Conan O'Brien for Treasury Secretary

(The Nation)  As the Democrats hysterically reel away from heath care reform in the wake of Scott ("My daughters are available") Brown's win in Massachusetts, I'd like to suggest the sort of personnel change President Obama needs to make in order to recoup his populist mojo: fire Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and replace him with Conan O'Brien. Why? Because Conan clearly has a grasp of exactly what you should do when, after years of grueling effort, the Man jerks your chain just as you're on the brink of realizing a long-cherished goal.

Like a lot of people, I don't really care about these late-night shows or the celebrity "controversies" they generate (if I can stay up that late, I'm watching Colbert or the Maddow rerun anyway). But NBC's Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien saga has started to display the same structural shape--that is, high-handed corporate incompetence in which all nasty consequences are relentlessly shifted onto workers below the perpetrator in the pecking order--that has characterized our nation's financial crisis. And Conan has the cojones to be admirably, even hilariously, petty about it in public.

Jeff Zucker, the NBC/Universal chief who juggled Leno and ultimately displaced O'Brien, is--like Goldman Sachs head Lloyd Blankfein when he was holding onto those worthless liens against AIG--the sort of grasping corporate exec who will not make tough decisions and instead ties everyone around him into contractual knots while hoping it will all work out in the end. After promising Conan that if he waited five years The Tonight Show would be his, Zucker pulled the half-baked, absurd gambit of moving Leno to 10 p.m. every weeknight with a terrible show that killed local news ratings and strangled Conan's lead-in. When the network's affiliates complained, Zucker just said "nevermind," and tried at first to squeeze Leno into Conan's first half hour; when that proved to be DOA, NBC agreed to pay the younger star $45 million to just go away.

The dollar amounts are spelled with m's instead of b's or t's, but that, writ small, is Obama's conundrum with the banks. Like NBC, American bankers in the boom years could not make a tough decision about the bloated and obviously unsustainable derivatives market because they were reaping huge fees by pushing subprime mortgages. They weren't even able to entertain the notion that their magic algebra couldn't go on forever, much less that it could add up to a Ponzi scheme that would sink the entire economy. They were hoping that some slapdash patch, some absurd dodge, some last-minute fix--like giving Hank Paulson nearly a trillion dollars in TARP money and the keys to the Fed window in the last 10 minutes of George Bush's presidency--would save their butts.

It did, too. But when you look at the financial equation the bankers and their friends in the two political parties wrote out for us, you can see immediately that it was a raw deal. The moneymen raked in at least $10 trillion in taxpayer funds as aid to the banks and other financial entities like AIG. Obama assumed in return that he'd get a stimulus bill of about $.8 trillion and the long-needed overhauls of America's health insurance system, environmental policies, and fiscal regulations. He got the .8 (though he had to dedicate a third of it to pointless tax cuts rather than to actual job creation or aid to the foundering states). But when the time came to pass health reform, the political/financial complex dug in their heels. They went so far as to mount a deviously phony-populist slander campaign against reform, with much of the corporate ad money secretly laundered through the Chamber of Commerce, FreedomWorks, and other such fronts. (With today's Supreme Court's decision that corporations may spend as much as they want in ad campaigns for a politician, who needs a laundromat?)

So, what Obama needs is a little bit of Conan's anarchic elan. If the banks--who, as Sen. Dick Durbin said of the Congress, "own the place"--won't let him spend money to reform healthcare, he should use his majority to rewrite the tax laws (tax rate changes require only 50 Senate votes and the Vice President's) to take Wall Street's bonus money back. After all, as Rediscovering Values author Jim Wallis said on Jon Stewart last night, the $150 billion that just six banks paid out as bonuses in 2009 could eliminate or postpone all home foreclosures through 2012, or erase the budget gaps in all 50 states. At the least, it could help rebuild Haiti.

Yes, O'Brien could show Geithner how it's done. And to paraphrase Scott Brown, Conan is available.

By Leslie Savan:
Reprinted with permission from The Nation

[cidaia]

"At Least Conan Knows What To Do...."

Whine loudly and milk the situation for all the personal gain that can be had out of it?

