First, Tom Blumer demonstrates that he is a) in entirely over his head, and b) has no freaking idea what has been taking place in the financial sector for the last 30 years.
Even when they sharply criticize yours truly, I have tried in recent years to avoid getting unduly exercised over individual posts at other sites. They have their views, I have mine. It’s a (mostly) free country (for now).
I must carve out an exception to that stance because the individual objecting to my most recent PJM column (“October 14, 2008: The Day the Economy as We Knew It Died”): a) has accused me of “bald lies” while failing to successfully identify one; b) did so without having the integrity or basic decency to name me; c) criticized a column which deliberately focused on a narrow two-week time frame as “a particularly odious and sickening piece of crap” without the faintest understanding of my full take on the government-led, bank-assisted, political corruption-driven financial crisis we face and the several decades of history which led to it (completely irrelevant to this column, which will exclusively address the absence of “utter falsehood”); and d) deliberately made it about more than my work by indicating that “these people (in context: ‘at Pajamas Media’) need to be exposed as the liars they are.”
Now, I don’t think Blumer is as much a liar as he is a complete moron who understands nothing about banking, the economy, or the power structure of the US political system. I suspect he genuinely believes that the former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson forced the banks to accept TARP and “basically put guns to their heads”.
What Blumer is either too ignorant or too stupid to realize is that Paulson IS A CARD-CARRYING GOLDMANITE who was in the Bush Administration to protect the interests of Wall Street. His putting a gun to the heads of the banks and “forcing” them to accept TARP was exactly like forcing Brer Rabbit to be thrown in the briar patch. Congratulations, Tommy Boy, you’re not actually a liar, you’re just a clueless moron who doesn’t allow his ignorance to inhibit his expression of an uninformed and incorrect opinion.
But Karl doesn’t need my help in pointing out the many deficiencies of Blumen’s case:
You’re entitled to your opinions, whatever they may be. You’re not entitled to invent facts, and placing words inside quotation marks that claim to make a point that you in fact interpreted might have occurred from other sources without identifying them as your own belief as opposed to someone else’s actual words you are quoting falls into that category.
As for your opinion that the banks were “taken over”, I disagree. I argue that the banks in fact looted the people with the full cooperation and complicity of the Treasury, and my interpretation is backed by the actual words of the bill that were passed and how it was used, buttressed by the fact that Kashkari testified over a year later under oath that prior to final passage of TARP Paulson had already decided to inject capital into the banks and did not inform Congress of this change in the essential intent of the bill on the floor at the time. (CSPAN should still have archives of that testimony if you’re interested in it.) It is further buttressed by your own claimed source.
I was attempting to engage in a debate on the substance of the matter, which is the root of your claim rather than the minutia: You stated that our economy in large part is not growing because our government has basically taken it over via authoritarian acts, implying that were those acts to be reversed we’d be ok (or at least “better off.”)
You’re wrong.
Blumen, like Pajamas Media, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News, is desperately attempting to cast Washington as the bad guy when it is the Washington-Wall Street axis of pure evil that is the problem, and it is Wall Street that is the senior partner.