Posted on December 26, 2009, 2:54pm | Adrian Moore
Our crack aviation security system fails once again. Dozens of TSA agents were busy putting granny and those 5-year old twins through "additional screening" instead of focusing on probable threat, like this guy on the terror suspect list.
How about some actual, risk based airport security? Please?
Here is how it ought to be done. Here is how to put it in place.
All of Reason's stuff on aviation security is here.
Posted on December 24, 2009, 2:54pm | Anthony Randazzo
The national debt limit—as distinct from the federal deficit—was increased to $12.4 trillion this morning, right after the Senate voted to pass a landmark health care bill. The health care bill has to be merged with a House version, but the debt bill will go straight to the President, as it was passed by the House last week:
The Senate voted Thursday to raise the ceiling on the government debt to $12.4 trillion, a massive increase over the current limit and a political problem that President Barack Obama has promised to address next year.
The Senate's rare Christmas Eve vote, 60-39, follows House passage last week and raises the debt ceiling by $290 billion... The bill permits the Treasury Department to issue enough bonds to fund the government's operations and programs until mid-February. The Senate will vote again on the issue Jan. 20.
Obama must sign the measure into law to prevent a market-rattling, first-ever default on U.S. obligations. The government piled up a record $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009 to counter a meltdown in financial markets and help bring the nation out of its worst recession in seven decades.
Read the whole AP story here.
Posted on December 24, 2009, 10:39am | Adrian Moore
When Congress has found time not occupied with nationalizing healthcare, they have introduced a series of laws designed to curtail suburban living. This column by Wendell Cox explains why that is a mistake.
The Mythical “Demise” of the Suburbs: Nearly since the pace of suburbanization increased, following World War II, critics have been foretelling the demise of the suburbs. During the 1950s and 1960s, some planning “visionaries” such as Peter Blake were predicting widespread municipal bankruptcies in the suburbs and for residents. This was occurring even as other urban planners were tearing up cities with urban renewal projects and freeways
The Real Decline of the Cities: In fact, it has more generally been the central cities that nearly went bankrupt, not the suburbs. Examples include New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and that jewel of municipal consolidation, Indianapolis, rescued last year by $1 billion in state taxpayer funds. There are hopeful signs of a renaissance in most central cities, however their financial difficulties remain intractable and large swaths of their land area remain desolate. Meanwhile, the lawns were mowed in the suburbs, the houses painted and a strong sense of community developed among residents that was far too subtle for the prophets of suburban doom to perceive.
He goes on to examine in some detail greenhouse gas emissions from suburban vs. compact develeopment.
But a funny thing happened on the way toward GHG inspired desurburbanization. Some academics actually began looking at data. The reality of the suburbs turned out to be rather different from that portrayed by the conventional wisdom of the planners.
He concludes noting President Obama's trip to Home Depot,
The President explained why insulation was sexy, noting that saving money is sexy. Indeed, saving money is what the suburbs are about. The economic research is clear that housing costs are far less where suburban development is not limited by the compact development strategies thatartificially create land scarcity. That’s why places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and Houston, without compact development, had little, if any housing bubble, while housing bubbles of economy-wrecking proportions occurred in California and Florida, with their compact development.
Yes, Mr. President, insulation is sexy. Saving money is sexy. And, the suburbs are sexy.
Posted on December 24, 2009, 9:39am | Anthony Randazzo
The Senate version of health care reform passed this morning, with a little fanfare from Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid. From Politico:
At 7:16 a.m., the Senate passed on a 60-39 party line vote a sweeping health care bill that will tighten insurance regulations, provide insurance for 31 million more Americans and cost $871 billion over the next decade. "This is for my friend Ted Kennedy, aye," said Sen. Robert Byrd as he cast his vote.
Clearly exhausted, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid mistakenly voted no before changing his vote to yes, which got a laugh in the chamber, especially from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. After the vote, Reid joked, "I spent a very restless night last night trying to figure out how I could show some bipartisanship and I think I was able to accomplish that for a few minutes." [...]
With Vice President Joe Biden presiding over the session, Democrats gathered in the chamber before sunrise on the day before Christmas to cast a vote long in coming but in the end, hardly a surprise, a 60-39 tally that was the fourth time in as many days that Democrats proved they could muster the winning margin.
