Is this true? Is the nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Agency really “a done deal.”
The argument seems convincing to me. The only way it doesn’t happen is if they can’t find a single Republican willing to say they’ll vote for her. But, even then, I think they just might see this as the right fight at the right time to make up with the base and get them engaged for the electoral fight to come.
But, even then, I think they just might see this as the right fight at the right time to make up with the base and get them engaged for the electoral fight to come.
So who, exactly, would Obama be listening to then? Because that’s not advice Rahm would be giving? Is Pelosi telling Obama that unless he starts going Bernie Sanders on people he might have car thief Darrell Issa all up in his face come January? Has he read the paper and saw Bachmann’s lunatic ravings and figured he better stop that from having a chance of happening?
Well, it’s just a blogger’s speculation. Still, I can’t imagine Geithner putting himself and Obama in this position: publicly heaping praise on her qualifications and then bypassing her? The WH has been pretty clumsy at times, but surely they’re going to see the trap in allowing a setup like this and then disappointing the party left again.
People like us around here love Warren. I wonder if the general public is familiar with her?
My real question, though, is: will the job be worthy of her formidable knowledge and competence, or will they be wasted as she finds herself forced to defer to some inferior “superior”? I didn’t really follow the legislation on the CFP to have a good idea how independent she’ll be allowed to be.
Yes, the WH has been clumsy, or worse, at times. The question is: Is this a chronic condition?
Is there anyone that’s even remotely palatable that the right wouldn’t fight?
Yeah, thought not. I’m still pulling for Warren, so I’m certainly not as confident as Felix “Done Deal” Salmon.
FTFY.
Let the Republicans oppose one of the folks who accurately predicted the consequences of the financial abuses that were taking place. Let them try to impugn her actions as watchdog on the TARP funds. And let the President and the Democratic caucus make that a forceful case.
If that were to happen, tell me which Republican breaks on cloture. And how many cross over on the final vote.
It’s doable if Obama and Reid decide to do it. The issue is easily stated if they will state it clearly and not bafflegab.
I think it’s been a done-deal for a long time. As I said, politically Obama really has no choice. He has nothing to give liberals right now because of the Senate and election season is coming up. Not nominating her would be disastrous for those reasons alone.
I don’t like nominating people for political reasons, but I see her nomination like I saw Bernanke’s: not my first choice, but I don’t particularly care either way.
Although it’s going to be funny if she is nominated, where the people at FDL will be patting themselves on the back as having been the people who got Obama to listen to them.
And since people were mobilized to call and push their reps for her…
…would they be wrong?
Depends if they agreed with her nomination or not. I would never disparage something for which someone believed in when it comes to this sort of activism, but I always laugh that every good thing Obama does that they give themselves a pat on the back.
I don’t know if she’s in, but I see it pretty much the way he sees it.
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(Daily Bailout News) – I believe Geithner sees the appointment of Elizabeth Warren as a threat to the very scheme he has utilized to date to hide bank losses, thus keeping the banks solvent and out of bankruptcy court and their existing management teams employed and well-paid.
“To see how this scheme works during the current crisis we must go back and examine previous crises and recessions in order to understand their cause. As Kenneth Rogoff explains in his new book, This Time is Different, most crises are preceded by a boom or bubble period in which asset classes, such as homes in this case, reached unsustainable pricing levels. The main driver of most of these asset bubbles is loose bank lending in which banks offer money to asset buyers on very liberal terms, thus guaranteeing that asset prices will inflate abnormally. Eventually, all bubbles burst, and in the worst cases we are led into financial crises.”
So where are the [62] trillions of dollars of bad loans that the banks had on their books? They are still there. The Federal Reserve took possession temporarily of some of them as collateral for lending to the banks in an attempt to clean up the banks for their supposed” stress tests”. But as of now, the trillions of dollars of underwater mortgages, CDO’s and worthless credit default swaps are still on the banks books. Geithner is going to the familiar “bank in crisis” playbook and hoping that the banks can earn their way out of their solvency problems over time so the banks are continuing to slowly write off their problem loans but at a rate that will take years, if not decades, to clean up the problem.
And this is where defeat of the nomination of Elizabeth Warren becomes critical for Geithner. For Geithner’s strategy to work, the banks have to find increasing sources of profitability in their business segments to balance out their annual loan loss recognition from their existing bad loans in an environment in which they continue to recognize new losses in prime residential mortgages, commercial real estate lending, sovereign debt investments, bridge loans to private equity groups, leverage buyout lending and credit card defaults (CCD).
This also explains why there is no economic recovery, no lending by banks and the unemployment stays unacceptable high at 9,5%. Nice NY Times op-ed by Friedman: “It’s my fault.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."It sure sounds like Obama is in the behind-the-scenes arm-twisting phase to get 60 votes.
Or he is going to delay until the August recess and make a recess appointment. Which would be my preference. Hassle out the reappointment in January. Have her on the job and working before the election.
At Netroots Nation today, she talked about standing up an agency in the network age and how this is the first new agency set up from scratch (i.e. doesn’t have legacy hardware and software merger issues). I wonder how fast the Obama administration can set this agency up and how the development of regulations will be different from existing agencies. We might see a first experiment in actual transparency.
Actually, Tarheel, the HuffingtonPost has reported that the structure of the agency does not even required Senate approval for the first Director. So, if Obama really wants Warren, he could have APPOINTED HER ALREADY. He hasn’t.
Moreover, Timothy Geithner serves at Obama’s request. He was the second person chosen to be in the Obama administration. The first? Rahm Emanuel. Those early picks by Obama should tell you Obama is not a progressive, not even really liberal. He’s a Blue Dog. Warren, by contrast, is a progressive and is liberal. That’s why she will never get this job.
If Obama does appoint her, he might do what he did to Dawn Johnsen, appoint her but fail to support her nomination. Johnsen’s appointment to the Head of Legal Counsel position was let to twist in the wind until she withdrew. That could happen here, or Obama will appoint the Robert Rubin-Goldman Sachs guy, Michael Barr.
NOTE: I too believe that Warren should get this job. The fact that she is not a shoo in for the Obama administration should also tell people something: Obama is not a progressive and is not even a liberal.