Bailouts

On Thursday, I noted (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) that the Associated Press's Marty Crutsinger and Chris Rugaber worked very hard to gloss over October's horrid housing market news as reflected in the Census Bureau's reports on housing starts and building permits.

That's bad enough. But a Tuesday report covering the latest release of the Housing Market Index (HMI) by the National Association of Home Builders demonstrates how utterly determined the wire service is to put gobs of lipstick on a very ugly pig.

For context, I'll show readers the complete 25-year history of said index.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday said the reason so many Republicans are opposed to the Federal Reserve's new monetary stimulus scheme of quantitative easing is because they really want the economy to stay weak in order to harm President Obama.

Readers are advised to strap themselves in tightly in preparation for the paranoid lunacy on display:

At the top of Thursday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith cheered the public trading of General Motors stock as evidence that Obama administration's bailout of the auto industry had worked: "GM's big comeback. In a stunning turnaround, General Motors begins to sell it's stock less than 18 months after the government's massive $50 billion bailout."

Smith even went so far as to ask: "Will American taxpayers make a profit on the investment?" Moments later, fellow co-host Maggie Rodriguez praised the companies "amazing turnaround" and observed: "What a difference a year and a half makes....here we are17 months after a bailout GM is trading publicly again." Later in the show, Rodriguez remarked that she hoped the cost to British taxpayers for the upcoming royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton "ends the way GM's is ending, with the taxpayers getting paid back."  

I guess after about a year and a half of dancing around the truth, the Associated Press decided that confession of some of the truth about Government/General Motors is good for the soul.

Conveniently, the AP's de facto partial confession, delivered via reporter Sharon Silke Carty, comes as the success of the company's initial public offering seems assured.

Carty's confession consists of four reasons why investors should consider avoiding the stock once if it indeed makes it to the public markets (and yes, the original uses all caps where indicated):

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Krugman tries to clarify what he said.

Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget.

In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit commission, "Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN's Kathleen Parker and Eliot Spitzer endorsed Matt Taibbi's bashing of conservatives on their Monday program. Spitzer marveled over the Rolling Stone editor's "brilliant" label of the Tea Party as "15 million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid." This was the second straight evening that the network brought on an anti-conservative author to promote their latest work.

The two hosts devoted 12 straight and uninterrupted minutes during the first half of the 8 pm Eastern hour to their interview of Taibbi. Parker mentioned Taibbi's new book, "Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and a Long Con that is Breaking America,"  in her introduction of the author and labeled it "a scathing and often hilarious account of the financial crisis...it's hard to make the financial crisis funny, but you did that successfully." She continue by quoting one of the writer's attacks on Sarah Palin: "I want to read you a description that you wrote of Sarah Palin. You called her a 'narcissistic money-grubbing hack.'"

After laughing at this label, the pseudo-conservative writer sought her guest's take on Palin: "She's got the Republican establishment scared to death, so there must be something more to Sarah than just that, huh?" Taibbi replied with some guarded praise of the former Alaska governor, along with the Tea Party movement:

Darn. If only the midterm elections had been held after Friday's Employment Situation Report instead of before, the results might have been very different.

Apparently that's what the Associated Press's Liz Sidoti (pictured at the top right at this post's home page tease) wants us to believe, as she ended her borderline bitter take on the origins of Congressional Republicans' successful electoral comeback and takeover of the House of Representatives four days ago with this sentence:

Ten months later (after Scott Brown's U.S. Senate race victory in Massachusetts -- Ed.), victorious Republicans met to plan their transition to power in the House - just as it was announced that the economy created 151,000 jobs.

As if one good jobs-added number -- even with the unemployment rate stuck at 9.6% -- proves that the economic recovery is finally in high gear. Zheesh.

When a Democrat or leftist makes an ill-advised remark, it seems that there's a three-stage process at the Associated Press, and perhaps in most other establishment press outlets, for handling it. It goes roughly like this:

• Stage 1 - Ignore it as long as you can. If there isn't much outcry, keep ignoring it.
• Stage 2 - If there ends up being enough of an outcry from conservatives or Republicans to warrant coverage, make sure that the story is about the criticism at least as much as the remark.
• Stage 3 - In the ensuing coverage, leave out what was originally said.

