As I said, I'm not for "a bailout"; I think purchasing assets makes more sense than offering open-ended insurance. It's good we got $12 billion in equity in Citigroup, but if the losses on Wachovias assets are very large, that equity will be dwarfed by the straight cash paid to Citigroup to make up its losses.

Posted at September 30, 2008 2:56 PM in response to A "Bailout" is Cheaper than the Status Quo

Now, that's funny :) and

Posted at September 30, 2008 2:32 PM in response to A "Bailout" is Cheaper than the Status Quo

BTW Ellen-- you are right that the Citigroup deal is slightly better than I thought, since the government gets a $12 billion equity stake, so they will participate in the upside. But I still think making big banks bigger, even with the federal government getting a taste, is worse policy than more evenhandedly buying troubled assets and spreading the government equity stakes around more institutions to decrease financial centralization.

Posted at September 30, 2008 1:36 PM in response to A "Bailout" is Cheaper than the Status Quo

Ellen-- the point is that the Fed is already a Wall Street enabler, so my point is let's compare the bailout legislation to the real status quo of Fed handouts to the big banks, not to some imaginary reality where lack of new legislation means some big financial institutions aren't getting big financial supports from the feds.

The status quo is a bunch of very expensive, haphazard bailouts amounts to tens of billions, maybe already hundreds of billions in potential losses to taxpayers. That's NOW. So the question is whether buying actual assets, as opposed to explicit or implicit insurance, is a better and less costly approach.

Yes, I actually agree with Paulson, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Paulson and, god help me, George Bush, that it's better than the status quo approach.

Posted at September 30, 2008 1:28 PM in response to A "Bailout" is Cheaper than the Status Quo

It's worth remembering that many Northern states prohibited free blacks from emigrating, making them "illegal immigrants" in "free soil" Northern states. Restrictions on immigration out of economically or politically regressive places is also a form of tyranny.

And given the U.S. collaboration with rightwing Mexican regimes on NAFTA which economically decimated poor rural areas in that country, attacking the right of Mexican workers to flee the economic poverty the U.S. helped impose is hardly a progressive position.

The goal should be to strengthen the labor rights of ALL workers, black, white, American, Mexican, Chinese, whatever. Declaring any worker "illegal" and using the state to imprison and punish them for that status is just a continuation of the same kinds of injustice fueling the Southern Gulag.

Posted at September 2, 2008 8:24 PM in response to Southern Gulag: How 20th Century Slave Labor Undermined the US Labor Movement

The real problem is that undocumented immigrants aren't fully protected under federal labor law. They can be fired by employers for trying to unionize without punishment under the law-- making them extremely attractive as employees, since they are a workforce without rights. Restore labor rights to all workers and the attraction of hiring undocumented workers will decrease.

Posted at September 2, 2008 6:59 AM in response to Southern Gulag: How 20th Century Slave Labor Undermined the US Labor Movement

As noted, the point is history that is within the lifetime of living people.

But please note that I emphasized that the slavery involved not just southern institutions but northern ones as well, like US Steel, led by Northerners, who were for a while the largest users of the Alabama slave convict system. I actually went out of my way-- as did Blackmon -- to emphasize that the problem was not merely a southern one, even if that was the physical location of the convict slave systems he was examining.

Posted at September 1, 2008 11:12 PM in response to The Non-Inevitability of Evil

Odd, this was not a post about Southerners but about a national decision to commit ethnic cleansing against Native Americans. The main southerner quoted was Davy Crockett, a Tennesseean who opposed the decision.

But this sectional breastbeating of southern oppression is another example of ways memory is diverted. So many ways to ignore or distract from the past -- here is another example.

Posted at September 1, 2008 10:11 PM in response to The Non-Inevitability of Evil

I'm not even sure what your point is or who the bad guy is in your story? Sure, there a number of important strikes and union organizing drives in the South, but they were fatally weakened by the southern system of repression. Yes, labor leaders missed a number of major opportunities-- although 1934 was before the CIO had formed and mounted major organizing drives in the North, much less set itself up to support industrial union drives well in the South (the real failures on that front came in the late 1940s).

The problems of labor are not monocausal, but the story in this piece is one that few people know, so that was the point of writing it.

Posted at September 1, 2008 5:09 PM in response to Southern Gulag: How 20th Century Slave Labor Undermined the US Labor Movement

Yes, native Americans often are treated as "noble" and their defeat "tragic;" the romance of their defeats began almost immediately.

Question? How many U.S. textbooks say that the U.S. engaged in acts that, in modern language, would be considered war crimes and acts of genocide? The point is not that no history books discuss the abuse of native Americans. The point is that anyone who describes their treatment as calling into question the moral worth of U.S. policy and its existence in stolen lands would be treated as crazy and traitorous. Just look at how the student group, MEChA gets treated for raising the issue of stolen lands from Mexico and the mistreatment of latinos historically in the lands stolen from them.

Posted at September 1, 2008 4:58 PM in response to Legacy of Mythological Patriotism from the Southern Gulag