President Obama Chumps Donald Trump and the Birthers

Today's topic at my blog "Resurgence" on BigThink.com:

President Obama Chumps Donald Trump and the Birthers




Donald Trump has been running around the countryside, playing the CEO of Village Idiot, Inc. to the hilt these last few weeks, and our lazy, unprincipled national media corps has hung right with him, broadcasting every inane, bombastic utterance that explodes from his mouth. I figured President Obama was going to release his birth certificate at some point, although, for my money, I would have waited a little longer, just to keep Karl Rove from sleeping at night as this cancerous obsession with the legitimacy of our President’s citizenship ate away at any chances the GOP had to regain the White House.



Read More...

BigThink.com is a global forum connecting people and ideas.

You can access hundreds of hours of direct, unfiltered interviews with today's leading thinkers, movers and shakers, and, best of all, respond in kind. You can respond to the interviewee, respond to a responder or throw your own question or idea into the ring.

Quit Waving The Damn Flag And Get Real About Immigration

Everybody is trying to make it to the weekend and the president is still grinding away, with a speech yesterday guaranteed to open up debates from coast to coast during this most patriotic of weekends.

But if we could quit getting caught up in all the god damn flag waving for a minute, we might really be able to see more clearly why this is a problem, and why doing more of what we are doing now is not possible.

Every house in my neighborhood was built in part by illegal immigrant labor. If you live in a house in just about any metro area in the country that was built in the last twenty years, yours was too. This labor allowed you to buy a bigger house for less money - whether it was ten percent less or twenty percent less or some number somewhere in between I don't know, but it should be obvious to anyone who knows how to operate a basic calculator that paying less than market wages translated into a benefit for the builder and the homeowner.

BY the time I return, illegal immigrants with leaf blowers will have cleared my neighborhoods streets of debris.

The golf courses I passed this morning all employ their own armies of illegal immigrants to keep their fairways and their greens cut.

The restaurant where I ate a bacon biscuit had several illigal immigrants working in the back prepping food orders and washing dishes.

Squadrons of illegal immigrants descend on the houses I pass everyday to clean them, or repair their roofs, or paint them, or lay sod, or any number of tasks that keep an oasis of Republican rectitude looking crisp and clean.

As Americans - not just Republicans, or Democrats, but AMERICANS - we will lie to ourselves so much it should be listed as an official pathological disease category by the Psychological Association.

We cannot and will not pay the hundreds of billions of dollars a year to completely secure the border and aggressively deport any and all illegal immigrants.

If we did, the people who depend on this cheap labor would squawk their heads off via their lobbyists, PR people and fake political action groups.

The good thing about not being the president is not having to deal with everything. I have done no research on the illegal immigrant problem, and I am heavily inclined to follow the rule of law.

But unless we want to leave this issue in the "permanent national complaint" category, we have got to quit bullshitting ourselves about our moral purity and get real - we are in a symbiotic relationship with 15 million to 20 million people who are an integral part of our daily lives.

And since all our principles seem to evaporate whenever we can get something we want cheaper, we need to act like real capitalists and come up with a capitalist solution, rather than one cooked up in a church pulpit or a political rally.

The president is right about making these people citizens, but he can't tell Americans the real reason why this is the only answer we are willing to pay for. He can't tell Americans that we are prone to say one thing and do another, because that's not what we elect our presidents to do.

Is this is an easy answer? No. Do I like it? No. But there are a lot of things in life I don't like that I deal with because it is the best that can be done under the circumstances.

Even in Arizona, where antipathy against illegal immigrants is high, and new laws seem to hit the books daily to eradicate them, I don't see any mass firings of illegal immigrants. Any groundswell of support AT ALL from those who even as I write this are preparing pay envelopes to hand out later this afternoon to their no documents required employees, employees they are counting on to return to work next week, and the week after, and the week after that so the rest of us can continue to get the stuff we want at as cheap a price as we possibly can.

But since I'm not the president, I can tell you why most of us, when it comes to immigration, are full of shit. Until you start tearing the sheetrock out of your house that was put up by illegal immigrant hands, until you start stripping the paint off of your house that was painted on there by illegal immigrant hands, until you start stripping the shingles off your roof that were nailed in place by illegal immigrant hands, until you stop eating at restaurants that use illegal immigrant labor, or refuse to eat food tended and picked by illegal immigrant hands...

...you need to put down that damn flag and start trying to learn some Spanish.

Hill Harper Checkmates Negative State Of The Union Spin

The best moment during the commentary after President Barack Obama's State Of The Union speech last night was during an exchange on the Larry King Show between Hill Harper and two Republican political strategists. Larry King had opened the door for the GOP operatives with a softball question -- what did they think about the president's message? The two practically began talking over each other, they were so intent on getting their standard talking points across, as if they got paid for every negative phrase they said on the air.

Harper, who was live in the studio, reared back in his chair, raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, as if he were saying "are you finished yet?" with his eyes. When King turned to Harper for a response, Harper looked coolly into the camera and asked the two, "if you don't like what the president is saying, what are your solutions?"

The twosome responded by continuing their original line of attack.

The more they talked, the more ridiculous they looked, until even Larry King had to break in and ask them if they were going to answer the question.

I don't know why the PEOPLE ON TV WHO GET PAID BIG BUCKS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT POLITICS are so concerned with counting the number of times a word like "jobs" or a phrase like "the economy" was used. You would think they are ESPN sports analysts who are about to tell you "he broke the single term record for most pregnant pauses in a speech" or something else just as stupid. The most eloquently delivered, most carefully prepared speech in the world doesn't mean jack shit if there is no one or no way to implement it.

Since we're on sports analogies, I've got one I use whenever I talk to someone about my hometown Falcons and their on-field woes -- "instead of trading the players, what we need to do is trade the owners".

The room was electric last night, with all eyes on the man of the hour. Obama worked the microphone like owned the room. He was conversational.  He was professorial.  He was confessional. He was charming, and roguish, and Father Knows Best, sometimes in the same sentence. 

And all I heard about for the next two hours was the same old bullshit analysis from the same old people, as if the dramatic effect of the president acting large and in charge for a change didn't mean a damn thing.

A really really really big part of our problem in this country is the people who tell the story of what happened, what is happening, and what should happen next. We are back to the narrative I am obsessed with this year, not because I'm a writer, but because it is the perspective of this narrative that determines in large part what we are willing to believe and why we may be willing to take action.

Hill Harper is out there every day, helping in his own way to reshape the narrative that binds us all.

Thank you, Mr. Harper, for bringing a little sanity last night into what was otherwise a total waste of political analysis.

How Far Should Black Critics Go With President Obama?

President Obama went on a European vacation, and all we got were some pictures. I guess I'll have to take a cue here from ESPN, the master of made up statistics - "Larry Bird is the most accurate inbound passer of all time" - and declare the Obamas "the tallest American presidential couple of all time." The buildup for this trip was so big it was hard to believe that the world leaders only met for a day. I imagine they wanted to make sure they got back home in time to see the world leader of golf try to snag another green jacket at the Masters in Augusta this weekend.

Then again, I guess it couldn't take too long for them to all announce "we're broke as hell too." I'll leave the parsing of promises that won't be kept to the pros at the Washington Post and The New York Times who get paid the big bucks to tell us, in euphemisms and anecdotes that we don’t understand half the time, why the majority of us don’t really understand the nuances of foreign diplomacy most of the time.

What I want to get into today is the debate that is brewing among the black critics of the Obama Administration.