The bill now moves to conference between the House and Senate with huge issues to smooth out, including the public option, Medicare reforms, and the funding of abortions. Another matter to be discussed will be the endless debate over cost savings. The President has promised he will only sign a bill that is deficit neutral. But if the final bill passed includes stuff like this below story, he may be put in a pickle:
The Congressional Budget Office challenged claims by health-care overhaul proponents that Medicare savings in Senate legislation would help finance expanded coverage and postpone the bankruptcy of the medical program for the elderly.
The nonpartisan agency said the $246 billion it projected the legislation would save Medicare can’t both finance new programs and help pay future expenses for elderly covered under the federal program.
Nor could those savings be used to extend the solvency of Medicare, set to run out of money in 2017, the budget office said in a letter to Senate Republicans.
“What we’ve seen is a colossal manipulation” by Democrats “of the accounting scores of CBO” and the independent actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, said Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican who requested the analysis from CBO. He called the letter “a potential game-changer.”
The estimated Medicare savings in the legislation overstate “the improvement in the government’s fiscal position,” the CBO said in the letter.
Read the rest of the Politico story on passage here.
Read the rest of the Bloomberg story on the CBO here.
Posted on December 23, 2009, 5:17pm | Samuel Staley
The Center for the American Experiment has just published a useful and insightful set of essays on inner-city entrepreneurship. The symposium was motivated by the following question: What would it take for you to start up or expand a business in a low-income neighborhood?
Mitch Pearlstein, the center's executive director, asked 20 people with insight into this problem to answer the question in short, pithy responses. According to introduction,
Why this new American Experiment symposium? For a variety of reasons, starting with the assumption that unless commerce in a neighborhood—or at least in its vicinity—is vibrant, chances are little else will be either, including income levels, public safety, and graduation rates, to pick just three gauges. If one were to focus more specifically on families, it’s impossible to imagine how marriage can be re-institutionalized in many places unless many more men are economically successful enough, causing many more women (in sociologist William Julius Wilson’s famous locution) to view them as "marriageable." Completing the circle, imagining good data and good news is tantamount to impossible if large numbers of men (and women and children) continue living in communities largely bereft of going and growing businesses.
The symposium includes essays from 20 business owners & operators, analysts, and activists (including yours truly). They are an easy read, and provide unusual insight into the problems and challenges faced by inner-city entrepreneurs.
Kudos to Mitch for putting such an eclectic and useful set of papers together!
Posted on December 23, 2009, 2:57pm
Reason.com Editor Nick Gillespie takes part in NPR's look back at the worst of the decade.
Some great minds conceived some awful ideas in the last ten years. As we close out 2009, guests share their picks for the worst ideas of the decade, from Sarbanes-Oxley and torture memos, to the Blackberry and TV dance competitions.
Posted on December 23, 2009, 2:50pm | Robert Poole
My new column for the Christian Science Monitor:
Thanks to the recession, air travel delays are down from the highs of recent years. But even if flights this holiday season aren't nightmarish, experts project far worse delays in coming years, unless fundamental changes are made.
Delays would not have become a problem if air travel had remained the province of the relatively well-off - as it was in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. In those days, a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) tightly controlled which airlines could fly which routes, and strictly limited competition to keep fares high and profits virtually guaranteed. But in 1978, thanks in part to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, Congress deregulated air travel, permitting real competition on routes and fares.
The result has been rightly called the "democratization of air travel," as competition created openings for low-fare airlines such as Southwest, JetBlue, AirTran, and others. Air travel became affordable to just about everyone, and studies show that consumers benefit to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year.
When airline deregulation was enacted, there was lots of "slack" in the infrastructure; airports and the air traffic control system had lots of excess capacity. But the intellectual father of airline deregulation, economist and CAB chairman Alfred Kahn, warned at the time that airline competition would so stimulate the market that airports and air traffic control would get overwhelmed - unless Congress took action to enable them to become more nimble and better able to grow.
Unfortunately, Congress ignored Mr. Kahn's warning. Air traffic grew and grew, but the air traffic control (ATC) system plodded along as a stodgy, bureaucratic government operation. It gradually introduced better displays and more modern computers, but most of these projects were delivered years late and way over budget. Airports were generally better managed, but remained passive when airlines scheduled far more flights at busy times of day than their runways could handle, leading to ever-longer delays in major cities.
