about everybody complains about them; but they refuse to look at the alternatives. When I ask people about this, they say things like "Gee, I know I should, but I just don't have time ... Someday I'm really going to inform myself better ... Someday ..." Yet they do have time to watch reality TV shows and hour upon hours of professional or college sports; I think that reveals their real priorities.

Myself, I don't have time to watch the corporate media; most of my news-reading time is taken up with alternatives: FAIR, Democracy Now!, my community radio station, and a lot of places on the web, which I read critically. And I've noticed that once you begin to inform yourself, you can read behind what the corporate media say, so that even if you must watch CNN or read the New York Times, you can spot their distortions. That is your responsibility as a citizen: to think for yourself. If you want the media and the government to decide for you what is true, you might as well just listen to Rush Limbaugh; he at least openly claims to think (or something) for his audience. No free citizen should abdicate the responsibility of thinking to anyone, government, corporation, or individual, but that is what the commenter was advocating: let the government determine a "minimum threshold of honesty" — and come to think of it, we already have that, a minimum — so that we can just sit back and let ourselves be filled with government-approved truth. Yummy! Why, we could even have a Department of Truth! Then we could finally trust the media; they wouldn't dare step out of line.

A law like the one that commenter wants would make a difference, though: it would wipe out alternative media, or at best drive them underground. Right now you have alternatives to the corporate media, who distort the news in directions agreeable to their corporate owners. But if the government can require the media to tell the "truth" as determined by the government, who do you think would be shut down? Not the New York Times for dutifully passing along Obama's claims about Iran's nuclear weapons, you can be sure of that. More likely it would be little magazines and websites who shoot his claims full of holes. If the commenter doesn't like the First Amendment, which forbids government interference with the press, he can always move somewhere more to his liking, like Canada or France or -- what the hell, why not? -- Iran.

"What Is Truth?" Said Jesting Pilate

Another fun tidbit: FAIR has a blog post by Peter Hart about Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes fussing over new polling data which showed that a majority even of Republicans believe that there is "too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations." Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe this, compared to 91 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Independents, or 77 percent of all respondents. (I find it significant that 80 percent of Independents agree, since the Independents are the mythic Center that Democrats like Obama are always trying to placate by moving to the right.)

I've written about this before myself:

Now, the White House is obsessed with the opinion polls. It is not possible that Obama and his people don't know what most Americans think and want. For that matter, the Republicans must know it too. So, when Obama sold out a public option in his health-insurance bill, when he put the deficit rather than jobs front and center, when he put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, when he extended and escalated US military adventures, he knew that if public opinion meant anything, he was chopping away at his chances of re-election with every budget cut. Yet he avowedly defied his base. Maybe he believes and hopes that he can spend his way into a second term; and maybe he can.

(To clarify: I know that although professional politicians watch the polls, they don't let them guide policy or practice. My point is that you can't claim they aren't aware of them.) The difference between me and those MSNBC stalwarts is that they thought that these poll results reflected a new development, even though (as FAIR showed) similarly large majorities of Americans have said the same thing for decades.

HAYES: What's amazing to me is how unresponsive Republican state level officials are and how much they're responsive to all of their ideological priors, all of the interests that they promised fealty to before they got into office, and how little trimming of the sails they've done.

True, but what about the Democrats, who, as I pointed out above, must have the same polling data? As the FAIR blogger pointed out, "the first question to ask is whether you really believe politicians are actually sensitive to public opinion at all--read about Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics for another take." The only connection between the Democrats and "populist" American came later, when Maddow said: "But I think right now, if they [Democratic politicians] were calculating the domestic political cost of ending the Afghanistan war, there would be none. I do not think that the Republican Party has either the credibility or the energy on foreign policy to resist Democratic White House if they wanted to end the Afghanistan war sooner." Of course, Obama has no intention of ending the war in Afghanistan until he's damn good and ready, political cost or no -- he has no Bush-era Status of Forces Agreement to push him, as he did in Iraq.

So anyway, another good commentary from FAIR. What prompted me to write this post was a comment below the post, from someone who wrote:

Perhaps if we demand that a requirement be made into law that news broadcasts and public political meet a minimum threshold of honesty we might see things change. They manage to do this in Canada and yet here Fox News was able to win a lawsuit by claiming they had no legal requirement to tell the truth. Demand Honesty.