• How much criticism is too much?
• Can you criticize the president and still keep your Afro-American I.D. card?
• How critically are black people willing to examine the inaction the president has opted for on numerous occasions?

I've been in online writing groups for years. The only reason they exist is to bring writers together to help each other get better by reading and criticizing each other's work. The first critique I got on my favorite writers workshop, Scrawl, stung quite a bit. I'd been writing in a vacuum on and off for a few years, and it showed. But I hung in there, and submitted another story, and then another. Meanwhile, I began critiquing the work of other writers. Doing the critiques, I learned early on that the way to get someone whose work I didn't think was very good to read my stuff was to address their literary deficiencies with some concrete actions, suggestions that were in some cases the same techniques I used to give life to my own work.

Many of us feel that in some ways President Barack Obama and his family are a cherished part of the African American collective, the same way the writers in my writing group felt that the work they submitted for review was an important representation of their artistic perspective. Which means that we who have dubbed ourselves cultural critics owe it to our new president to be as honest and as forthright as possible about his shortcomings as we are about his strengths. What we have to do is be wary of efforts by the mainstream media to delegitimize our commentary.

How much criticism is too much?

It's almost impossible to create a melody with just one note, let alone a whole song. When the critic begins to sound like a one note nancy, the way Tavis Smiley did last year, it's too much. But when the president is having a bad week, or a bad month, it is what it is. The best hitters in baseball strike out more than they hit the ball. The president is kind of in the same boat. Calling a strikeout after an unsuccessful at-bat is expected. But every solid base hit is not a fluke, or a lapse by the pitcher, or an unforced error. When President Obama gets some good wood on the ball, call it "good wood on the ball."

Can you criticize the president and still keep your Afro-American I.D. card?

This metaphorical membership card, not to be confused with the "race card", which is one of the funniest media-fostered oxymorons I've ever heard, does have a similar intent - to place restrictive boundaries around those upon whom these designations are conferred. If you are having a problem with the allegiance to President Obama versus your allegiance to your perceived peer group, you need to think about this - he may look like us all of the time, but he stands for us for only a small part of the time that he is the president. This metaphorical membership card business is more about how you think than who you are. You might not be able to leave home without American Express, but this 'black card" is one you can leave behind.


How critically are black people willing to examine the inaction the president has opted for on numerous occasions?

This is probably the most important area of all. When the president does not address certain issues that disproportionately affect African Americans, it may be for a variety of reasons - lack of political capital, lack of emphasis by his staffers who put together his briefing books, or simply that there are other issues that are crowding the president's bandwidth. It really doesn't matter what the reason is, though, because our responsibility to ourselves should trump any urge to submerge our needs in order to make him look good. For instance, there are many homes in poor and working class black neighborhoods that have been flipped over and over again until they were sucked dry of their equity by unscrupulous investors who took advantage of the relaxed lending standards, or in some cases, committed outright mortgage fraud.

These empty houses, which are a significant part of the "toxic assets" the banks are complaining about, aren't moving, even with new investors out there who are willing to bring as much as half of the purchase price to the table, because the lenders are not willing to write down the debts on these houses to levels that can support current appraisal values. This is an issue which needs to be addressed right now - the people left in these neighborhoods are now being held hostage by redlining because the lenders who are willing to write new loans for buyers won't do business in zip codes with a high number of foreclosed properties. And if the president isn't willing to use his bully pulpit to do something about it, we need to aggravate him and his staff until he does.

Cliches are cliches because they are overused metaphors, but we use continue to use them because they are one of the most efficient distillations of the essence of a literal truth. So I will leave you with my final reason why we need to criticize the president - "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", no matter what color they are.

What A Toxic Asset Looks Like Up Close

We've had a good time, celebrating the election and inauguration of Barack Obama, our nation's first black president. A lot of us African Americans are still luxuriating in that post inaugural feelgood haze, an elixir so powerful that it has many of us seeing the famous metaphorical glass as half full for the first time in our lives, even as America faces what will prove to be one of its greatest economic challenges ever. I see a lot of commentary on the political end of the web, both from those who feel as good as we do about this momentous event to those who feel that the country is about to go to hell in a handbasket because the man in the White House is black.

But the problems this country has right now, which by extension are the same problems a lot of African Americans are having, started in the housing markets, with creative mortgage loans that kept a housing boom going long after it should have leveled off. The loans themselves were higher risks, but the subprime mortgage markets have always accounted for these risks by pricing the loans at higher interest rates to compensate for their lower repayment levels. These loans have been around for years. But until the 90's, no one in their right mind would have dreamed of creating an entire class of investment securities that gambled on securitized payment streams from these loans.

These used to be portfolio loans, the kind of paper that the lenders who made them had to hold onto for years before anyone might take a chance on buying them. Even the securitization of bundles of these loans wasn't a bad thing - it was the manner in which the smart guys on Wall Street figured out how to put enough lipstick on these pigs to make conservative investors believe they could fall in love with them the way they did real triple AAA rated paper that was the beginning of the end for "C" and "D" loan markets.

The travesty going forward will be the price that African American communities end up paying for this.

Back when I started in the mortgage business, I worked for a firm that only did subprime loans. I was glad they hired me, because I had just been laid off by an internet company during the internet bust and needed to get into something new. The two white women from St. Louis I worked for were crackerjack trainers - I completed my first loan, from taking the loan application to sitting in at the closing, in five days after two weeks of training. The thing about this company that rubbed me the wrong way was their insistence on advertising that targeted blacks, and a standing company rule to charge the highest interest rate allowed by law, no matter how easily a borrower could be qualified to get a Fannie Mae or FHA loan.

I ended up at a firm that targeted talk radio listeners - the kind of working class white Americans who keep Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in business, people who worked hard to keep our plants running and our department stores staffed and our school children taught. We did good business charging competitive fees and getting low rates for them, even when their credit was a little slow, or their debt to income ratios were slightly out of whack, or they were a few points shy of meeting government loan guidelines. It was not the kind of business that made anyone rich - our average fees of $3500 paled in comparison to the the kind of cash subprime operations were generating, but the boss had lost his home as a child because his parents had been talked into an adjustable rate mortgage, and was morally opposed to doing them unless there was no other way to get a deal done.

The mortgage boom that took place after September 11, 2001 strained our operations to the point that we couldn't get our deals done in less than four to six weeks, so we became a victim of our own success. The firm that really opened my eyes to how important the much maligned "minority borrower" was to the bottom line of many companies, large and small, that populated the financial industry was a mortgage lender owned by an ex-builder. The FHA loan was just starting to come back into vogue, so we had a series of training seminars on how to do them.

One morning, as we were waiting to begin, I overheard the owner, who had just finished advising a loan officer on a marketing plan for Dekalb County, joke with his head underwriter about how things had come full circle. "I built my share of houses in Dekalb," he said. "Then, when the buyers needed repairs for that bad siding from Louisiana that we put on a lot of them, I went into the rehab business. I made money, but the guys at HFC and Beneficial were making more, and they didn't have to keep an eye on any crews like I did. So I get into the mortgage business, and here we go again, refinancing the second mortgages on the same damn houses we built and then fixed up."