As recently as the early 1990s, more than 81 percent of flights arrived on time, according to US Department of Transportation figures. By 2007, that number had plunged to 73 percent. Thus, prior to the current recession, about 1 out of every 4 flights arrived more than 15 minutes late.
During the 1990s, other countries began reforming the way their ATC systems were governed and funded. The common diagnosis was that ATC is essentially a high-tech service business that doesn't really fit the model of a government department that depends on annual tax funding and micromanagement.
Instead, they decided that ATC should be operated like a business, charging its aviation customers directly for its services and able to go to the bond market to raise capital for large-scale modernization investments. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, and Britain all adopted this model, setting up ATC as a self-supporting entity run by a board of directors and regulated for safety by the national air-safety regulator.
Posted on December 23, 2009, 2:21pm | Anthony Randazzo
Bernard Condon and Stevenson Jacobs write for the AP:
Unlike big-city bankers, Stan Wilmoth didn't make lots of dumb loans during the boom. After the crash, he accepted not a dime of taxpayer money for his bank. His salary? "Substantially less" than the $1 million the former head of Merrill Lynch spent remodeling his office, he says. He credits his grandfather, a Protestant minister, with giving him "moral fiber."
But judging from the rhetoric coming out of the Obama administration, Wilmoth, the folksy 58-year-old president of Heritage Bank of Reno, Nev., should be scorned, not praised. His sin? He's shirking his patriotic duty by not lending enough money to his community.
Read the whole AP story here. (HT: FinReg21)
Last week President Obama met with the top bank CEOs in the country and asked them to lend more. Why? To stimulate the economy. Of course he has also told them that if they return to the risky lending practices of housing boom period that he will sick new government agencies on them and break apart their businesses. He might do that anyway. But nevertheless, the mixed message from the White House is increasingly disturbing. It is a double PR win for the President—tell bankers to give more to local communities and give them a stern verbal shakedown that all of Main Street supposedly wants to yell at Wall Street. But bankers can't do both, and they should ignore the meddling from Washington on both fronts.
If banks aren't lending right now it is for two reasons: either they don't feel comfortable returning to wide scale lending given the shaky market and are trying to stabilize their businesses, or they are being more prudent with who they lend to. We can't use the lending standards of the past few years as the benchmark for when the market returns to full free flowing credit. Those were "bad" years. Lending standards were too loose. It would be a mistake to try and get back to that time of cheap credit because we'd just make the same mistakes as before.
Posted on December 22, 2009, 5:49pm | Anthony Randazzo
The Tax Foundation has a new report out looking at the changes in state tax law this year. Director of State Projects Joe Henchman writes:
During most of this decade, state lawmakers responded to surging tax revenue by boosting state spending growth to an unsustainable level. Now that boom has turned to bust, significant structural budget deficits have opened up in many states. Throughout 2009, state officials struggled to close these gaps. They face three choices to meet their budgetary obligations.
One option is to raise taxes. Officials generally claim that the budget cannot or should not be cut any further, and that the benefits of tax increases for the state budget outweigh the economic damage they can do in an economic downturn. Most states taking this option aimed their taxes at specific groups such as high-income earners, smokers, or out-of-state business transactions. These revenue sources may provide short-term relief but can cause substantial economic harm to the state economy in the medium and long term.
The opposite approach is the second option: roll back spending growth commitments made during previous years and take actions to spend no more than the state brings in. Arkansas and Indiana have taken this path.
The final and politically easiest option is to use one-time funds and accounting gimmicks to paper over the current state budget shortfall, but without significantly curtailing spending. This irresponsible approach amounts to praying that the economy will soon recover and bring a surge of tax revenue. California has taken this path for several years in addition to raising already-high taxes, building up to a crisis in 2009 when the state issued IOUs, borrowed, seized funds from local governments, and enacted requirements that companies increase withholding to 110% of what workers owed-in essence an interest-free loan to the state.
Other factors in these decisions have been the draw down of rainy day funds by most states (Texas notably has several billion dollars remaining), the availability of one-time stimulus aid but with strings that forbid cuts to huge swaths of state budgets, and increasing abuse of state Medicaid matching funds as a way to shift state general spending to the federal taxpayer.
The report goes on to detail tax law changes in these categories:
The report also looks at miscellaneous taxes like D.C.'s plastic bag tax and proposed obesity taxes. See all the juicy numbers and details here.
