Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter Jesse Eisinger — he insists I write that intro every time I mention his name (heh heh) — has an interesting ProPublica/NYT column out this morning looking at the many empty appointments at key agencies in Washington DC:
“The administration has inexplicably left open the vice chairman for banking supervision, a new position at the Federal Reserve created by the Dodd-Frank Act, despite having a candidate that many people think is an obvious choice: Daniel K. Tarullo. The new Consumer Financial Products Board chairman is unnamed. There are some lower-level positions that don’t have candidates, including the head of the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research and the Financial Stability Oversight Council insurance post.
Perhaps most important, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is being headed by an acting comptroller, John Walsh, who took over the agency last August. Nine months have passed without a leader who might better reflect the Obama administration’s views on banking regulation, a time lag made worse by the office’s coddling of the banks even as they have acknowledged rampant abuse and negligence in the foreclosure process.”
You have to love this paragraph:
“Even low-level appointments are now deeply partisan affairs, the playthings of score-settling senators with memories like elephants and the social responsibility of hyenas (which probably insults hyenas).”
My solution? Go a little Seal Team 6 on the Senate minority GOP leadership. Tell them to sit down with the President’s list and hammer out a compromise. The alternative to obstructionism is to pull a page out of George W. Bush playbook and after 2 years of foot dragging, fill the full slate via recess appointments — including Elizabeth Warren as FCIC Chair.
Its time for the kiddies in DC to grow up and behave like adults.
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Source:
At a Time of Needed Financial Overhaul, a Leadership Vacuum
Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, May 18, 2011
http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/at-a-time-of-needed-financial-overhaul-a-leadership-vacuum/
Category: Politics, Regulation
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
My solution?
Get rid of all of those wasteful and useless agencies.
[...] On the utter lack of financial leadership in this era. (TBP) [...]
kudos to Jesse on the Pulitzer (hopefully, it’ll serve as a + example to others..)
though, w/this: “…Nine months have passed without a leader who might better reflect the Obama administration’s views on banking regulation…”
maybe, he should reflect on the possibility that those ‘empty Offices’ do, actually, “reflect the Obama administration’s views on banking regulation” ..
esp. given http://search.yippy.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&v%3Aproject=clusty&query=Where+is+U.+S.+Attorney+General+Eric+%22Bag%22+Holder%3F (ol “Bag” has been MIA–on the, whole, Financial Fraud/Racketeering prosecution-Front)
using Jesse’s ~parlance, the 82nd U.S. Attorney General is no ’82nd Airborne’
http://search.yippy.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&v%3Aproject=clusty&query=82nd+Airborne
Obama is as much a corporatist whore as anyone in government, so confronting the Senate wold be nothing more than Kabuki theatre/professional wrestling. Keeping that in mind, and by all evidence, functions essential to the economy are, and will continue to be, carried out extra-governmentally — by those private interests with something at stake and/or to gain. Any political infighting over appointments will be over what are largely, at this point, ceremonial positions. Our real leadership is occluded by the veil of legitimate/functional government.
Nobody but a stooge would want these jobs.
look what they did to Herz, and the feckless but well meaning Warren.
I still say O is missing a bet,
instead say i love all you country club real business guys,
its wall st i want to clean up…
but he would have to dump all the financial folks he’s hired
Geithner on down..he’d have to do that way befor nov 1012
and of course the Street money spigot to O gets chopped
and doubled for the other side
never mind, why am i even suggesting this?
You need to take the money out of politics. Every politician grandstands for more contributions (bribes). Conflict create controversy and thus more donations. Both parties are corrupt.
The irony of this is that the GOP has successfully portrayed Obama as a liberal, when actually he’s a conservative Democrat. Except in national security, Obama has shown a high degree (and I believe, excessive) of deference to procedure. The only thing is that Harry Reid is even worse–more conservative, and much less intelligent.
Think about it. If appointments were the #1 concern, then Reid would have supported filibuster reform at the beginning of the year. Hundreds of stalled appointments could have been voted on by now–yes or no.
But if we had filibuster reform and the return of majority rule in DC, what about the conservative Democrats? There’s a gang of 10 red-state Dems who control the Senate right now, and Harry Reid is their leader.
Democracy in the Senate would neuter the conservative Democrats, so Reid will never allow it. That’s one of the reasons I was rooting for Sharron Angle last year–anything to get rid of Reid.
Its time for the kiddies in DC to grow up and behave like adults.
The reason the people in DC look like kiddies to us is that we are trying to view their actions through our framework of what we think they should be doing. And we, the voters, have the unmitigated audacity to think that the people in DC work for us.
Well, they work for us no longer.
The people in DC work for corporations. The people in DC work for the entities who have the power to get them reelected, and the money to keep them in office (lobbying).
So long as the corporations control our electoral and governing processes with a nearly unlimited amount of money, Congress will do little to serve the constituents of the individual representatives.
“[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society,” – John Adams
Leave ‘em empty. It will reduce the tendency and ability to rush through “emergency” regulations that only serve to further reinforce the bulwark of bureaucracy. Don’t just _do_ something; stand there!
[...] No matter your thoughts on financial regulation having no one in leadership roles is an issue. (ProPublica via Big Picture) [...]
some things should be (re-)read..
“[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society,” – John Adams
~~
but, xnycpdx, really, John Adams? — to hear Today’s fops put it: “He’s soo 18thC. (What could He know?)”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fop
[Middle English, fool; probably akin to Middle English fob, trickster, cheat; see fob2.]