Most of the business I've done since I've been a loan officer were Fannie Mae loans and some higher end "Alt A" loans, where the borrowers had great credit and plenty of assets, but had other quirks - mostly the self employed or those with job gaps. The handful of truly awful loans I've done were pretty much the borrowers last resort. The highest interest rate I've ever closed a deal on was at 12% on $250,000 for a white family who were going to have to move out of the house they were leasing from a builder if they didn't get a loan - with the tax liens they had, it was amazing that anyone funded it at all. Dozens more prospective clients, practically all of them African American, walked away from low interest rate deals I put together for them because their friends were all getting cash back at closing from the guys who peddled the 2 year ARM's with the teaser rates

Today, Dekalb County is one of the hardest hit areas in the Atlanta metro. Foreclosures have been a problem for some time, and if you drive through the areas of the county where the houses from the eighties are concentrated, which are homes owned largely by black middle and working class families, you will see his anecdote come to life, with homes whose siding is sagging once again while the people inside them try to figure out how to make another month's mortgage payment on homes they often cannot afford to keep fixing.

When you have this kind of perspective on these toxic assets, you begin to truly see how insidious this latest national financial calamity is for us. You see people who have put good money behind good faith, paying on first mortgages with 10% and 12% interest rates and second mortgages with rates of 15% or more while the roof leaks or the foundation cracks, and wonder what kind of seat in hell should be reserved for vultures like these.

Now these neighborhoods aren't just in Dekalb County, but all over the Atlanta metro area. Boarded up houses line many streets in working class black neighborhoods. The part of this story that we are in now is what to do about them. A big, big problem is the lenders themselves. These assets, they have said for months, are toxic to their balance sheets, so the government has offered them a way to get rid of them. Some of them have been flipped a few times. Some of them have simply been abandoned by the last homeowner when the payments jumped, as the lenders and the brokers knew they would, past a point that the borrowers could pay. The loans on them are in most cases much, much higher than anything they could possibly appraise for now.

But the bankers aren't moving them. It is as if the poison in the toxic assets are like snake venom that has slowly begun to paralyze their ability to move in the right direction. Now if it was me who knowingly stepped into a cage full of rattlesnakes, and then got bitten, when someone came running with the anti-venom to save my life, the way the Treasury Department has, I wouldn't hesitate in taking it.

But our nation's bankers have decided, now that the swelling has stopped from all the bites they've taken from their own brand of exotic mortgage derivative snakes, snakes they grew themselves, that they aren't sure they want to take the anti-venom, which in this case is participation in the TARP program that practically pays companies who actually have money to take these loans off their hands.

To these lily-livered son of a bitches, the loans themselves are an abstraction. To many of us, try to do our damnedest to keep a roof over our heads, they are as real as the boarded up house across the street, and the one next to it that doesn't have any windows left, eyesores that might only need a little repair work and a reasonable price tag to get families moving into them.

I feel good about having Barack Obama as our nation's president, but I would feel a whole lot better if he would quit smiling at the cameras long enough to put some wood to these guys on Wall Street, who look like they are willing to wait until their limbs start falling off before they get with the program. He needs to make them take the damn money they say they need, and then force them to get these foreclosed homes off of their books.

Educator-In-Chief Schools Press Corps

The president showed up on time last night, did his thing, answered the same old questions with the same old answers from some of the same old faces and few new ones for an hour, and left.

The news media will still be talking and writing about this on Friday.

As Brown Man Thinking Hard Number One, President Barack Obama held court last night, searching for the most complete answer he could come up with in response to the wide ranging questions he fielded from the pool of reporters.

Maybe it's just me, but the reporters seem to have become a distraction in this process, not because they are asking questions of the Obama administration – I could go for a two hour press conference myself – but because of the amount of importance they place on their own roles in the process as news shapers rather than news deliverers.

I saw a few minutes of the chatter by the political pundits on CNN after the press conference. The things these people were coming up with to explain the meaning behind the question and answer session were so off base at one point that I simply turned it off.

One of the things I've learned in doing a lot of business over the telephone is that most people don’t listen well. In order to know that the person I’m talking to has been fully exposed to new information I’m trying to explain, I’ve learned to repeat myself by saying the same thing a second time with different terminology, then illustrating my point by using an example, and finally, recapping the whole exchange with a brief synopsis of what I'd just said.

This is pretty much what President Obama did all night.

I sincerely think that the current news model does not have the capacity to handle our current multi-channel, multilevel personal information delivery needs. If these media behemoths want to remain tied to the traditional linear narrative story arc that is the backbone of the system they are using now, they are doomed.

In a post modern world, your audience is more sophisticated than ever before. The two things President Obama pointed out, when he spoke about persistence in the face of adversity and the idea that many of the changes that are happening now won’t become apparent for years to come, were spoken as if he was talking directly to us, as if he speaking over the heads of the reporters who were licking their wounds because they didn’t get called on or scribbling furiously because they did get called on.

Keep up the good work, Educator-in-Chief.

My Money Is On The Welterweight From Illinois

I compared candidate Barack Obama to Muhammad Ali months ago, just after his speech at the Democratic Convention in August, when he seemed to exhibit a steely eyed resolve in an address that laid off of the soaring rhetoric he was known for and got down to defining in meat and potatoes terms how he was going to battle John McCain and the Republican Party during the fall campaign. "No More Rope A Dope For Obama" was the title of that piece. He landed a few punches down the stretch, but for the most part, relied on some fancy footwork and a superior corner team to cruise to an undisputed victory.

From where we are now, with the president himself coming on TV tonight to let us know what is happening on his end, right there in the White House, the campaign was an amateur fight. This thing President Obama is up against now - an economy that is teetering on the brink of disaster, due in part to a financial sector that has run amok - is like Joe Frazier and George Foreman and Sonny Liston all rolled into one big, bad, rough and tumble opponent. One solid punch from this financial catastrophe could stagger the president badly enough to give his opponents the kind of opening that leads to a political knockout.

Slipping punches and dancing around the ring does not win heavyweight boxing titles, the same way dodging miscues and flying around the country doesn’t fix economic meltdowns.

President Obama has to define his space in the ring.

He has to hit back against his foes, whether they are financial executives squandering taxpayer dollars or a media intent on repurposing his message, with punches that pack some real power, jabbing his adversaries in the solar plexus hard enough to make them think twice about coming inside on him.

This is going to be a fight that goes the distance, an old school fifteen rounder that promises to leave both victor and vanquished exhausted by the final bell. Points won't win a fight like this. Technique won't allow either opponent to outclass the other. And there will be some cuts and bruises and swollen eyes along the way.

The people in the stands are going crazy, and the fight hasn't even started yet. The reporters are having a hard time keeping up with all the hoopla, especially since they are having to scratch through the choice phrases they had already picked out to tell the story of what is really happening in the ring in order to record the actual action on the canvas.

The weigh-in is tonight. It will be broadcast worldwide. The president will be smooth, as usual, and a little longwinded, as usual, but he will be standing on that podium at that lectern tonight with the tiniest bit of positive momentum at his back from the events of the last few days. Sometimes that's all a fighter needs to know before he gets in the ring - that he's got just a little edge on his opponent.


I'm putting my money on the welterweight from Illinois.

Can The President Take A Hint From Leno?

It's still a little hard to wrap my mind around President Obama appearing on The Tonight Show. Jay Leno has become almost as much a Tonight Show institution as Johnny Carson used to be, in spite of all the competition from the late night shows on cable. But Leno's still a comedian.

Luckily, President Obama hasn't developed the wooden version of presidential cheeriness yet, that forced smile that takes away the natural plasticity in their faces, a look that became a caricature of itself in almost every modern commander-in-chief except the first George Bush.

The audience had been searched. The Tonight Show band were all wearing suits. Jay Leno was noticeably excited but contained in his monologue. You really couldn't call this an interview, with the president getting plenty of room to deliver his pre-written jokes, but it was something less than a pure infomercial. It wasn't until about a third of the way through the president's visit that Leno's eyebrows began to inch skyward in disbelief, the way they normally do when his guests give him half answers.

You got the sense from watching this that Leno reluctantly went to the softball questions about the Obama's dog and Air Force One to wrap up the evening. He looked as if he could have asked questions about AIG until six in the morning.

The one thing this visit pointed out to me is a need for someone - the president, the treasury secretary, or some high ranking official - to go ahead and do a podcast or a webinar that actually explains step by step what kind of mess we are in, complete with a link to a glossary or on screen definitions so they can use all the correct names and terminology involved. Telling us that AIG's Financial Products division's foray into manufacturing derivatives was like "putting a hedge fund on top of an insurance company" may have been the best President Obama could do, but that was the kind of buzz word filled answer that leaves most listeners as clueless as ever. It was about as effective as explaining sex to your kids by using "the bird and the bees" analogy.

A presentation on AIG, how it works, and why the government feels it so important to the world economy may end up being an hour long - maybe two - but I think we deserve better pronouncements from our government officials than using half baked analogies to describe one obscure product nobody understands by comparing it to an obscure industry most people don’t understand.

For those of you who are also unsatisfied with all the eighth grade explanations about this, I've got a couple of links you need to check out.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street


EXCERPT:

If you're an investor, you have a choice these days: You can either lend directly to borrowers or sell investors credit default swaps, insurance against those same borrowers defaulting. Either way, you get a regular income stream—interest payments or insurance payments—and either way, if the borrower defaults, you lose a lot of money. The returns on both strategies are nearly identical, but because an unlimited number of credit default swaps can be sold against each borrower, the supply of swaps isn't constrained the way the supply of bonds is, so the CDS market managed to grow extremely rapidly. Though credit default swaps were relatively new when Li's paper came out, they soon became a bigger and more liquid market than the bonds on which they were based.

When the price of a credit default swap goes up, that indicates that default risk has risen. Li's breakthrough was that instead of waiting to assemble enough historical data about actual defaults, which are rare in the real world, he used historical prices from the CDS market. It's hard to build a historical model to predict Alice's or Britney's behavior, but anybody could see whether the price of credit default swaps on Britney tended to move in the same direction as that on Alice. If it did, then there was a strong correlation between Alice's and Britney's default risks, as priced by the market. Li wrote a model that used price rather than real-world default data as a shortcut (making an implicit assumption that financial markets in general, and CDS markets in particular, can price default risk correctly).

It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn't just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything.

The effect on the securitization market was electric. Armed with Li's formula, Wall Street's quants saw a new world of possibilities. And the first thing they did was start creating a huge number of brand-new triple-A securities. Using Li's copula approach meant that ratings agencies like Moody's—or anybody wanting to model the risk of a tranche—no longer needed to puzzle over the underlying securities. All they needed was that correlation number, and out would come a rating telling them how safe or risky the tranche was.
As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond—corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them—an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn't matter. All you needed was Li's copula function.

The CDS and CDO markets grew together, feeding on each other. At the end of 2001, there was $920 billion in credit default swaps outstanding. By the end of 2007, that number had skyrocketed to more than $62 trillion. The CDO market, which stood at $275 billion in 2000, grew to $4.7 trillion by 2006.


READ MORE...

To put this in perspective, the entire U.S. housing mortgage debt is 11 trillion dollars.

Now that you've got a better foundation to understand WHAT happened, reading this next excerpt, you might begin to feel like you are standing in the shoes of your government officials, with a clearer picture of why they are scared to death of doing anything to keep the AIG crew away from their desks.

The excerpt below is from AIG itself.

EXCERPT: AIGFP Employee Retention Plan Executive Summary

There are also substantial risks related to the hedging of AIGFP's various books. Although we view the large-market risk books at AIGFP as generally well hedged, the hedging is dynamic - that is, it must be monitored and adjusted continuously. To the extent that AIGFP were to lose traders who currently oversee complicated though familiar positions and know how to hedge the book, gaps in hedging could result in significant losses.

This is driven to some extent by the size of the portfolios. In the interest rate book, for example, a move in market interest rates of just one basis point - that is 0.01% or one-100th of one percent - could result in a change in value of $700 million dollars if the book were not hedged. It has virtually no impact on the hedged book. There are similar exposures in the foreign exchange, commodities and equity derivatives books.

AIGFP's books also contain a significant number of complex - so-called bespoke - transactions that are difficult to understand and manage. This is one reason replacing key traders and risk managers would not be practical on a large scale. Personal knowledge of the trades and the unique systems at AIGFP will be critical to an effective unwind of AIGFP's businesses and portfolios.

In this current environment, any perceived disruption in AIGFP's ability to conduct business, such as one that would result from the departure of a number of key employees, could also cause parties to limit or cease trading with AIGFP. Obviously, this would adversely affect its ability to continue to cost-effectively hedge its positions.

READ MORE...

That pesky devil, it seems, is still always in the details. In all fairness, though, I fall asleep fast enough already while watching The Tonight Show - 11;30 at night is not the time to be introducing these kinds of concepts.

Hopefully, the president took a hint from Leno, a certified car guy who loves domestic cars, who didn't ask ONE question about the GM or Chrylser situations. AIG will be here to stay, Mr. President, until the answers we get about the how and the why behind this never-ending bailout starts matching up with the urgency and the action you're taking with our money credit.

"Juggling Major National Issues Should Only Be Attempted By A Professional"

The warning on fire juggling equipment websites read "fire juggling should only be attempted by a professional juggler."

If you've ever watched a juggler in action, you’ve probably done what I've done - wonder what it is that makes something that looks so simple so hard for the average person to do.

I've seen professional jugglers at the circus as a child and on TV as an adult. They all pretty much start off the same way - by standing next to a row of items they intend to juggle and picking the items off of the row one by one. The first two items they toss into the air to get their rhythm going make the action look deceptively simple. And while you're watching, they smoothly snatch another item from the pile and add it to the ones they are already circulating from hand to hand and into the air.

The next thing you know, they've got four items in the circuit - two in the air, with the other two in their hands. This, you figure, you could probably do as well, if you had time to practice a bit. It isn't until they begin juggling five or six items that you have to admit that this guy knows what he is doing.

If you watch him while he's juggling, you will see, even if he is plying his audience with a steady line of patter, that his eyes are intent on the trajectory and the height of the balls in the air.

Imagine these items are torches, the kind you set on fire.

When you see a juggler begin to light his juggling torches, any idea you may have had of your prowess matching the juggler's skills one day vanishes. At that point, you figure the juggler has lost his mind – he cannot possibly be planning to juggle torches that are actually flaming.

The most amazing act I've ever seen involved juggling lit torches.

President Obama is a fire juggler.

In some ways, he is making the balancing act he's maintaining as his administration juggles decision making on the economy, healthcare, the banking bailout, the environment, education and America’s infrastructure look too easy. Most of us, aware of our own limitations, figure we would be sweating bullets if we tried to take on any three of these at once.

The critics, who are legion, are not professional jugglers. They are a lot like you and me - the kind of people who would be afraid of even tossing lit torches into the air. President Obama may not be one yet either, but he seems to be willing, like has has in all the other endeavors he's committed to accomplishing in his life, to be giving it his undivided attention.

Obama Stimulus Plan Can Be A Win For Everybody

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Tiger Woods is going back to work today, the morning after President Obama’s address to Congress.

If I were Bobby Jindal, who is touted by many in the media as a rising Republican star, I would give Phil Mickleson a call, to see how he deals with the fact that he doesn’t have a chance in hell to catch the world’s number one golfer. Because that’s about how Jindal came across during his Republican response to President Obama’s address – okay, but no where near as good as Obama. Jindal looked more like a third year medical resident than the head elected official of Lousiana.

As I watched the people in the House chamber clamber over one another to get close to President Obama as he made his way through the room, I thought of Mr. Woods, another biracial American legend, who routinely generates the same type of enthusiasm. The PGA’s current fortunes aren’t quite as bad as the fiscal crisis the nation is in, but its future depends greatly on the efforts of one Eldrick “Tiger” Woods Jr. to bolster its declining ratings before the time comes to renegotiate TV and sponsorship agreements.

Woods has an unmatched temperament, unrivaled shot making ability, incomparable length off the tee, matchless drive and a mind boggling will to win. He has given the PGA the identity of a winner. From what I’ve seen so far, President Obama has the capability, the smarts, the demeanor, the energy and the will to do the same for America.

If I were Governor Jindal, or Governor Crist, or Governor Schwarzenegger, or Governor Sanford, or even Governor Palin, I'd try to look at the big picture, the way all the other guys on the PGA Tour do when they think about Tiger. Even when they lose to Woods, they still win, because ALL their paychecks have just about tripled since Woods came to the Tour thirteen years ago.

Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican right now, a win for the Obama stimulus plan is a win for everybody.

We Rob People Here

My brother is the most parsimonious person I know.

He bought his first house a couple of years ago. The purchase process almost wore me out, even though I'm in the mortgage business, and it wasn't my house. I believe he looked at every house for sale in two zip codes in northwest Atlanta. After traipsing around the less decrepit parts of Atlanta's forgotten northwest corridor for a few months, I wondered - why is he going through all this? Why not just get a house in the suburbs, like everybody else, that is newer and has the kind of neighbors who hang around the streets in the morning, waiting for their kids school bus, instead of the kind of neighbors who hang around the streets at night, waiting for some shit to go down?

He finally found a house that he liked that he figured I would like too. Actually, I was very impressed with his find, a four bedroom, two bathroom ranch that was almost as big as the house we grew up in. It had hardwood floors, and an open floorplan, and an elevation that gave him a nice view of the gently curving tree lined street off of the porch. It was a brand new house that had never been lived in. Now THIS was worth all the months of riding around and looking at rattraps. It looked like it was going to be his new address.

Until he found out the price.

H called me, telling me that it wasn't going to work. The payment, he said, was higher than he wanted it to be. Then he said he had done a little more digging, and had found a house nearby with the same floorplan, by the same builder, that was in foreclosure, right around the corner. It needed some work, but it was almost thirty thousand dollars less. I couldn't argue with his logic, but as I walked through the foreclosure, I tried to picture my brother, who owned two screwdrivers and a pair of pliers, doing handyman type work to fix the place up.

I lobbied like hell to get him to reconsider the first place, that was sweet smelling and pristine and move-in ready, especially when they dropped the price. The two hundred dollars a month difference, I pointed out, would be the same as the thousands of dollars he would have to spend to paint and repair the foreclosure.

He didn't budge.

The second house fell through. It took a couple more tries before he finally found the place he owns now, another foreclosure that wasn’t quite as neglected as the first one. More importantly to him, the price meant he could pay his principal, interest, taxes and insurance within the budget he’d outlined. The original owners, who paid twice as much as he did two years prior to his closing, had not made it twelve months.

My father asked me why I wouldn’t do the loan for him. “Dad,” I said, “we rob people here. He will get a better deal somewhere else.” It was at the end of the that sentence that I realized how true that statement was – that my company “robbed” people with enormous house fees, and extraneous junk fees, and the ever present jimmying with the yield spread premium that often resulted in a borrower showing up at the table to find a rate higher than what he was expecting.

I could control the jimmying, but there was no way around the two thousand dollars in house and junk fees. It was a bad feeling, to be stuck in an office that was so wedded to the mortgage broker hokey pokey that I couldn’t even do a reasonably priced loan for my own brother.

There are many of the same houses that he looked at two years ago in the area that are still for sale. There are houses on his street that have been vacant for some time, houses that friends of mine, upon visiting him, have immediately tried to buy as investment properties, but to no avail. The bankers will not budge one inch, leaving the investors no recourse but to stay on the sidelines until the prices come down to a level that will allow them to get 70% loan to value loans.

I've helped him paint some of the rooms. Clear brush out of the yard. Cut down small trees. And he has had to get the air conditioning and the heat reconditioned. There are things yet to be done. He was right, about keeping his payment where he wanted it, and about what he figured he could and could not live without.

What is the new homeowner relief package going to do for him? He needs relief too – not directly, because he can pay his bills, but indirectly, because he will never be able to sell his house if the vacant properties in his neighborhood aren’t purchased, fixed up, and lived in. And all of this is only four miles from downtown Atlanta.

These are the kind of stories that make you swear you wished you’d never learned how to run a loan application through Desktop Underwriter, that you’d never seen a mortgage rate sheet that showed you how to make three points on the back end of a loan, that you didn’t know how to get that sound in your voice that made people give you their social security numbers over the phone.

If President Obama’s foreclosure prevention plan does HALF of what he says it will, it will be a resounding success. And if it can pull off half of the other half, maybe my brother can get him some new neighbors.

Is This A New HOPE for Homeowners?

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

Winston Churchill

With the signing of the Economic Recovery Act on Tuesday in Denver, President Obama opened the floodgates on a huge pile of money. He announced this morning that 75 billion dollars, 25 billion more than expected, is now going to be earmarked to directly assist homeowners who are having trouble paying their mortgages. You may or you may not be in this category. There are other goodies strewn throughout the stimulus bill, but none will be lauded as publicly as this program.

We have been down this road before. Last year, we in the mortgage industry waited with baited breath for months for the government’s emergency aid package for homeowners. They came up with a program called HOPE for Homeowners.

A little about Hope for Homeowners below:

The HOPE for Homeowners program was authorized by the Economic and Housing Recovery Act of 2008. Since the President signed this vital legislation into law on July 30, 2008, the HOPE for Homeowners Board of Directors has worked diligently to develop and implement the program as directed by Congress. The Board was charged with establishing underwriting standards to ensure borrowers, after any write-down in principal, have a reasonable ability to repay their new FHA-insured mortgage.

The HOPE for Homeowners program ends September 30, 2011. The program is available only to owner occupants and will offer 30-year fixed rate mortgages - so the borrower’s last payment will be the same as the first payment. In many cases, to avoid what would be an even costlier foreclosure, banks will have to write down the existing mortgage to 90% of the new appraised value of the home

A co-worker of mine, who I used to give my standard answer – read the damn guidelines for yourself - whenever he started asking me questions about the details of a new program, did just that the day it came out. He was incredulous. "How the hell are we going to qualify anybody for this? If they need help that bad with an adjustable rate mortgage, there is no way they can get through underwriting."

His comments were more on the money than he knew – the much vaunted HOPE for Homeowners program, which was expected to assist HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of homeowners, has thus far helped LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED.

LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED.

In fact, as of last week, it seems that this program has seen only twenty five applications get through the process successfully.

It cost more to print the brochures up, disseminate the new guidelines to lenders, and train the staff at the FHA hotline than they have actually used to facilitate the program.

The moral of this anectdote?