Posted on December 22, 2009, 2:53pm | Samuel Staley
I have a brief post on the National Review's blog "The Corner" today discussing the recent revisions to Third Quarter 2009 growth estimates by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The downward revision was larger than expected, and may call into question the validity and usefulness of future estimates from the BEA. As I note in the post at The Corner:
However, this was revised downward from the November preliminary estimate of 2.8 percent. And this was revised downward from its "advanced" estimate of 3.5 percent. In other words, the best estimate of the change in output shaved more than a whole percentage point off the preliminary forecasts. That's a big hit in terms of forecasting error, and it may well bring into question the reliability of future forecasts and estimates from the BEA. This may unfortunately fuel speculation in some quarters that the agency is no longer acting independently and is rigging at least the preliminary forecast numbers to favor the administration.
As a result, much of the growth that occurred was due to the increase in consumer expenditures that resulted from the Cash 4 Clunkers program, which really just advanced spending and didn't spur meaningful investment. Thus, there very well may not have been any real growth in the third quarter; the growth numbers may well be a statistical mirage.
My colleague Anthony Randazzo's post on the "effectiveness" of the Cash 4 Clunkers program are worth another read in this context.
Posted on December 22, 2009, 1:51pm | Leonard Gilroy
In an editorial yesterday, The Olympian weighed in on Senate Bill 6201, a bill sponsored by Washington State Senators Tim Sheldon and Curtis King that would privatize the state's liquor retail monopoly:
Those who support privatization say the state Liquor Control Board, which manages the wholesale and retail sale of liquor, is a relic of the Prohibition era. They argue that the state agency has simply outlived its usefulness and that the sale of liquor should be in the hands of private entrepreneurs.
Perhaps their best argument is a philosophical one – that the state shouldn't be in the liquor promotion and liquor enforcement business at the same time.
On one hand, the state needs to boost revenue to fill the tax coffers and to do so must sell an ever-increasing amount of alcohol. On the other hand, the state wants to curb alcohol abuse and sales of liquor to minors.
The two missions of a single agency are inherently at odds.
Opponents of privatization say hundreds of family-wage jobs will be lost and that's particularly heartless at a time when the nation is in the throes of a recession and new jobs are scarce.
On a certain level, privatizing liquor sales sounds like a logical step for the state to take. But there are many questions lawmakers must answer – especially on financial implications for the state treasury and liquor store patrons.
Sheldon's legislation is worthy of debate and serious legislative consideration.
Last week, the Washington State Auditor's Office wet the whistle even further in a new report, "Opportunities for Washington." Among its conclusions was that the state could increase revenue from liquor sales and distribution by up to $350 million over five years beginning in fiscal year 2012 if it sold the state distribution center and auctioned liquor licenses to private retailers.
It also makes a very salient semantic point by rebranding the 18 so-called "control states"—states like Washington where government has a monopoly on the liquor retail business and adds a markup to the price before liquor is taxed—as what they really are: monopoly states. In these states, what you see are government-run liquor enterprises that abuse their monopoly status through excessive taxation.
Privatization would get these enterprises out of government while preserving its regulatory and oversight functions, what many would argue are the proper role of government. Certainly there's nothing inherently governmental about selling liquor, because 32 states don't do it that way.
