Bonfire of the Bailout

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Toxic R Us
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 21, 2009

Maureen Dowd's fury at the titans of industry that have wrecked the economy has not abated and she blames Barack Obama for not being tougher on them. We get a nice little Dowdversion® aimed at the robber barons.

Barack Obama prides himself on consensus, soothing warring sides into agreement. But the fury directed at the robber barons by the robbed blind in America has been getting hotter, not cooler.

And she places a share of the blame on Timothy Geithner for being too cozy with the Wall Street weasels.

And that’s because the president and his Treasury secretary have been coddling the Wall Street elite, fretting that if they curtail executives’ pay and perks too much, if they make the negotiations with those who siphoned our 401(k)’s too tough, the spoiled Sherman McCoys will run away, the rescue plan will fail and the markets will wither.

Sherman McCoy is the famously benighted and clueless hero of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities made into a bad, bad movie starring Tom Hanks. And as part of the Movies Wiht Maureen®, she takes from the film one of its catch phrases only substituting 'shafters' with 'masters'.

The shafters of the universe have been treated with such kid gloves that they remain obnoxiously oblivious.

Ending that line with an Alliteration Alert™. And she says Geithner is a little to sympathetic to said masters.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who grew up as a Republican and was head of the New York Fed for five years, sees things from the point of view of that wellspring of masters of the universe, Goldman Sachs.

In the bonuses, Maureen sees not only bad movies about the excess of greed, but also a fair amount of the theater of the absurd, citing its premiere writer.

Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance behemoth that had $59 billion in losses last year when the government was forced to take it over, and since has asked for $15 billion in taxpayer money, brazenly intends to give $1 million apiece in retention bonuses to four top executives, even though the word retention in a depression is pure Ionesco.

My guess is that her favorite play of his is La Lacune or maybe Frenzy for Two or More.

And it wouldn't be a decent Dowd rant on corporate excess without a Bling Report©:

Vikram “Pandit the Bandit” at Citigroup, which received $50 billion in bailout money, is pulling a Thain, spending $10 million to renovate his Park Avenue offices, complete with a Sub-Zero refrigerator and premium millwork (whatever that is).

While the grifters are remodeling in New York, the gardeners are planting an upscale vegetable patch at the White House.

It’s an image that could have come straight out of a McCain campaign ad: Barack Obama growing organic arugula at the White House.

But there was Michelle on Friday, the first day of spring, with a bunch of fifth graders, digging a veggie garden on the South Lawn.

Dowd says that perhaps Barack Obama needs the weapon Michelle is wielding.

The tableau of Michelle Obama hoisting a pitchfork on Friday with her sinewy arms and warning that the commander in chief would be commandeered into yard work left me wondering if the wrong Obama is in the Oval.

I can hear the howls now that Maureen is again emasculating Obama. But until he plants some blame on the bonus babies, he is going to keep getting rolled. Maybe Maureen can talk Michelle into taking a break from gardening and marching pitchfork in hand on the masters of the bailout.

Darby O'Gall

No Boiled Carrots
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 17, 2009

Like a good Irish lass, Maureen took St. Paddy’s Day off, but it was a working holiday for her as she covered Obama’s latest address on the financial bail-outs.

On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.

Gawker notes that the Moneygall pun was used in her Irish Times interview, but in these tough economic times, who can blame her for a little recycling. She continues with the Blarney theme with an extended leprechaun metaphor.

But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well.

And she digs into her well of quaint sayings from the Old Sod to quote her Irish dad:

[Obama] should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”

Now there is a mental image for the ages. Normally, this is a carrot and stick metaphor, but the executive excesses have got her blood boiling. And while other columnists are content to brandish pitchforks, Maureen has the oxcarts rolling up to the guillotine.

He’s got to lop off some heads.
{snip}
Mr. Obama belatedly tried to stop the tumbrels that began rolling toward the Potomac after Larry Summers went on Sunday talk shows to assert that there was nothing the administration could do about the blood-sucking insurance monstrosity’s venal payout.

Summers, who inspires lusty dreams of A.I.G. tormentor Eliot Spitzer, asserted that the government “cannot just abrogate” contracts with financial vampires.

All this blood sucking and carrots makes be think of Bunnicula.

What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G., many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: “We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.”

Which rolls right into the combo Alliteration Alert™ and Crossword Clue® since 'louche' not only fits well with London but also means 'immoral'. One thing this crisis is doing, it’s making Maureen dig deeper into her thesaurus than ever. She's as mad as hell and she's willing to make the March Madness metaphor to prove it.

[Obama's] lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards.

And there is nothing a righteous financial fury to make Dowd get her Irish up.

Real Gone

I'm American made but I like Chevrolet
My momma taught me wrong from right.

I was born in the South
Sometimes I have a big mouth
When I see something that I don't like
I gotta say it.

Well, we've been driving this road for a mighty long time
Paying no mind to the signs
Well, this neighborhood's changed
It's all been rearranged
We left that team somewhere behind.