Since the media has proved itself to unable or unwilling to keep our elected officials feet to the fire on their grandiose ideas once they are passed into law, and have been funded through appropriation, the only people left are US – the same people who gather here daily on the internet - to watch this latest pile of cash like a hawk.

The projections most of these kinds of programs use are actually pretty good. But implementing them in a way that allows them to function as intended seems to be a different story.

I hope, for these homeowners sakes, as well as President Obama's, that they get the ghost out of the machine before trying to put all these dollars on the street.

Public Wants Wall Street To Bleed A Little More

President Obama will have his first test this week. He doesn't like the executive compensation restrictions inserted into the stimulus bill last week by the Democrat Chris Dodd and his cohorts in the Senate, but he's going to have to sign it anyway. I hope he doesn't waste any time this week barking into a microphone in the middle of a cornfield somewhere about why we need to be worried about paying Wall Street's foxes enough money to guard the public's hen house.

The American public - the same people who are tired of being laid off, the same people who are tired of shrunken retirement and investment accounts, the same people who are tired of rate increases on credit cards they pay on time from some of these very same banks when we have the lowest interest rate environment since 9/11 - this American public just does not want to hear it, especially not when it can still see the feathers falling from the jaws of these foxes.

The public wants a little blood. They want to see some sort of shared suffering. They really want to know - what is so god awful important about this particular fraternity of self-important white men that not one hair on the head of their financial chinny chin chins can possibly be exposed to harm? That their earning power cannot possibly be reduced by one dollar? That their personal lives cannot possibly be allowed to go into a tailspin, the way it has for millions of other Americans who were also employed by insolvent firms, but in other industries, industries that didn't get bailed out?

There is no crime in being wrong. Some of the greatest innovations in our history came from men who were wrong way more often than they were right. But there is a crime, in this case, a crime that seems to go against the very laws of nature itself, to be so hideously, horribly wrong and suffer no consequences that come even close to matching the proportion of the mistakes that were made.

This inequity is where President Obama needs to start learning how to put the "bully" in his "bully pulpit" and use it often for items that benefit the public at large. If the rest of us can suck it up and be good patriots, why can't the guys on Wall Street do the same? Are they only into being "Americans for America" when money is involved? Is their sense of honor and duty to preserving a marketplace that has made them rich based upon some sort of conditional quid pro quo, the way it was for the Benedict Arnolds of the world?

There is no moral high ground in this situation. We've all lived high on the credit hog as a nation for the last eighty years, so blaming where we are on any one president who served in the last thirty years is illogical. We believe in credit more than we believe in freedom. And for some of us, who have no other way to conceptualize life, credit is freedom - the freedom to enjoy what we want today.

The White House has been making overtures for days that these new executive restrictions have gone too far, and will create a "brain drain" on these firms just when they need these people the most, because they will leave for foreign banks and hedge funds.

Really?

I know somebody in the White House must subscribe to Forbes and Fortune. Our nation's leading business magazines don't print an issue these days that doesn't lament the loss of these exact same jobs. What I'd like to know, from those who do executive searches for financial services industries, is whether or not they are seeing any increased demand for candidates. Come to think of it, my old neighbor is a recruiter for financial services candidates with quantitative backgrounds - maybe I'll give her a call this afternoon.

There just aren't that many jobs out there in any sector. And all of these people that our bankers deem to be such key employees all came up the same way - up through the ranks. Which means there are second, third, and fourth in command employees in every trading department in the company who are thoroughly familiar with the proprietary trading strategies and positions their firms have, employees who are eager for a chance to prove themselves, even with the potential for drastically reduced bonuses, as the head of a major trading desk.

If President Obama is as good at reading the public's sentiment as his people says he is, and if he is as smart as his educational background and his meteoric political career suggest, he will understand instinctively why he needs to reverse his position on this issue. If he thought he got hit hard when the Daschle tax problem came to light, making any overtures to soften the language in this provision will make him wish Daschle was back in front of the cameras.

And if the latest internet scuttlebutt on the Bernie Madoff scandal - that Wall Street's execs knew what he was doing but kept their mouths shut - gathers any steam, they will wish no one knew what they looked like.

Our banks have no money left in them. So why should any representative of the people even waste any time considering paying a premium to retain "talent" to watch what are essentially empty savings deposit boxes?

It makes absolutely no sense to worry about the welfare of the fox when he is already inside the hen house, his belly full from the hens he has already eaten, his eyes glazed over as more hens are added to replace the ones he’s already gorged on.

These foxes will be just fine if they miss a few meals.

A Nation Of Outsiders

I was talking to my buddy on the phone yesterday, just a casual conversation about the perils of joining Facebook, when I said "hey man, I've been meaning to tell you something."

"What’s up?"

"You know that wish list you have of all the stuff you'd like to buy because you always wanted it?"

"Uh, yeeeah," my buddy answered, wondering what list I was referring to, and why it was important now.

Old friends, especially smart ones, are usually pretty good at quickly figuring out when you are talking about something that actually exists, and when you are talking about its metaphorical equivalent, like I was yesterday.

"You need to take that list," I continued, "fold it up, and stick it in a desk drawer somewhere. This thing is badder than it looks. Brotherman, you need to be saving some money."

There is nothing more exasperating to a person who feels financially secure than to have someone begin to lecture them on their finances - particularly when the someone giving them advice has less money than they do. But these people didn't get where they were by ignoring advice, but by sifting through it and selecting the nuggets of wisdom from among the bushels of bull. I could almost hear my buddy lean forward at his desk. "So what indicators are you seeing that tell you this thing is so bad?"

I tried to think of the ones we all use - the Dow, the unemployment numbers, new home sales - before finally settling on interest rates. "If anything else happens, the Fed has nowhere to go. Interest rates can't get any lower unless they go negative."

My buddy exhaled a bit. I could see his mind working - was that it? "So Greenspan screwed us."

"Dude, it sounds simple to blame Greenspan, but he had to work with the hand he was dealt. We've been operating on credit for decades. Ever since-"

"Gold," my buddy interjected. "You know, I was just thinking about that last night - why did we ever get off the gold standard?"

"That's kind of water over the dam. Credit isn't bad. It's the way it's been used lately that is the real problem." My buddy was too calm now - I could hear his regular, easy breaths, could see him looking out the window of his high rise office, wondering why I was wasting his time with this when we could be talking about something more salacious.

"You know," I said, "I've been writing a lot about this bank bailout stuff this week, which means I've had to root around the internet to do some research on what was happening. The real problem is the amount of liabilities the major banks owe versus the amount they have in assets. It will take a few trillion to fill the hole."

I had his attention again - fully, this time. I could hear him sigh a few times. "So I guess these guys have really fucked this up."

"Yeah."

We went on for awhile about how this could have happened, with my buddy wondering out loud why no one could see this coming. I wasn't until this morning, while reading Eugene Robinson's column in the Washington Post, that I understood some of my buddy's frustration when I came across the phrase "a nation of outsiders".

Being "in the know" is a hallmark of having arrived in America. Getting useful information before everybody else confers status as well as power. Sometimes it is as simple as understanding what the information means before everyone else figures it out. And for quite awhile in this country, an intimate understanding of the world of finance often meant those "in the know" could act faster on public information, because they were the only ones who had any real interest in deciphering it.

We're all "in the know" today. The guy spraying around your home for bugs knows more about how the 10 year bond prices affect mortgage financing than he does about insect nervous systems. The guy who gets your car running again at the repair shop comprehends the fundamental theory behind collateralized debt obligations the same way he understands the fluid dynamics in your car's hydraulic systems.

