“The media are incompetent” is not really true. They have shown themselves to be extremely skilled at deflecting attention away from things like this. On-air personalities mention it and move right along, with no discussion.

The people that run the media companies are not going to rat out their friends in the financial industry.

They protect their own. Unless unions are involved. That’s when the class aspect of this comes out into the sunlight. That’s why we see the auto industry bailout (a fraction of the AIG bailout) being so roundly criticized and nitpicked, while the financial industry is simply handed more cash to use as it sees fit.

Like paying retention bonuses to keep the guys who ran the business into the dirt.

A lot of this debate strikes me as the usual all-or-nothing argument movement conservatives so love to present when they want to stall any solutions.

They’ve employed this with great success on health care reform, arguing that, if we allow ANY government intervention in health care, the country quickly will turn to socialized medicine and all medical innovation will stop because there no longer will be an incentive to develop new drugs and procedures. Of cousre, it’s a lot harder for them to make the argument now that we have sunk hundreds of billions into our financial sector.

“Not since Truman,” Sanger writes, “has Washington toyed with nationalization.”

“Not since Truman,” that is, so long as you ignore the very recent nationalizations of AIG, Fannie, and Freddie.

Sanger uttered not one peep when the US effectively nationalized AIG–he was off writing about things that normally come up on his beat, nukes in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. Likewise, he was silent when we took over Fannie and Freddie. Again, at that point he was happy to focus on North Korea. Yet between AIG, Fannie, and Freddie, we spent $285 billion, in a first installment (and more since), and took a much greater stake in the companies.

We started nationalizing companies three months ago, David Sanger, and you seemed perfectly content with all that.

Being a Villager apparently means typing up corporate or GOP press releases and releasing them under your own name. Actually looking back at things like history, even very recent history, is verboten if it contradicts today’s propaganda offering.

And what this whole debate is lacking is any concept of numbers. For example, if this is a $34 billion so-called bailout, what is it really? Well, it’s subsidized loans, or maybe they’ll turn it into loan guarantees. And depending on what the government gets in return, that is a fraction of what—as Amy said, of what Citibank and the financial industries have gotten in New York.

The reason why there’s so much focus on the auto companies is not just its role in the American economy, but it’s public, and there are congressional hearings, where the wave of the gigantic bailout after bailout of Wall Street occurred largely on weekends in secret meetings between the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and the goliaths on Wall Street. And these were sweetheart deals. Citibank got a huge sweetheart deal with very, very little reciprocity.

Now, if the Congress is going to move to save the domestic auto industry, they’re going to do it as taxpayers, as shareholders, as creditors, and they will drive a hard bargain. And as a result, the taxpayer can get preferred shares, they can get warrants, so that if the companies recover, the taxpayer gets not just the money back, but a huge surplus. I mean, Ford Motor Company stock now is around $2.60. If Ford modestly recovers, it could go to $20. And, of course, those Treasury warrants and preferred shares would come out very, very handsomely, as they did in the Chrysler bailout when Iacocca turned it around in 1980 and ’81.