He included a couple of links to online petitions which he had evidently started. (The one on Facebook has 4 likes so far!) I was disappointed, because I was looking for evidence that they "manage to do this in Canada." Judging by right-wing Canadian politicians' ability to be voted into office, I am skeptical.

But the real question is, what would a law look like which required "that news broadcasts and public political [sic] meet a minimum threshold of honesty"? Who would decide what is honest and what isn't? I wouldn't trust any government to make that decision. Much as I dislike Fox News, I'm glad they won the right to lie; "We Fought the Courts for Our Right to Lie to You" should replace "Fair and Balanced" as their tagline. The alternative would be that the government can decide that any news outlet wasn't meeting "a minimum threshold of honesty" if it published information -- about the economy, say, or about American war crimes -- the government disliked. Before anyone advocates such a law, they should imagine it being enforced by the Bush administration, though I'm sure Obama would love it just as well. In the real world it would replace journalism with government and corporate propaganda. Indeed, the corporate media already "meet a minimum threshold of honesty," with the stress on "minimum."

The problem, as far as I can see, is that too many Americans don't "demand honesty." There are plenty of alternative media in the US. Nobody is required to listen to the corporate media; just about everybody complains about them; but they refuse to look at the alternatives. When I ask people about this, they say things like "Gee, I know I should, but I just don't have time ... Someday I'm really going to inform myself better ... Someday ..." Yet they do have time to watch reality TV shows and hour upon hours of professional or college sports; I think that reveals their real priorities.

Myself, I don't have time to watch the corporate media; most of my news-reading time is taken up with alternatives: FAIR, Democracy Now!, my community radio station, and a lot of places on the web, which I read critically. And I've noticed that once you begin to inform yourself, you can read behind what the corporate media say, so that even if you must watch CNN or read the New York Times, you can spot their distortions. That is your responsibility as a citizen: to think for yourself. If you want the media and the government to decide for you what is true, you might as well just listen to Rush Limbaugh; he at least openly claims to think (or something) for his audience. No free citizen should abdicate the responsibility of thinking to anyone, government, corporation, or individual, but that is what the commenter was advocating: let the government determine a "minimum threshold of honesty" — and come to think of it, we already have that, a minimum — so that we can just sit back and let ourselves be filled with government-approved truth. Yummy! Why, we could even have a Department of Truth! Then we could finally trust the media; they wouldn't dare step out of line.

A law like the one that commenter wants would make a difference, though: it would wipe out alternative media, or at best drive them underground. Right now you have alternatives to the corporate media, who distort the news in directions agreeable to their corporate owners. But if the government can require the media to tell the "truth" as determined by the government, who do you think would be shut down? Not the New York Times for dutifully passing along Obama's claims about Iran's nuclear weapons, you can be sure of that. More likely it would be little magazines and websites who shoot his claims full of holes. If the commenter doesn't like the First Amendment, which forbids government interference with the press, he can always move somewhere more to his liking, like Canada or France or -- what the hell, why not? -- Iran.

I Adore Cheap Populism

It's depressing when a Republican makes sense, but Steve Latourette (R-Ohio) managed to do it for a couple of minutes. Of course this is something pols usually manage to do when they're out of power, but Latourette also voted against the original Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain heist last fall -- you know, the one that Obama defended as "not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street" -- while Bush was still in the White House. And pushing massive, complex legislation through Congress without permitting time to study it is a time-honored Republican strategy as well, though as with Obama's stimulus plan, the Patriot Act's partisans probably weren't interested in knowing what was in it anyway.

Last weekend Alexander Cockburn told the story at Counterpunch:

As Obama’s stimulus bill worked its way through the Congress, Oregon senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, joined with Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine to attach an amendment to the bill capping executive bonuses for companies taking bailout money at $100,000. This provision sent off alarm bells across Wall Street and inside the Treasury Department and it was mysteriously killed in the conference committee in order to protect the AIG executives. Wyden jokes, “it didn’t die by osmosis.”

So who killed the ban on AIG bonuses? This week all the major players swore, hand on heart, they never, ever knew that $165 million in bonuses had been assigned to AIG personnel. Out in Los Angeles President Obama told Jay Leno as much. Treasury Secretary Geithner claims he only found out last week. Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, swore day after day that he too never knew.