We're all "in the know", and what we know is this - something terrible has been taking place on Wall Street for quite some time, something terrible enough to knock the metaphorical Wall Street bull off of its figurative feet.

Whether or not we will remain a nation of outsiders, willing to accept any half-assed idea, whether its from President Obama, or Tim Geithner, or Congress, to help get the nation out of this economic nightmare, or fight to become a nation of insiders, who demand that we get to see exactly how they make the sausage from now on, is up to us.

Professor Obama Lectures White House Press

I called my buddy immediately after President Obama exited his press conference, before the commentators could begin to start telling us what we just saw.

"My man," I said, "did that Negro talk his behind off or what?"

"Man, I fell asleep. I just woke up."

"You're in good company. S. was asleep before the president finished answering the first question. Dude, the damn dog was yawning at the TV."

My buddy paused, letting a small yawn of his own pass. "He's going to have the reporters scared to ask questions with answers like that."

I've never really been a fan of these kinds of things, because they usually are more about style than substance. Multi-dimensional thinking is what I want in my president. Someone who has the capacity to use the entire capacity of their brain power when things go wrong – not just the left side, or the just right side, or the just damn middle, but the whole entire thing.

President Obama transformed into Professor Obama before our eyes, segueing from reading his remarks from the teleprompter to answering questions from the press. Professor Obama proceeded to take over the question and answer session with a fifty minute performance. At times, it seemed like he was teaching freshman seminar classes in economics and political science.

It was very impressive at first, but by the end of the evening the president's wide ranging answers had become a bit pedantic, with the length of his comments threatening to try the patience of even the most dedicated political junkies.

"You probably felt like you were back in law school watching this," I said to my buddy as we joked about the president's "around the world in eighty days" method of not exactly answering the questions he was posed.

My buddy groaned audibly, as if I had dredged up a painful memory. "Yeah - he's a professor alright."

"Man," I said, "Obama was excited to be there. There was fire and enthusiasm in his monologue. It was like the trip to Elkhart was his warm up, like the day trips used to be back on the campaign for his big night time rallies that were more likely to be on prime time TV for free."

President Obama put the "bully" in "bully pulpit last night, using his celebrity and his breadth of knowledge to shape practically all of his answers to press corp questions into vehicles for his main themes - creating new jobs, easing the credit crisis, stabilizing home values, and getting some kind of expansion in our economy to counteract the current contractions.

If you didn't know these were his main themes, you were probably asleep too.

I was actually surprised when he didn't somehow turn the question about Alex Rodriguez's admission of steroid use into yet another illustration of how his economic recovery plan was going to help the citizens of Elkhart, Indiana, and by extension, the rest of America.

The other thing about the sheer amount of verbiage contained in President Obama's responses is the indirect effect it will have on reshaping the media narrative. In addressing all of the things he touched on for the next few days, the news media will have to jettison some of the "strife between the parties" storylines, effectively removing the Republican message from the forefront of the public's minds at a time that is crucial to the passage of theeconomic recovery bill.

S. woke up after the ninth or tenth question. She got a little perturbed towards the end, when I mentioned that the press conference, the one we'd both figured would be over in half an hour, was coming up on the sixty minute mark.

"What? This thing is about to mess up my shows."

Dancing With The One Who Brung You

After listening to the TV pundits and reading the opinion columns the last few days, all of them railing about the failings and deficiencies of President Obama with hyperbolic vigor, a vision came to me.

I imagined that instead of Obama, we had President John McCain standing behind the White House press room podium, intoning, in the manner of Ronald Reagan that "the fundamentals of the economy were sound."

I pictured Vice President Sarah Palin on Meet The Press, stumbling over an incoherent explanation of exactly how a proposed trillion dollar tax cut package actually creates those jobs we need to boost our ailing economy.

They would be facing the same problem President Obama has - a Congress dominated by leaders on both sides of the aisle who have come to worship the rigid, severely restricted boundaries of their respective ideologies. Tax cuts, which seem to be the only tune Republicans can all whistle together, don't mean a god damned thing to you if you have no job. Funding projects slated to start three years from now, which appears to be a constant theme running through the Democrats list of proposals, mean even less.

Which means your president can be as bold and as visionary as Jesus - and get the same kind of bloody reception.

Or he can try to figure out how to get a passable economic recovery package in front of the members of Congress, which means appealing to their political needs and desires. Coming back to the nation empty handed with his Boy Scout values intact is not an option for President Obama.

He has to "dance with the ones who brung him", even if they are a little embarrassing.

Both political parties are fooling themselves with the labels "liberal" and "conservative" – almost all of their members are centrists, men and women who don't have the guts to back anything but the party Kool-Aid if their lives depended on it. I don't know why they even waste time swearing themselves in, because the things they pledge to honor and uphold in that ceremony simply do not occur.

The president needs to get his hands on a pile of cash, metaphorically speaking, that can be allocated in ways we haven't tried before, even though the last two piles we've spent on the banking industry, another a method we haven't tried before, hasn't shown any immediate relief. The president needs the ability to intimately influence the distribution of these dollars, and he needs it now.

And the pile needs to be a lot bigger than the one Congress has come up with, not to solve our problems, but to even have a chance at stemming them. Two trillion dollars is the bare minimum, and even that may not be enough. I'd add another five hundred million just to mess with the deficit hawks, who have been swooning like Scarlet O'Hara over the thought of borrowing one more dollar when we already owe so much.

But there is no one in any country in the world except the United States that really believes we have the capacity or the will to pay our deficit off – and frankly, they don't care, because they like getting the interest.

It is almost painful to watch men who appear to have common sense look so pained when they talk about the enormity of the deficit, as if it is some kind of moral failing, inconsistent with our nation's values, when it is in fact an exact reflection of who we are and what we believe, because if we don't believe in anything else in America, we believe in "buy now, pay later."

"Buy now, pay later" is why the banking crisis hurts so much.

So man up, representatives of the people, and represent something besides some god damn slogans for a change. Hand your president the biggest pile of cash you can gather, and tell him he has our lives in his hands. Find every program and agency available that can begin deploying any infusion of cash they get in 90 to 180 days - not just the "shovel ready" ones, but the "classroom ready" ones too, to start retraining all of us whose jobs are never coming back.

Try to expand your horizons beyond the narrow confines of the yesteryear platforms your respective political parties cling to far enough to be able to actually see the people you say you represent. Because the bills they get in the mail don’t come in red or blue envelopes. The groceries they buy don't end up in red or blue bellies.

You might not want to dance with one you brung, but the jobs you save this time, Congressmen and Congresswomen, may be your own.

Moving On To Your Next Shot

President Obama, you've had a long week. Lost a nominee. Had to cut stimulus plan. Capped exec pay at banks living on the federal dime.

And I imagine, just two weeks into living at the White House, that you've had to make some adjustments. Tried to get used to the brand new mattress they put on your brand new bed. Wondered how long it would take to get used to the whole live/work/play in one space idea. Wistfully recalled the days when you could get the attention of five or ten million of us from your computer without even putting on a tie.

The good thing about your new job, Mr. President, is that its a lot like playing on the PGA golf tour. Every time you get ready to tee it up, there is a scoreboard, right behind you, that shows how you're doing. The world's number one golfer, Tiger Woods, doesn't always get the ball on the fairway. He doesn't always hit the green on his approach shot. He might end up with a lie beside a tent, or behind a tree, or next to a rock.

