MATT TAIBBI

NEW YORK (AP) — John Thain is getting a second chance.

CIT Group Inc. tapped the former Merrill Lynch CEO to become its chairman and chief executive.

Thain brokered Merrill’s sale to Bank of America as the credit crisis peaked in the fall of 2008, but was then pushed out the door after the deal closed as controversy swirled around bonus payments and mounting losses at the investment bank.

via News from The Associated Press.

Man, exactly what do you have to do to become unhirable in this country? Eat Christian babies on CNN?

John Thain is the dope who was buying himself an $87,000 area rug as his company was going bust. He became a symbol for brainless greed on Wall Street just in time to complete a tortured sale of Merrill to Bank of America in which billions in losses were somehow kept hidden from BofA shareholders.

Now he gets another big job, just like very other high-end Wall Street buffoon who wrecks a company in this era. My favorite of course is John Meriwether, the “genius” investor who dreamed up the imploded hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in the late nineties. Meriwether immediately was given another $250 million to play with after LTCM blew up and is now working on his third such venture, a company called JM advisors, which uses LTCM-like investment techniques. Who’s giving guys like this money?

We protest against a heavy-fisted form of government that seeks to further regulate private enterprise and hinder future profits (i.e., banking and energy industries…).

via We, the Tea Partiers – The York Daily Record.

The writer goes on to protest cap and trade, which I also think is a bad idea, but not for the same reasons, obviously. But that other line — that is why the Tea Party “movement” is not a movement but a top-down manipulation, a misdirection.

These are people who’ve been gouged for years by the deregulated banking, mortgage lending, and commodities trading business, and when Obama sends down very weak, watered-down regulations to deal with those problems, they howl that he’s against “private enterprise” because that’s what they’ve been told to think by the Glenn Becks of the world.

Did you know that insider trading isn’t even illegal in the commodities trading business? Do you honestly think gas prices were high in 2008 because we weren’t drilling enough in the Gulf of Mexico?

You idiots are being used. Think for yourselves. If the Fox Network believes it so wholeheartedly, how could it possibly be in your interest? They’ll take your ratings, sure, so they can sell you Charmin and $5 footlongs. I mean, Jesus, how can you not see that? If you had real allies that powerful, don’t you think someone would have taken care of you by now?

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Populist Addiction – NYTimes.com.

Normally one would have to be in the grip of a narcissistic psychosis to think that a columnist for the New York Times has written an article for your personal benefit. But after his latest article in the Times, in which he compares the “populism” of people who “blame Goldman Sachs” with exactly the sort of racist elitism I ripped him for last week, I think David Brooks might be trying to talk to me.

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Mayor Richard Daley is pitching the idea of one get-out-of-a-ticket-free card per year for drivers who slightly overstay their welcome at Chicago parking meters.

If aldermen go along, drivers would be able to successfully fight one ticket per car each year if the penalty is handed out within five minutes of the meter or pay ticket running out.

It’s part of the mayor’s attempt to placate the public after an unpopular lease of the city’s parking meters led to steep rate hikes and broken machines. Much of the one-time windfall is being used to prop up the city budget.

via Chicago parking meters: Daley offers drivers a break – chicagotribune.com.

Any Chicago residents out there with some strong opinions on the parking meter issue? If so, I’d like to hear from you.

I’m also interested in hearing from people in Nashville or in any other city that is planning to sell off part of its infrastructure to help pay off the budget.

Apologize for the sporadic posting of late. I’m in the middle of a move.

Ankiel will try to rebuild value in Kansas City after slipping to a .231/.285/.387 line for the Cardinals in 2009. The 30-year-old’s maladies included a sore Achilles tendon, a deep shoulder bruise, and a groin strain. The shoulder injury, suffered in May, came from a headfirst collision with a wall and lingered most of the season.

via MLB Rumors – MLBTradeRumors.com.

Apologies to my non-sports-reading readers, but I just spotted this — what the hell is going on in Kansas City? Is Dayton Moore trying to collect every sub-.300 OBP player in baseball?

Last year the Royals drew 457 walks. There are currently about 450 Siberian tigers left in the wild. Anyone want to bet which ends up being more rare in 2010? This isn’t just wishful thinking, but I really think the Tiger is going to bounce back. Yuniesky Betancourt’s batting eye, not so much. Again, apologize for the non-political aside, but this stuff just makes me scratch my head.

A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.
Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.  Some examples:

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.
The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

TRANSLATION: Don’t bother giving any money, it doesn’t do any good. And feeling guilty about not giving money doesn’t do anyone any good either. In fact, you’re probably helping by not doing anything.

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