The bonuses were not secret. These so-called “retention payments” for 130 people at AIG were approved two days after the September 16 bailout, disclosed in a September 26 federal filing. They soon became a focus of extreme interest to politicians like New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, well aware of the smoldering public mood. On December 15 Bloomberg News quoted Representative Elijah Cummings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, as writing that “Liddy [AIG’s CEO] should testify under oath on why retention payments are going to thousands more people than first disclosed." Cummings cited an earlier Bloomberg News report disclosing that AIG was scheduled to give as much as a year’s pay to about 10 percent of the staff at units that are being sold. Recipients were told to keep the awards secret.

On Wednesday Dodd came clean—sort of. Yes, he had accepted language in the recent stimulus bill which okayed bonuses consequent upon bailout money already released by the US government. Facing a tight reelection race next year and well aware that this admission would not play well with Connecticut voters, Dodd emphasized that he’d been pressured to okay the language by the Treasury Department, suggesting that Bush-era holdovers from Hank Paulson’s team warned that unless the AIG bonus contracts were protected the entire stimulus package could be vulnerable to a constitutional challenge. Dodd thus passed the poisoned chalice to Treasury Secretary Geithner, White House economic czar Larry Summers and… Obama.

At first the White House put up Summers to argue that America is a nation of laws, among them the law of contract, as applied to AIG employees. Only a man who had to resign the presidency of Harvard after claiming that woman are in some ways stupider than men would be capable of such idiocy. Obama is in the process of asking millions of Americans -- autoworkers, pensioners, veterans to accept annulment of contractual obligations to them by the US government. Suddenly they’re asked to respect retention contracts to AIG losers, many of whom have quit the company anyway.

Tossed on the third rail by Dodd, scorched by Republican jeers for hypocrisy and double dealing, the White House rushed into damage control. Invective against the executives of AIG poured from Obama’s lips, although not so fierce as the suggestion by the Republican senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley, that the AIG top brass “follow the Japanese example and resign or go commit suicide.” After reading their constituent email, taking phone calls and watching the talk shows, on Thursday after about 30 minutes of debate 243 Democrats and 85 Republicans joined in voting "Aye" to a House bill that would impose a 90 percent tax on bonuses given to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at AIG and other companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money. It would apply to any such bonuses issued since December 31. It was opposed by six Democrats and 87 Republicans. The senate is considering a slightly more restrained version.

House leader Nancy Pelosi was no doubt close to bursting from schadenfreude as she mousetrapped the House Republicans on that one. It’s a measure of just how terrified they are of the popular mood that no less than 85 Republicans voted for an individually targeted, retrospective tax levy on individuals which is probably the largest marginal rate ever imposed and certainly unconstitutional.

Rough though the week has been, there is a silver lining for the White House. It stems from the very word that has landed Obama and his team in such trouble - “bonus”. A bonus is something people can relate to. You hope to get it at Christmas. It’s a reward for working hard. You don’t give bonuses to thieves and deadbeats. Yet at the same time as the uproar over $165 milion in bonuses is in full spate, Obama has approved bailout of AIG to the tune of about $200 billion, much of it passed on to the infamous “counterparties” like Goldman Sachs and foreign banks.

In other words, Obama has been using the bonuses to divert attention from the vastly larger amounts of money he's throwing at AIG. (See also Glenn Greenwald's Salon article on the White House's scapegoating of Dodd.) So, for that matter, has Congress. Already the punditocracy and the blogosphere are urging Obama to fire Geithner and Summer, but of course they are merely members of his Team of Rivals, doing his will. But I shouldn't be sarcastic -- that's nothing more than the truth. No doubt they'll fall on their swords if it becomes necessary to safeguard the bailout, but ultimately it's the President's responsibility, not theirs.

As Whatever It Is I'm Against It pointed out, "In the larger scheme of things, it’s the need to prop up this criminally-run company with $170 billion of taxpayer money that’s the real scandal. Compared to that, $165 million in bonuses is kind of a sideshow, the insult to injury ratio here being 1:1,000."

