Help me! Here in Real America, I can’t help having the same, fruitless dicussions. Too often it’s with a Glenn Beck groupie and starts off cordially enough. Efforts to calmly explain that ‘No, it was not ACORN, but Wall Street bankers and their predatory buddies in the mortgage lending biz that did the real damage to our 401Ks’ normally just end up with suspicious glares and familiar screeds about the evils of redistributionism and hippies.

Taking pains to help them understand that losing your wallet and a bridge collapsing under a passenger train are both bad things, but one is very much worse than the other, just seems to lead to bitter acrimony and hard feelings.

This reminds me of a very old bad joke ..

Walking along a downtown street late at night a man encountered a drunk crawling around on the ground on his hands and knees, obviously searching for something.

“Lose something, buddy?” he asked.

“Yeah, I dropped a quarter up the block there, and I’m trying to find it.”

“Well, if you lost it a block away .. why aren’t you searching there?”

“Light’s better here.”

Dumb as it sounds, I think that’s a pretty apt metaphor for why the Fox News cocoon crowd insist on blaming the most helpless of the poor for screwing the country into the ground. It’s less bothersome to search under Beck’s lamppost, nodding along with simple-minded rants at minorities they already fear, than it is to grope through the dark,  complicated stories like this one by McClatchy:

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers that it also was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. A five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose those secret bets may have violated securities laws.

I suppose it’s fair to question just how many Beck or Hannity fans could be drunk all the time. Probably not many, but seeing they can be cold sober and that idiotic at the same time isn’t helping my cheerful outlook.

Just narcissistically brutal, and stupid. Never mind you desperate worker guppies, it’s nothing against you, we just have a bigger fish to fry.

Right-Wingers To Boycott GM?

The Detroit Bureau reports that an idea seems to be picking up some cachet on the right-wing blogs and in talk radio: Fighting the “Government Motors” bailout by boycotting the company. Most of it so far is limited to relatively little-known writers, but two big names have picked up on it: Hugh Hewitt, who wants to save free enterprise — and Rush Limbaugh, who wants anything President Obama does to fail, and is urging his listeners to help push towards that goal.

Limbaugh reassures any GM workers who might be listening that the boycotters aren’t angry at them. “They don’t want to patronize Obama. They don’t want to do anything to make Obama’s policies work!” he explains. “This is an untold story, by the way. Of course, the government-controlled media is not gonna report anything like this but there are a lot of people who are not going to buy from Chrysler or General Motors as long as it is perceived Barack Obama is running it, because people do not want his policy to work here because this is antithetical to the American economic way of life.”

Not that I’d wish it to happen, but if some equally selfish and unhinged asshole shot Limbaugh dead, perhaps in church, I wouldn’t get upset.

As the economy continues to groan along, as the government money continues to fly all over the place in an effort to grease the wheels, the questions are mounting: when will the loaning begin? Why hasn’t it begun already–what the hell is going on?

WASHINGTON – Bank lending to consumers and businesses for many types of loans fell in February despite the billions of dollars in government support the banks received.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday its latest monthly survey of lending activities at the nation’s biggest banks showed nine reported increases and 12 posted declines. The median, or midpoint, for lending activity dipped 2.2 percent in February.

The March reports are expected to be as bad, if not worse–loaning is still frozen. With so much of our money now in private hands, and with so many Americans furious over the bailouts, you would think the recipients would be hustling up the efforts to make good on the President’s (and the people’s) wishes to get the economy back on its feet.

Not so. Instead, they’re being extremely…well, conservative, frankly. And I mean that in the bad-with-power, senseless and greedy sense. They’re apparently uninterested in doing anything that won’t make them piles of money, personally and professionally, immediately.

Today’s example: Chrysler Financial. Already a recipient of $1.5 billion, the government offered it another $750 million on the cheap to keep it flush with cash and the auto loans flowing. But they refused it. Why? They didn’t want to sign on to the new salary restrictions that come with the government money.

Well, do they need the money? They say they don’t right now, but at the same time they’ve already made arrangements for private borrowing that would obviously come at a higher price.

So, you be the CEO: piles of cheap money now, or expensive money a little later? What’s the prudent business strategy?

Pay Rule Led Chrysler to
Spurn Loan, Agency Says

Top officials at Chrysler Financial turned away a government loan because executives didn’t want to abide by new federal limits on pay, according to new findings by a federal watchdog agency…

But by forgoing the government loan, the company had to tap loans from a group of private banks, including J.P. Morgan and Citigroup, that charged more for the money than the government would have, sources said. That line of financing had been arranged in August, when the company was struggling to stay afloat, according to an industry official.

Brad Sherman makes CNBC’s Mark Haynes and Erin Burnett look like the clueless company employees they are. Isn’t it about time we started talking about Merrill Lynch as well–wasn’t that something like $4 billion?

Bad medicine.

My sister, who’s previously been a banking executive with a couple of those now billion dollar bailout beneficiaries, reminded me that not all of them actually welcomed the money. The real background stories that were going on at the moment the ‘crisis’ became so dire that the government stepped in were varied and dramatic. The Portfolio.com article I linked to below was the first I’d read that spelled out some of those stories.

All of the entities were at least stressed, but many still saw big business opportunities and jumped. The credit markets may have begun to freeze, but the wheeling and dealing was red hot. They were doing what savvy business people do: playing out the following months’ and years’ events in their heads in order to strategize.  They thought they saw what was about to occur and pulled the trigger on interesting and perhaps risky deals that were meant to set their institutions up for better positions or even big payoffs later.

…until Secretary Paulson, in the role of gargantuan business ‘doctor’, stomped in and forced the billions of ‘medicine’ down everybody’s gullets. The syrup may have poisoned a few business titans.

Who Got Screwed by the Bailout?

4. Wells Fargo–Dick Kovacevich

You know when your mom used to say, while denying you permission for something fun, “Would you jump off a ledge just because your friends jumped off a ledge?” Well, Dick Kovacevich’s friends all jumped off a ledge and he didn’t. But now he’s being punished right alongside all his beaten-up former friends.
 
According to several reports from inside the three-and-a-half hour-long meeting between the bank chiefs and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Monday afternoon, the Wells Fargo chairman voiced the loudest protest. Kovacevich argued that Wells Fargo intentionally avoided much of the subprime business that got its competitors in such a pickle. Even though Wells is about to absorb some of the most toxic assets around with its Wachovia acquisition, Kovacevich was adamant that it wouldn’t need the Treasury’s capital. In the end, he had no choice but to take it.

1. J.P. Morgan Chase — Jamie Dimon

2. Merrill Lynch — John Thain

3. Goldman Sachs — Lloyd Blankfein

Kovacevich and Wells begged Paulson not to force them to take $25 billion, but to no avail, shucks. The big three automakers and their thousands of union members begged for that much to survive, but were denied. Now, what do you think of the bailout? Oh, forgot–the automakers got a fractional ‘bailout’ from the President, but will have to beg again for more later. There, does it now make sense?  

(H/T–’big’ sister)