Dec 14 2008

“Are We Chumps?”, “You Betcha”

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)


“What I’m learning is that the highest officials in our land have proven to be less than capable in making decisions that affect the lives of so many Americans, that we’ve seen about faces, changes of strategy, no clear coherent strategy for fixing a world-shattering crisis.”

Emma Coleman Jordan
On Bill Moyers Journal
Friday, December 12, 2008

Emma Coleman Jordan is a Georgetown University legal and finance scholar. She taught for twelve years at the University of California, Davis.

She began her teaching career at Stanford Law School as a teaching fellow. She has been active in the financial services field, serving as chair of the Financial Institutions Committee of the California State Bar, drafter of the statute to regulate bank check holding practices, and co-counsel in class actions challenging bank stop-payment fee charges.

Her article, “Ending the Floating Check Game” (1985), grew out of this involvement. She organized the Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services section of the Association of American Law Schools.

She was a White House Fellow in 1980-81, serving as special assistant to the Attorney General. She was counsel to Professor Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.  

She has been tracking the bailout hearings in Congress trying to find out what happened to the original $700 Billion dollar Wall Street bailout, where the money went, and where all the bailout money has been going since.

On Friday (last night December 12) Jordan spoke with journalist Bill Moyers on the PBS program Bill Moyers Journal, and took Moyers through recent news on the bailouts as big business begs for more, and about the web of connection behind the pending automakers bailout.

The program is about 30 minutes long, and the full transcript is available on the Bill Moyers Journal site, here.

18 comments

Skip to comment form

    • Edger on December 14, 2008 at 03:12
      Author
    • #

  2. …Thanks for posting.  The first half of the show, with Glenn Greenwald on the abuse of power by the Bush gang, was excellent also.

  3. the link to the transcript.  Great stuff!

    She’s right of course: the Powers That Be do think we’re chumps.  Possibly the Republic Windows occupation will encourage other such actions.  Read the story about it in today’s NYT, and it seemed to me (although I may have been reading this into the piece based on my own biases) that even the journalist who wrote it was appalled by the hubris of Republic’s owner demanding that, if the workers got the money they were entitled to by law his vehicles should also be paid for by the loan.

    Of course he eventually backed down on that.

    Another intriguing bit from the story:

    In many ways, however, Republic was an unlikely setting for a worker uprising. Many workers interviewed, including some who had been at the plant for more than three decades, said they considered it a decent place to work.

    snip

    But after Mr. Gillman took over as owner in 2006, there were several rounds of layoffs, and the number of employees fell to about 240, from more than 500.

    snip

    Bank officials…said later that they had been discussing closing the plant with the company as far back as July, giving it plenty of time to fulfill its obligations to its workers.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12…

    Of course we all know what the scumbag owner was doing: buying a non-union shop in Iowa.  Nevertheless, the owner’s protestations (and I believe this is a “methinks he doth protest too much” moment) notwithstanding, what strikes me is that he only bought the company in 2006.  So I wonder: did he intend this all along?  Slash-and-burn capitalism at its ugliest?

    Sorry if this rant has gone o/t but it seems very intricately related to all the malfeasance, incompetence, and con-artistry coming from the Masters of the Universe over the past 30 years.

  4. Interviews were Very Good, as usual for Moyers!!

Comments have been disabled.