The Associated Press is currently and grudgingly at Stage 2 with Harry Reid's remark that "but for me, we'd be in a worldwide depression," as seen below (reproduced in full for fair use and discussion purposes):

Only the New York Times could burn through 2,500 words about Japan's economy and not use the word "stimulus." The Old Gray Lady's Martin Fackler did refer to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's just-announced second attempt to "stimulate" economy, but dodged the central lesson: The government created the Japanese people's malaise, and our government, despite Japan's experience, seems determined to do the same to us.

The Times item is the first in a series, so I suppose Fackler may get around to it in subsequent reports, but it doesn't seem likely.

Here are some paragraphs from Fackler's report that show how intent he and the Times were on not getting to the real root causes of Japan's nearly two-decade malaise (bolds are mine):

Steven Rattner, the first Obama car czar who allegedly "bribed a political consultant to win business from New York's pension fund for his former investment firm," was extremely close this week to cutting a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), only to see that agreement held up this week to the intervention of New York Attorney General and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, the Washington Post reported today. 

On page A16.

There is a simple explanation for President Obama's dismal approval ratings, but ABC's George Stephanopoulos fails to comprehend it. Appearing on the October 13 "O'Reilly Factor," the former Clinton adviser peddled multiple theories to explain Obama's unpopularity, but neglected to consider the possibility that the president has simply failed to connect with the general public.

"As far as the problem with Democrats, they're upset about the economy, but he has also got a problem with liberals, who wish he would have done more on issues like gays in the military, on health care, on other issues," asserted Stephanopoulos.

The argument that Obama's approval rating is suffering because his policies have not been liberal enough shows just how disconnected this political flak-turned-journalist is with the public he ostensibly serves. Obama's approval rating is not hovering around 43 percent, as the latest Reuters poll indicates, because liberal activists, who represent a small percentage of the population, have been abandoning the president in droves. Rather, Obama is floundering because his support among independents and swing-voters has evaporated. In that same poll, according to Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, Obama has a 33 percent approval rating among Ohio voters.

Following up on yesterday's post ("Government/General Motors, UAW Hose Long-Time Members Twice in Two Weeks"; at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) -- What a "revolting" development this is, as reported in the Detroit News:

GM Orion assembly workers to picket UAW over two-tier wage structure

In an unprecedented move, Government/General Motors and the UAW are imposing a two-tiered wage structure involving pay cuts approaching 50% on union members with as many as 10-12 years of seniority. That's right; the Democratic Obama administration and the alleged champions of workers' interests are acting in concert to gut the earnings of hundreds of the union's longtime, dues-paying members.

Does anyone expect any press coverage of this outside of Detroit?

Here's more from the story by Louis Aguilar and Christina Rogers:

There are times when you have to wonder whether liberal shills in the media are are just ignorant or dishonest.

Monday is one of those times.

Consider Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's most recent column in the New York Times entitled "Hey, Small Spender" wherein the man the Left considers to be one of the economic geniuses of our time argues that federal spending really hasn't increased under President Obama.

Most deviously, the Nobel Prize winner in economics never once actually referred to actual figures from the budget to prove his point:

George Will on Sunday once again proved how little Nobel laureate Paul Krugman actually knows about economics.

As the Roundtable segment of ABC’s “This Week” approached its conclusion, host Christiane Amanpour referred to French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde’s claim earlier in the program that her country’s economy is already growing and doesn’t need any further stimulus spending.

Krugman, who is always interested in government laying out more dollars it doesn’t have, bashed Lagarde’s view saying, “I think she's got a fantasy, which is a popular European fantasy, which bears no relationship to what's actually happening.”

With the ball nicely teed up, Will smacked a monster drive down the middle of the fairway that would make Tiger Woods proud (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Solidarity, schmolidarity. 

It was one thing when the United Auto Workers agreed many years ago to temporary "two-tiered" wage structures at the plants of Detroit's Big Three automakers. After all, it was argued, they'll be brought up to a level of full pay and benefits in several years, and new employees aren't as productive as the veterans.

 

So more government isn’t the answer to all of our problems? For a brief moment, that seemed to be the message Huffington Post editor-in-chief and co-founder Arianna Huffington was conveying. 