No doubt, like Jon Stewart, Obama finds cheap populism oddly arousing; but Stewart was being satirical. (Like the title of this post, as I hope I needn't point out; it's a Boys in the Band allusion.) What worries me is that the best I can say for Obama's leadership (to be charitable) in this mess is that he's using such creepy diversionary tactics; the worst I can say is that I smell panic in his tactics, all the way from Washington DC to Indiana. Passing a blatantly unconstitutional law like the retroactive tax on the AIG bonuses is also a familiar tactic of the right: you not only get to pass the law, knowing that it will be overturned, but then you can denounce the courts that overturn it as elitist activist judges interfering with the will of the people. (Previously it was announced that the amount of the bonuses would be deducted from the next bailout payment to AIG. I'm sure that had the big boys shaking in their shoes! Any accountant who can't figure out how to get around that move doesn't deserve his, erm, "retention payment.")

I'm sure I'm not the only person who worries about the crossfire of arguments about the best way to deal with the economic crisis we're in, and the historical precedents that inform them. For example: Did the New Deal end the Depression, or not? I've seen arguments by economists taking either side, and it seems that their politics determine their answers. Which to me suggests that no one knows. I certainly wouldn't trust the Right, but since I can't trust the Center-Right either, I'm worried. In a system as complex as the US economy, it's very difficult -- maybe impossible -- to tease out cause and effect. I have to take it on faith that Obama appointed people who were competent to produce a plan that would work, and though I never had much faith in him, which decreased even more when he appointed hacks like Geithner and Summers, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that Obama has no idea what to do either, so he'll settle for saving Wall Street at any cost. Since most of the people who voted for him, I think, see Wall Street as part of the problem, he has to pretend to be boldly independent, and the pretense is becoming less plausible every day.

I Adore Cheap Populism

It's depressing when a Republican makes sense, but Steve Latourette (R-Ohio) managed to do it for a couple of minutes. Of course this is something pols usually manage to do when they're out of power, but Latourette also voted against the original Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain heist last fall -- you know, the one that Obama defended as "not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street" -- while Bush was still in the White House. And pushing massive, complex legislation through Congress without permitting time to study it is a time-honored Republican strategy as well, though as with Obama's stimulus plan, the Patriot Act's partisans probably weren't interested in knowing what was in it anyway.

Last weekend Alexander Cockburn told the story at Counterpunch:

As Obama’s stimulus bill worked its way through the Congress, Oregon senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, joined with Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine to attach an amendment to the bill capping executive bonuses for companies taking bailout money at $100,000. This provision sent off alarm bells across Wall Street and inside the Treasury Department and it was mysteriously killed in the conference committee in order to protect the AIG executives. Wyden jokes, “it didn’t die by osmosis.”

So who killed the ban on AIG bonuses? This week all the major players swore, hand on heart, they never, ever knew that $165 million in bonuses had been assigned to AIG personnel. Out in Los Angeles President Obama told Jay Leno as much. Treasury Secretary Geithner claims he only found out last week. Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, swore day after day that he too never knew.

The bonuses were not secret. These so-called “retention payments” for 130 people at AIG were approved two days after the September 16 bailout, disclosed in a September 26 federal filing. They soon became a focus of extreme interest to politicians like New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, well aware of the smoldering public mood. On December 15 Bloomberg News quoted Representative Elijah Cummings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, as writing that “Liddy [AIG’s CEO] should testify under oath on why retention payments are going to thousands more people than first disclosed." Cummings cited an earlier Bloomberg News report disclosing that AIG was scheduled to give as much as a year’s pay to about 10 percent of the staff at units that are being sold. Recipients were told to keep the awards secret.

On Wednesday Dodd came clean—sort of. Yes, he had accepted language in the recent stimulus bill which okayed bonuses consequent upon bailout money already released by the US government. Facing a tight reelection race next year and well aware that this admission would not play well with Connecticut voters, Dodd emphasized that he’d been pressured to okay the language by the Treasury Department, suggesting that Bush-era holdovers from Hank Paulson’s team warned that unless the AIG bonus contracts were protected the entire stimulus package could be vulnerable to a constitutional challenge. Dodd thus passed the poisoned chalice to Treasury Secretary Geithner, White House economic czar Larry Summers and… Obama.

At first the White House put up Summers to argue that America is a nation of laws, among them the law of contract, as applied to AIG employees. Only a man who had to resign the presidency of Harvard after claiming that woman are in some ways stupider than men would be capable of such idiocy. Obama is in the process of asking millions of Americans -- autoworkers, pensioners, veterans to accept annulment of contractual obligations to them by the US government. Suddenly they’re asked to respect retention contracts to AIG losers, many of whom have quit the company anyway.