Getting in trouble on one or two holes, even if they are back to back, doesn't faze Mr. Woods. He does what he has to do - turns the club head backwards, swings from a left sided stance, putts with his driver off the fringe- whatever it takes to get the ball in the hole.

And on Sundays, more often than not, he is in one of the final groups, with a chance to win.

So don't worry about these bumps in the road this week, Mr. President. You're still on the first hole, lining up your approach.

Just take a presidential mulligan, and bring your "A" game the rest of the way.

And when you've made a bad call, like you did with Daschle, leave it behind you. Move on to the next shot. When you've got to play politics, like you've done all week with Congress, and Rush, and us, including today on your radio address, come at it from any which way you need to in order to get the outcome you think the American public deserves.


And when you need to do a little trash talking, like you've done about Wall Street execs...


...back it up with a bold shot.

Obama Begins PR Blitz For Recovery Bill

The byline on today's Washington Post op-ed article titled The Action Americans Need states simply "the writer is president of the United States."

I liked the understated style of the piece, Mr. President. Everything from the direct, declarative title, to the use of only your name, "Barack Obama", to the logical way one paragraph progressed smoothly into the next.

With your radio addresses, weekly podcasts, yesterday's TV interview blitz, next week's planned prime-time news conference and a subsequent address from the Oval Office to the American public, it looks like you have become a one man public relations effort in your bid to get your economic recovery bill passed.

Today's plainly worded seven hundred and sixty seven word missive in the Post, with a straightforward message that keys on the need for a sense of urgency to drive any action the government plans to take to get our nation’s economy on track, is not the kind of thing that would tax you, President Obama - we all know you are well versed at expressing yourself through your keyboard.

We often think of our presidents as hands off executives, who have someone on their staff to do just about everything but chew their food for them.

But the language you used, the repetitive cadence near the end that mimics your speaking style, and the fact that this is the same thing you have been saying for the last two weeks suggest to me that you probably whipped this article out in an hour or so, which is about the amount of time it took me to write this piece, although you probably had a little editorial input from your chief speechwriter.

There are a lot of the same words and phrases in here that we’ve been hearing over and over - "crisis", "jobs", "savings", "homes", "renewable energy", "health care", "education", "energy independence", "health care" and "partisan gridlock" - the same issues you campaigned on, and the same issues you’ve been talking about everywhere there's been a live microphone in the last few days, which is why I don’t think it took you too long to write this yourself.

It's a great effort, and the buzzwords are nice, Mr. President, but you are going to have to expand your narrative a little wider. Maybe you can trot out a team of economists. Not the Nobel Prize winners, but the ones who teach econ to college freshman, the kind who can do question and answer sessions with the media that will bridge some of the gap between what the American public doesn't understand about your plan and what you believes it will accomplish.

If you were to speak to the American people on Monday intimately, in specific detail, and without reservation, the way you did when you delivered your "race" speech in Philadelphia during the Democratic primary campaign, it would be a great help to your cause and our futures.

If you were to expand the narrative this way, instead of merely rebutting the reactions and the spin of the Republicans who are against your stimulus bill, it would significantly reduce the potency of the "us versus them" dynamic that is currently threatening to curtail widespread support for your proposals. More importantly, it would help you to step outside of the box the press corp want to put your presidency into already, a group which may be more dangerous than your political opposition.

Turning your one man public relations endeavor into a group effort will go a long way towards getting the kind of public support you need to get your stragglers in Congress on board.

"President Relentless" Hounds Wall Street

By the time you see the news tonight, President Obama's address to Wall Street this morning will have been analyzed, sifted through, taken apart and put back together again - by the same brilliant members of the punditocracy who interpreted what the last president really meant.

The real political narrative is wider and broader than anything these columnists want to deal with - their editorial and aesthetic constraints force them to deliberately focus in on the three soundbites that can be shoehorned into a thirty second news clip.

But there is more in this speech announcing new bailout rules than a few buzzwords.

This speech is the beginning of the unveiling of a new attitude from President Obama, a more forceful, more authoritarian one we are not used to seeing.

"For top executives to award themselves these kinds of compensation packages in the midst of this economic crisis is not only in bad taste - it's a bad strategy - and I will not tolerate it as President."

As much as I hated hearing the phrase "I will not tolerate this" growing up, I can appreciate hearing it from the president in the context of the Wall Street bailout bonus bonanza.

For as much money as our Wall Street friends make, they ought to have thick enough hides to take it.

I took it for free back when I was growing up.

The current phrase of the day - "this is unacceptable" - is fairly innocuous, akin to someone snorting, or sucking their teeth in displeasure, when things go haywire. "I will not tolerate this" implies, no, promises that severe disciplinary action will be on the way like a firetruck to a four alarm fire if the intolerable behavior continues.

Obama does not have the physical stature of the ex-farm boy turned college graduate type of fathers I grew up around, but the timbre of his voice sounded ominous enough to bring back memories.

For all the talk about Obama’s rhetorical gifts, it is his ability to state starkly, in a simple, direct, and unwavering voice, exactly what he means without any unnecessay adornment.

"…in order to restore trust, we've got to make certain that taxpayer funds are not subsidizing excessive compensation packages on Wall Street."

This is the same thing he said last week.

Guess what - if you are a C-level exec who works on Wall Street, and you work at AIG, Citigroup, or Bank America, you will get tired of hearing these words, the same way I got tired of hearing "I will not tolerate this" back in my youth.

Take it from me, guys, the best way to combat this is to do what the president asks. You'l have less stress. You’ll live longer.

The thing that is really amazing to me, especially since I live with a lawyer, is the level of specificity President Obama gets to in parts of his speech.

"Companies receiving federal aid are going to have to disclose publicly all the perks and luxuries bestowed upon senior executives and provide an explanation to the taxpayers and to shareholders as to why these expenses are justified.

And we're putting a stop to these kinds of massive severance packages we've all read about with disgust; we're taking the air out of the golden parachute."

It sounds to me like the most wired president in American history has somebody – likely very many somebodies – taking the temperature of the internet daily, if not hourly, because this mirrors what I've been reading on all the political blogs for the last few weeks.

I’m obviously biased here, but it seems like a smart move to get beyond the one note ninnies who are wasting space in many of our nation’s top newspapers, masquerading as public thinkers, and go direct to the blogosphere, the place where real public opinion is cultivated these days.

The phrases that appealed to me the most were these:

"The economic crisis we face is unlike any we've seen in our lifetime. It's a crisis of falling confidence and rising debt. Of widely distributed risk and narrowly concentrated reward."

You will see well dressed, red faced men on your TV for the rest of the week, sputtering their denials, listing their accomplishments, and telling you how unfair all of this is. Many of them will look like they want to jump out of a window.

Oh, if only the windows of modern high rise buildings were designed to be opened...

Many of them will go home today just like the rest of America has been lately - tired, disgusted, scared, and afraid to look at the mail. They will lay awake tonight like the rest of America has been - uncertain of how they are going to afford to make it from month to month, in doubt about their children's futures, speculating about the distinct possibility that they may not have the retirement years they have been planning on.

When they wake up, they will feel a lot like the thousands of people they have laid off from their own firms with little or no warning in the last year. They will feel the same way their ex-employees did, like their whole world has been changed literally overnight.

For President Obama to state squarely what the real deal is, that the American public has been played for patsies by fake capitalist wannabes who think we have forgotten how to do basic math, is practically heroic in this era of doubletalk and message speak.

Instead of President Obama, I may start calling him "President Relentless" - because I get the feeling he will keep beating this drum until Wall Street learns to dance to his tune.