On CNBC’s Oct. 5 broadcast of “Squawk Box,” Huffington, author of “Third World America” explained what she thought the role of government should be in an American economic system. Now whether she was playing to the CNBC pro-capitalist audience or not remains to be seen, but she did depart with the so-called progressive/liberal view of government’s role in the economy, and criticized the Obama administration.

“[S]o when it comes to the Obama administration’s policies, the problem has been rewarding people for taking excessive risks, which is not at the heart of capitalism,” Huffington said. “You and I have talked about that before. At the heart of capitalism is the assumption that if you take excessive risks and you fail, you’re on your own. The taxpayer is not on the hook. And we still have left the systemic risk in the system despite the financial reform bill that was passed. ‘Too big to fail’ has not ended and that really is the potential problem in the future.”

Government/General Motors saw its total vehicle sales fall in September to 173,031 from 185,105 in August. At the same time, Ford's sales increased from to 157,327 to 160,375.

Thus, what was an almost 28,000-vehicle lead for GM in August shrank by more than half to less than 13,000 in September. No one has a crystal ball, of course, but if GM falls and Ford surges by similar amounts in October, Ford will become the top-selling brand in the USA.

Associated Press reporters Tom Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin apparently believe that Ford's move to within clear striking distance of taking over GM is not news that anyone can use. They had their opportunities to mention the situation in their coverage today, and blew right by them.

Oh, and wait until you see what GM is doing to try to keep from losing its Number 1 status.

Here is some of what Krisher and Durbin disseminated (bolds and number tags are mine):

New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman is clearly unhappy about the Tea Party, so much so that he considers the movement "not that important."

Instead, he envisions another group, "which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats," sitting silently out there in America waiting for the right leader to emerge.

So wrote Friedman Wednesday in his "The Tea Kettle Movement":

You would think someone in the U.S. establishment press would be following Uncle Sam's progress or lack thereof in getting out from under its investment in Citigroup, especially since the government promised that it would be fully divested from the bank holding company by the end of this year. From all appearances, you would be wrong.

It looks like the government may not be able to keep that year-end divestiture promise. For a fair number of news followers to learn that, the UK's Financial Times had to take an interest (link may require registration), and Drudge had to link to it:

US Treasury stumbles selling Citi shares

The US government is in danger of missing its deadline of divesting all of its Citigroup shares by the year-end after a fall in stock market trading volumes prompted authorities to slow down sales in July and August.

The lull could prompt the US Treasury, which has a stake of about 17 per cent in Citi, to consider a share offering instead of selling the stock in small quantities in the market, according to bankers and analysts.

In the earlier paragraphs of a Friday report on the recently passed small business lending bill at the Associated Press, reporter Pallavi Gogoi gave readers the impression that Congress's allegedly noble intentions might be thwarted because banks and businesses who should apparently be grateful for the "help" don't want it.

Gogoi gives no direct indication that the bill involves government "investment" in (i.e., partial state ownership of) participating financial institutions.

The AP reporter didn't have to look very far to see what's really involved. The defined purpose of the bill, which weighs in at over 40,000 words (full text here), is right there at its beginning (bold is mine):

An Act -- To create the Small Business Lending Fund Program to direct the Secretary of the Treasury to make capital investments in eligible institutions in order to increase the availability of credit for small businesses, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide tax incentives for small business job creation, and for other purposes.

This is not very different from what ended up happening with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) enacted two years ago. In fact, two lawyers writing on the law's potential impact describe it as a "mini-TARP." You'd never know that from Gogoi's report (one cryptic reference to the underlying state control involved is in bold):

For the second week in a row Charles Krauthammer has gotten into a heated debate with the Washington Post's Colby King on the PBS program "Inside Washington."

This time it was about the effectiveness of President Obama's stimulus plan. 

"These guys have had a year and a half and people are not happy with the results," said Krauthammer. "$1 trillion of stimulus it disappeared and there is nothing to show."

King responded, "They had 3 million jobs to show for it."

The fun really started after Krauthammer marvelously replied, "Yeah, saved, saved, how do you measure a saved job?" (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

A recurring theme from liberal media members as we approach the midterm elections is that Americans have to vote for Democrats in November so the nation doesn't go back to the way things were when Republicans ran everything.