Tossed on the third rail by Dodd, scorched by Republican jeers for hypocrisy and double dealing, the White House rushed into damage control. Invective against the executives of AIG poured from Obama’s lips, although not so fierce as the suggestion by the Republican senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley, that the AIG top brass “follow the Japanese example and resign or go commit suicide.” After reading their constituent email, taking phone calls and watching the talk shows, on Thursday after about 30 minutes of debate 243 Democrats and 85 Republicans joined in voting "Aye" to a House bill that would impose a 90 percent tax on bonuses given to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at AIG and other companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money. It would apply to any such bonuses issued since December 31. It was opposed by six Democrats and 87 Republicans. The senate is considering a slightly more restrained version.

House leader Nancy Pelosi was no doubt close to bursting from schadenfreude as she mousetrapped the House Republicans on that one. It’s a measure of just how terrified they are of the popular mood that no less than 85 Republicans voted for an individually targeted, retrospective tax levy on individuals which is probably the largest marginal rate ever imposed and certainly unconstitutional.

Rough though the week has been, there is a silver lining for the White House. It stems from the very word that has landed Obama and his team in such trouble - “bonus”. A bonus is something people can relate to. You hope to get it at Christmas. It’s a reward for working hard. You don’t give bonuses to thieves and deadbeats. Yet at the same time as the uproar over $165 milion in bonuses is in full spate, Obama has approved bailout of AIG to the tune of about $200 billion, much of it passed on to the infamous “counterparties” like Goldman Sachs and foreign banks.

In other words, Obama has been using the bonuses to divert attention from the vastly larger amounts of money he's throwing at AIG. (See also Glenn Greenwald's Salon article on the White House's scapegoating of Dodd.) So, for that matter, has Congress. Already the punditocracy and the blogosphere are urging Obama to fire Geithner and Summer, but of course they are merely members of his Team of Rivals, doing his will. But I shouldn't be sarcastic -- that's nothing more than the truth. No doubt they'll fall on their swords if it becomes necessary to safeguard the bailout, but ultimately it's the President's responsibility, not theirs.

As Whatever It Is I'm Against It pointed out, "In the larger scheme of things, it’s the need to prop up this criminally-run company with $170 billion of taxpayer money that’s the real scandal. Compared to that, $165 million in bonuses is kind of a sideshow, the insult to injury ratio here being 1:1,000."

No doubt, like Jon Stewart, Obama finds cheap populism oddly arousing; but Stewart was being satirical. (Like the title of this post, as I hope I needn't point out; it's a Boys in the Band allusion.) What worries me is that the best I can say for Obama's leadership (to be charitable) in this mess is that he's using such creepy diversionary tactics; the worst I can say is that I smell panic in his tactics, all the way from Washington DC to Indiana. Passing a blatantly unconstitutional law like the retroactive tax on the AIG bonuses is also a familiar tactic of the right: you not only get to pass the law, knowing that it will be overturned, but then you can denounce the courts that overturn it as elitist activist judges interfering with the will of the people. (Previously it was announced that the amount of the bonuses would be deducted from the next bailout payment to AIG. I'm sure that had the big boys shaking in their shoes! Any accountant who can't figure out how to get around that move doesn't deserve his, erm, "retention payment.")

I'm sure I'm not the only person who worries about the crossfire of arguments about the best way to deal with the economic crisis we're in, and the historical precedents that inform them. For example: Did the New Deal end the Depression, or not? I've seen arguments by economists taking either side, and it seems that their politics determine their answers. Which to me suggests that no one knows. I certainly wouldn't trust the Right, but since I can't trust the Center-Right either, I'm worried. In a system as complex as the US economy, it's very difficult -- maybe impossible -- to tease out cause and effect. I have to take it on faith that Obama appointed people who were competent to produce a plan that would work, and though I never had much faith in him, which decreased even more when he appointed hacks like Geithner and Summers, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that Obama has no idea what to do either, so he'll settle for saving Wall Street at any cost. Since most of the people who voted for him, I think, see Wall Street as part of the problem, he has to pretend to be boldly independent, and the pretense is becoming less plausible every day.