Posted on December 22, 2009, 9:53am | Samuel Staley
The American Dream Coalition has once again compiled some excellent links to transportation policy news through their weeklys newsletter The American Dream Communicator:
Mobility & Transportation
18th Annual Highway Report – Reason Foundation
New York Transit Woes Demonstrate Need for Reform – Sam Staley, Out of Control Policy Blog
Urban planners romanticize immobility (audio) – Randal O’Toole, Cato Institute
Urban planning and technology can change commuter ways – Financial Times
Plug-in hybrid subsidies are a bad deal for taxpayers – Washington Post
Infrastructure Politics Veering Right – Autopia
Winona could host futuristic public transportation model – LaCrosse Tribune, Minnesota
Can Entrepreneurs Drive People Movers to Success? – Harvard Business School
Houston commuters catch rides with strangers to save time, money – WHOU.com, Houston
Maryland ICC to be first all-electronic tollroad in eastern US – TollRoadNews
Debate panelists split over buses, broader impact of transit investments – Transportation4America
Colorado: 2010 Ballot Measure Would Slash Car Taxes – TheNewspaper.com
A Streetcar Named Monorail – LBPOST.com, Long Beach, California
Norfolk light rail is over budget, opening delayed to 2011 – Virginia Pilot
Link light-rail ridership dipped in November – Seattle Times
Phoenix Drivers Confused by Light Rail – Governing.com
Local residents want a fence built around the Light Rail for safety – WTKR.com, Virginia
VTA Accident Kills One Person – KCBS.com, San Jose
MTA to fire light rail operators in accident that killed 2 teens – Baltimore Sun
Elevated train derails in Chicago; minor injuries reported – Breaking News 24/7, Chicago
Attorney: Bus stabbing suspect is mentally ill – San Jose Mercury News
MTA worker faces charges of stealing more than $400,000 – Baltimore Sun
Backpedaling: New report raises questions about ‘Bike City USA’ – Willamette Week, Portland
Roll up the pavement: Gravel is making a comeback – Associated Press
Getting Beyond Petroleum Won't Be Easy – SciTech Today
Posted on December 21, 2009, 3:47pm | Leonard Gilroy
The North Tarrant Express—the first of two privately-financed toll road megaprojects planned for North Texas—has reached financial close, achieving a major milestone for the $2 billion project. Michael Lindenberger at the Dallas Morning News reports:
North Texas' first private toll road took a big step toward completion Thursday, as a team of firms led by Spain-based toll road developer Cintra announced it had secured the financing needed for the $2 billion project in Tarrant County.
Construction of the 13-mile North Tarrant Express will begin by late 2010, and will eventually rebuild existing main lanes on stretches of Interstate 820 and State Highway 183, as well as add two new tolled lanes that will produce revenue for the firms for 52 years.
The project, also the first to install so-called managed lanes in the area, will feature a mix of rebuilt free lanes, improved frontage roads, and new paid lanes where the tolls will rise dramatically as traffic increases. [...]
Cintra's partners in developing the North Tarrant Express include Paris-based Meridiam Infrastructure, an investment fund established in 2006 to invest in privatized infrastructure projects, and the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System. Together, those entities provided the bulk of about $427 million in equity investment in the $2 billion project. The fire and police pension fund invested about $43 million, project spokesman Robert Hinkle said.
Despite the recession and tumultuous financial markets, infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPPs) are alive and well in the United States. North Tarrant is the third PPP in the highway sector to reach financial close this year, after the I-595 express lanes in Fort Lauderdale and Port of Miami Tunnel (see here for more on those projects).
With the growing realization among policymakers that PPPs like this—a $2 billion project the state would not have otherwise been able to afford anytime soon, if ever—allow governments to do get more bang for the transportation dollar, I'd expect that we'll see interest continue to spread, as I testified in Pennsylvania last week.
More on North Tarrant Express project here and here, as well as TollRoadsNews.com.
» Reason Foundation's Annual Privatization Report 2009
» Reason Foundation's Transportation Research and Commentary
Posted on December 21, 2009, 2:34pm | Leonard Gilroy
Some privatization news highlights from the last two weeks that haven't been covered elsewhere on the blog:
FEDERAL
STATE & LOCAL:
INTERNATIONAL:
» Reason Foundation's Annual Privatization Report 2009
» Reason Foundation's Privatization Research and Commentary
Posted on December 21, 2009, 1:35pm | Leonard Gilroy
USA Today's Larry Copeland writes today on the growing phenomenon of toll roads in the South, which are increasingly taking the form of high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes—and even networks of HOT lanes, as in Atlanta's case:
Toll roads — or at least plans for them — are becoming as common in Dixie as pecan pie, pickups and porch swings.
• Georgia is planning an extensive network of HOT lanes on expressways in metropolitan Atlanta, including Interstates 85, 75, 575, 285 and 20. The only one that's "a certainty" is a 14-mile stretch of I-85, says Georgia Department of Transportation spokesman David Spears. That project, which will convert an existing high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane in each direction to a HOT lane with variable tolls, is expected to be operational in 2011 at a cost of about $147 million. Plans call for additional HOT lanes on 15 miles of I-75, 11 miles of I-575, 9.5 miles of I-285 and 6 miles of I-20.