A perfect example is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who on Friday penned a piece called "Downhill With the G.O.P.":

Never mind the war on terror, the party's main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

In the midst of all this "Do you really want to go back to those days" talk is a staggering ignorance concerning how "those days" compare to now:

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good." That was the defining line of Oliver Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street," and his attack on the financial system that the news media would use for decades to portray businessmen as villains.

The theme Stone wants viewers to take away from his sequel, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," was tucked away in the credits of his film on a greenback. "In Greed We Trust," the bill proclaimed where the words "In God We Trust" should have been.

"Money Never Sleeps," which opens in theaters Sept. 24, uses the financial crisis of 2008 as a backdrop for the comeback of Gordon Gekko, the iconic villain of the original. This time Gekko reinvents himself as a changed man, coming back bearish on housing and speculation.

In a business school lecture Gekko warns, "The mother of all evils is speculation -- leveraged debt." He claims the economy is merely moving money around in circles and the business model itself is like a "cancer."

One of the Left's most esteemed economists, the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research's Dean Baker, claimed Monday the "Second Great Depression," the term given to what many believed the country was heading for if drastic government action wasn't taken in the fall of 2008, was all a fiction created by Wall Street to get bailed out.

In Baker's view published at the unashamedly liberal Huffington Post, the Federal Reserve could have solved all the problems that ailed us at the time, and had some of America's largest banks been allowed to fail, their financial loss would have been "our" gain as their money was magically redistributed to Main Street.

Potentially most hysterical is that Baker never once mentioned how this all occurred weeks before Election Day, and never once mentioned Barack Obama who not only hyped the collapse to seal his ascendancy to the White House, but also continually reminds Americans to this day that his efforts averted the "Second Great Depression":

"This is what we are to expect, and it's going to get worse between now and November."

That's how NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center President Brent Bozell reacted this morning on Fox Business Network's "Varney & Company" to the media's drumbeat of criticism regarding Tea Party-backed Republican nominees for office this November.

Bozell agreed with host Stuart Varney that the media are incessantly bashing Tea Party favorites like Delaware's Christine O'Donnell because they have to change the subject from the demonstrable failures of Obamanomics [MP3 audio available here; WMV video for download here]:

I tried to find a nicer way to put it in the headline. But I can't.

At the Associated Press, Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger's apparent plug-and-play report less than an hour after the issuance of Uncle Sam's August Monthly Treasury Statement on Monday (his item is time-stamped at 2:56 p.m., which follows the Treasury Department's 2:00 p.m. release by less than an hour) contains three obviously false statements that a news organization which really subscribes to its own "Statement of News Values and Principles" would retract and/or correct.

The specific AP standard in question is whether it has violated its promise not to "knowingly introduce false information into material intended for publication or broadcast." The only conceivable excuse at this point is that Crutsinger and his employer don't realize what they have done. The three falsehoods involved are not arcane or open to interpretation. Rather, they are significant, obvious, irrefutable, and in need of correction.

What follows are the three statements, the first of which contradicts itself in the report's own subsequent sentence:

Interviewing White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett yesterday, The View's liberal co-hosts repelled Elisabeth Hasslebeck's tough questions on President Obama's failed economic agenda by changing the subject and ignoring their conservative colleague's criticism.

Refuting the claim that the economy is "certainly moving in the right direction" despite dismal unemployment numbers, Hasselbeck asked Jarrett if Obama's $50 billion infrastructure bill represents an "admittance of failure on the $800 billion stimulus bill that didn't seem to work."

To sidestep Hasselbeck's question, Jarrett invoked incredulity, flawed statistics, and historical revisionism:

As NewsBusters has previously reported, liberal Internet publisher Arianna Huffington is breathtakingly ignorant when it comes to basic economic theory.

On Sunday, she proved it again by making an absolute fool of herself on ABC's "This Week."

With the "Roundtable" segment beginning on the subject of the economy, Huffington noted how the failure of the banking bailout to stimulate growth was "proof that the government does not work."

In a stunning display of both idiocy and hypocrisy, she moments later demanded more financial regulations, including a reinstatement of the Depression Era Glass-Steagall Act, to - wait for it! - stimulate the economy.

Adding insult to injury, George Will was available to really make clear what an absolute imbecile Huffington is (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):