[mnbrant]

ALSO TO THE U.S. GOVT. I WILL BE MORE THAN HAPPY TO TAKE AT LEAST 1 BILLION AS A LOAN FROM YOU, MAKE 3%, GIVE YOU 2% AND PAY MYSELF 1%. I DO NOT REQUIRE ANY BONUSES TO DO THIS. I WOULD TOTAL MY TAKE FROM THIS BUY MY WIFE THREW AWAY MY 12 DIGIT CALCULATOR. PLEASE FIND ME TO GIVE ME THE MONEY. THIS IS A GOOD DEAL! BRANT COYLE.

[mnbrant]

I do like Conan better than Leno however and actually forgot that Leon even existed when he moved to his new time slot. Conan would be a lot funnier as treasury secretary.
Here are the Interesting bits on treasury secretary Geithner that I got from wiki, (FINDING INFO ON THIS GUY IS TRICKY YOU HAVE TO KNOW HIS NAME TO GET INFO ON HIM IN GOOGLE; U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY DOESN'T WORK).

Bank bailout


Geithner speaking at the United States Department of Treasury.
Geithner has the authority to decide what to do with the second tranche of $350 billion from the $700 billion banking bailout bill passed by Congress in October 2008. He does not need Congressional approval, but went to Congress on February 10-11 to explain his plans. He proposes to create one or more "bad banks" to buy and hold toxic assets, using a mix of taxpayer and private money. He also proposes to expand a lending program that would spend as much as $1 trillion to cover the decline in the issuance of securities backed by consumer loans. He further proposes to give banks new infusions of capital with which to lend. In exchange, banks would have to cut the salaries and perks of their executives and sharply limit dividends and corporate acquisitions.[40][41] The plan has been criticized by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman[42] as well as fellow Nobel laureate and former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz.[43]

Ok, now we know that AIG was the bad bank with toxic assets that we gave 1/5th of a trillion to. We know that AIG then laundered 93.4 billion of that money to other banks to make them appear more healthy. They then payed out 165 million in bonuses with U.S. tax money. To be honest I do not mean they took tax payer money to a Chinese laundry literally but they did purchase derivatives from these companies at less than face value. I looked at the quarterly loss AIG had after it had recieved the 1/5th trillion and it is 62 billion. Thats what happens when you buy derivatives for 2/3rds (estimated based on the sources I read) their worth to your friends and pay yourself bonuses of 165 million. At the hearing to chide them all the bankers did was grin and shrug and pull the pockets out of their pants to show they were empty except for a few govt. credit cards. Really we should treat this like any high profile bankruptcy case and seize all the high value assets of these bankers even making the govt. the beneficiaries of all their life insurance policies while requiring them to maintain payments on the premium. It's unbelievable that Obama and Geitner still have a job after this and for the love of GOD can you get someone like me to write for CBS? I mean I get more from google than reading you though I like you very much.

[mnbrant]

I got this from business insider.

In case you were wondering where on earth all that money went that you shoveled into the black hole known as AIG, we now have a pretty good idea.
$13 billion of it went to Goldman Sachs
$12 billion went to Soc Gen
$12 billion went to Deutsche Bank
$9 billion went to Barclays
$7 billion went to Merrill Lynch
$5 billion went to Bank of America
And so on.

Pretty much instead of hitting up the banks for peanuts we should demand that all these firms pay us back the our money that AIG laundered to them immediately. Especially Goldman Sachs. I know that banks are gearing up to charge monthly fees to have an open account with them. Now is the time to close our accounts and find alternative solutions rather than have them nickel and dime us to pay off their tarp money and bonuses.

[proudmilvet]

Even though i'm quite sure he's a nice guy, watching Conan is like watching a 17 year old doing a project with his Buddies for their Junior year in High School.

[sjc_1]

This more about having a stand up guy that takes no guff. The Treasury Secretary can not just say that he quits and walk away with $30 million. Paulson was appointed because Bush knew that it was all going to come crashing down and he wanted a guy that would take care of rich friends. Paulson also made sure that his $200 million in Goldman stock remained that way.