The mind boggles...
…on every conceivable level this morning.
Item: The bailout of Detroit went down in flames last night, but not because principled lawmakers devoted to the free market thought that management of the automakers should pass from weak hands into stronger hands via bankruptcy, as the Framers of the Constitution provided for.
No, it appears the Republican holdouts were more than happy to fork over the $14 billion, but only if the United Auto Workers agreed to wage cuts on the GOP’s timetable. In other words, the modern Republican party believes it’s government’s place to micromanage wages. (And let the record show the instigator of this scheme, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, was all for the bailout of the financial sector that Jim Rogers has declared bankrupt.)
Item: Laid-off workers at a company smash windows and computer gear. Workers at another company travel hundreds of miles to company headquarters to demand back wages. Taxi drivers fight with police in several cities, and even the cops gather as mobs to demand higher wages.
United States 2010? No, China 2008.
Item: Congresscritter submits a bill demanding the Fed, among other things, restore the M3 money supply figure it stopped reporting nearly three years ago. The congresscritter is… Dennis Kucinich?
OK, here’s something I can actually wrap my head around. The Federal Reserve just gave Bloomberg a big ol’ middle finger in response to Bloomberg’s Freedom of Information suit demanding to know who’s getting those $2 trillion in emergency loans, and what they’re putting up for collateral.
The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.
Incredibly, this longish story never gets around to saying what the next step in the legal process is. So yes, I guess my mind boggles at that too.
Comments: