The Errors of Matt Taibbi. - Democratic Underground

FarCenter

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Dec-11-09 05:44 PM
Original message

The Errors of Matt Taibbi.

Matt Taibbi has done it again -- written a nightmare of a story for Rolling Stone on Obama's economic sell-out of his campaign. The piece is a factual mess, a conspiracy theorist's dream, doesn't even indict Obama for his real failures (which I'll discuss in a post later today) and of course invokes the cold hands of Bob Rubin like a bogeyman at every turn. This is pernicious for a lot of journalistic reasons, but politically it's bad for progressives beacuse conspiracy theories stand in the way of good policy analysis and good activism, replacing them with apathy and fear. Here we go:

<He goes on the explain the errors with respect to the following points>
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=12&year=2009&base_name=oh_matt_taibbi

Jamie Rubin.
Austan Goolsbee "didn't make the cut."
"Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama's policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party's platform."
Michael Froman.
"Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman."
"Jacob Lew, a former Citi colleague of Rubin's whom Obama named as deputy director at the State Department to focus on international finance."
Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House.
The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.
"Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around."
"Neil Barofsky, the inspector general charged with overseeing TARP, estimates that the total cost of the Wall Street bailouts could eventually reach $23.7 trillion."
"It's the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin's fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi."
"In the end, Frank not only agreed to exempt some 8,000 of the nation's 8,200 banks from oversight by the castrated-in-advance agency, leaving most consumers unprotected."
"A masterpiece of legislative chicanery, the measure would have given the White House permanent and unlimited authority to execute future bailouts of megaconglomerates like Citigroup and Bear Stearns."
"The new bailout authority also mandated that future bailouts would not include an exchange of equity 'in any form' — meaning that taxpayers would get nothing in return for underwriting Wall Street's mistakes."
"Even more outrageous, it specifically prohibited Congress from rejecting tax giveaways to Wall Street, as it did last year, by removing all congressional oversight of future bailouts."

<snip> http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=12&year=2009&base_name=oh_matt_taibbi