Ditka and the Bears: Changing coaches is a start, but we have little to hope for until there’s a change of owners, dropping those who fired D. in 1993.
“I was fired out of jealousy, plain and simple,” Ditka said for the Beyond the Glory special. “I had become the Bears. The greatest moment of my life is when George Halas hired me. The lowest moment of my life was when a guy that shouldn’t have been there fired me.”
But he’s still there, at his mother’s side.
2) Obama vs. banks: New tax purely political, as Geithner made clear on CNBC yesterday on the Kudlow Report, John Harwood asking, “You know Wall Street . . . . Is there something morally corrupt about Wall Street institutions and the people in them?”
Geithner:
I believe personally [dodge word: how else would he believe?] that what you’re seeing happen across the financial system, what you saw happen that caused the crisis, even what you see now happening, is just causing a huger damage to basic trust and confidence of Americans in the fairness of our system.
Fairness an Obama word: he used it in the ‘08 campaign to justify tax rate increases that result in reduced tax revenues.
Geithner continuing:
It’s just very hard for people to understand with unemployment at 10 percent, you know [yes, we do know, now that you mention it], with millions of Americans–this is the United States of America [yes, we know that too]–with millions of Americans on food stamps, worst recession in almost a generation, that you could see compensation practice produce such huge returns to people who were at the center of this mess. It is unexplicable [sic]. People cannot understand why it is fair. And…
Harwood: “But you understand because you know this culture. Why is it happening?”
I don’t–I don’t–I don’t understand it, really. I really don’t understand it. [Hand-wringing off camera] . . . but what it underscores is why it is so important to make sure that we put in place tougher rules, the kind of reforms that’ll make sure that we can wake up in the morning and tell the American people that we have done what is necessary to protect them from the risk of this happening again.
A political goal.
Harwood: “Is it pure greed?”
Geithner:
John, it’s a complicated thing. I don’t–I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it, [distraught] and I think it’s very important for those people running these firms, for their boards of directors, for their shareholders, to work very hard to try to earn back some basic sense of trust and confidence of the American people.
Like the trust and confidence in Congress? He’s worried about that too? What about the sheer economics of it all? Is he the treasury secretary, or a highly placed morale officer?
He continued:
I think it’s very important to do that. [Of course you do.] And I think, as part of that, they need to not just make sure they’re making loans [with less available capital, of course] again to businesses and communities, helping solve the housing crisis [ditto], but . . . are working to support a package of strong reforms in the financial system that’ll be better for the country as a whole.
Vague, indecipherable, enough to drive a sane man nuts.
Blithe Spirit 