• Alabama is planning its first state toll road, a $710 million project that will add four toll lanes on a 16-mile stretch of U.S. 280 in Birmingham. The highway, designed to carry 50,000 vehicles daily, serves 97,000, and that number is expected to rise to 140,000 in the next decade, says Tony Hill of the Alabama Department of Transportation. "This is the best option we've been able to come up with … to relieve congestion along that stretch of 280."
• Mississippi is planning a toll road linking downtown Jackson with Jackson-Evers International Airport and the eastern suburbs. Progress on the 12-mile project — the state's first toll road — has been temporarily delayed by the recession.
• South Carolina is studying adding toll or HOV lanes to some of its interstates.
• North Carolina's first modern toll road, the Triangle Expressway, is an 18.8-mile system now under construction in Wake and Durham counties around Raleigh-Durham. The $1 billion project, portions of which open for traffic in 2011, will collect tolls electronically.
• Tennessee recently authorized limited tolling. No existing roads can be tolled, which would prevent the state from converting toll-free lanes reserved for high-occupancy vehicles into HOT lanes.
I'd also add in Texas, where you have three toll road concessions underway in the SH-130 segments 5 & 6 project (Austin to Seguin), North Tarrant Express (Metroplex), and I-635 managed lanes (Metroplex) projects, in which the private sector is bringing roughly $6 billion of the total $7 billion in needed financing to the table to deliver some needed capacity expansions and service improvements.
And let's not forget Virginia either, which has the I-495 Beltway HOT lanes and Midtown Tunnel projects currently either underway or in procurement.
Reason Foundation published the first policy studies on high-occupancy toll lanes in the U.S. and has researched them for over a decade since—these materials and more are available in our transportation research archive. Also, see our 2007 FAQ on HOT lanes for an overview of this topic, and our 2006 study on reducing congestion in Atlanta, which laid conceptual groundwork for the HOT network plans advancing in Georgia today.
Posted on December 21, 2009, 12:30pm | Anthony Randazzo
Sens. John McCain and Maria Cantwell want to bring back Glass-Steagall to prevent another financial crisis. From Bloomberg:
“Under our proposal, too-big-to-fail banks would be forced to return to the business of conventional banking, leaving the task of risk taking or management to others,” McCain, an Arizona Republican, said at a Washington news conference. A former bank regulator said splitting up companies is “crazy.”
McCain and Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, join other lawmakers in Congress proposing to reinstate the 1933 law, repealed a decade ago by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that led to a rise in conglomerates including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. active in retail banking, insurance and proprietary trading. Legislation to reinstate the ban was introduced today in the House.
Progessive economists are sure to be thrilled, but it is a terrible idea.
First, the economic growth America experienced over the past decade was due in large part to repealling Glass-Steagall. While a lot of people have lost their homes, they and many more never would have gotten them in the first place without the increase in competition that came about through Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
Second, just because banks became over leveraged with weak lending standards and bad risk models, doesn't mean they had too. While the repeal of Glass-Steagall contributed to creating an environment where the crisis happened, it wasn't a foregone conclusion from the deregulation bill. Banks could have still acted more prudently with the advantages of Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
Third, European markets, which were much more intensively regulated and had Glass-Steagall-styled regulations were not protected from the crisis. It should not be simply assumed that a return to Glass-Steagall will be better for the economy.
Read Bloomberg's whole story on this.
Posted on December 20, 2009, 3:29pm | Anthony Randazzo
Charlie Gasparino, recent author of The Sellout, writes in the NY Post last week:
The president's meeting yesterday with the CEOs of the largest banks was nearly a lovefest, I'm told by attendees. Yes, White House spinmeisters advertised the gathering as a chance for Obama to channel the public's disgust over Wall Street's celebrating while Main Street still suffers 10 percent unemployment, thanks largely to Wall Street's bungling. But that's not what he did. [...]
So there were no surprises for the likes of Jaime Dimon of JP Morgan, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley or Citigroup's Richard Parsons. Said one CEO who attended: "I expected to be taken to the woodshed, but the tone was quite the opposite."
Said another senior exec with knowledge of the meeting: "The whole thing was so telegraphed that not much was accomplished, other than giving Obama a PR stunt . . . He might have sounded mean on '60 Minutes,' but during the meeting he was a hell of a lot nicer."
Read more here.
©2012 The Reason Foundation. All rights reserved.
3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Suite 400 Los Angeles, CA 90034 (310) 391-2245
Please email feedback@reason.org if you have questions about this Web site.