-Sheryl Crow "Real Gone"

I Ponied Up for Sheryl Crow?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 24, 2009

Maureen Dowd is Howard Beale mad-as-hell still at financial institutions flouting their fiscal prolificacy. This time it is at Northern Trust of Chicago which earns itself a couple of Rude Names™, a rare honor for a non-politician.

Northern No Trust had a lavish dinner at the Ritz Carlton on Wednesday with a concert by Chicago (at a $100,000 fee); rented a private hangar at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday for another big dinner with a gig by Earth, Wind & Fire, and closed down the House of Blues on Sunset Strip on Saturday (at a cost of $50,000) for a dinner and serenade by Sheryl Crow.

Not only are they wasting taxpayers' money, they are doing it on bad AOR has-beens. And Maureen could have used the entire lyrics of 'Real Gone' (Crow's hit from the Pixar movie Cars) to emphasize the irony instead of just the verse she picked.

“Slow down, you’re gonna crash,
Baby, you’re a-screaming it’s a blast, blast, blast
Look out babe, you’ve got your blinders on ...
But there’s a new cat in town
He’s got high payin’ friends
Thinks he’s gonna change history.”

And it's not one of Dowd's now infamous rants without a BlingList®:

The entertainment Web site TMZ broke the story Tuesday that Northern Trust of Chicago, which got $1.5 billion in bailout money and then laid off 450 workers, flew hundreds of clients and employees to Los Angeles last week and treated them to four days of posh hotel rooms, salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides and Tiffany swag bags.

The second RudeName™ is tipped with a swizzle stick of sarcasm.

Northern Untrustworthy even offered junketeers the chance to attend a seminar on the credit crunch where they could no doubt learn that the U.S. government is just the latest way to finance your deals and keep your office swathed in $87,000 area rugs.

All this wild spending is summed up in a rather harsh Dowdversion®.

The bank cloaks itself in a philanthropic glow while wasting our money, acting like the American Cancer Society when in fact it’s a cancer on American society.

And she ends with a long rolling rile of a Alliteration Alert™ along with another Wolfe-ian aside.

[Andrew Cuomo] gets incensed about how ingrained, indoctrinated and insensitive the ex-masters of the universe are. “They think of themselves as kings and queens,” he said. And they’re not ready to abdicate.

Normally a Royal Reference™ is a good thing in a Dowd column, but lately she is fighting mad at those who act to the manor borne. And that is how revolutions begin. Perhaps another Sheryl Crow song sums it up: "A Change Would Do You Good."

A Trillion Here, A Trillion There...

Trillion Dollar Baby
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 10, 2009
According to Maureen Dowd, The One is no longer walking on water.

So much for the savior-based economy.

While not quite a Rude Name®, for the second time the Treasury Secretary has been called "laconic", an adjective previously used on the iconic bionic Barack.

Tim Geithner, the learned and laconic civil servant and financial engineer, did not sweep in and infuse our shaky psyches with confidence.

And I'm not quite sure what to make of "shaky psyche". It's not quite a full Alliteration Alert® like "learned and laconic", but sure tries to be one. And she practically accuses Geithner of not quite making it past puberty.

For starters, the 47-year-old’s voice kept cracking.

But perhaps inspired by Joseph Lowery's Inauguration invocation, she raps rhyming with:

Despite the touting, the Treasury chief unveiled a plan short on illumination, recrimination, fine points and foreclosure closure.

Which leads to Dowd's current favorite whipping boys, clueless billionaires. She whips out a Crossword Clue™ that hasn't been part of her vocabulary since the Clintons had just vacated the White House:

Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whinge about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage.

The nuance of "complaining fretfully" just nails the weary whining of the increasingly defensive banks. And Maureen sees Treasury Tim as one of the insiders protecting the Wall Street wailers.

Geithner is coddling the banks, setting it up so that either we’ll have to pay the banks inflated prices for poison assets or subsidize investors to pay the banks for poison assets.

The Maureen Dowd Anti-Banker Crusade continues. Today she makes more luxury item metaphors.

The new plan offers insufficient meddling with Wall Street, even though Wall Street shows no sign that the hardscrabble economy has pierced its Hermès-swathed world.

She renews her call for heads to roll.

And these impervious, imperial suits who squander taxpayers’ money after dragging the country over the cliff should all be fired...

That is after they take a pay cut.

The pay of all the employees in bailed-out banks, not just top executives, should be capped.

The right wingers and the finance industry apologists will tut-tut that Maureen just doesn't understand the compensation packages of the privileged class. Perhaps. But she knows a populist parade when she leads one.

Greed Is Galling

Disgorge, Wall Street Fat Cats
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 31, 2009

Maureen Dowd's latest rant against greedy Wall Streeters picks up right where it left off from her last column. Now she is calling not only for show trials, but for disgorgement, which is not nearly as sexy as it sounds. She explains with a really great six word alliterative attack:

Disgorgement is when courts force wrongdoers to repay ill-gotten gains. And I’m ill at the gains gotten by scummy executives acting all Gordon Gekko while they’re getting bailed out by us.

And the invocation of Gordon Gecko, the archetypal greedy businessman played by former Dowd boyfriend Michael Douglas, is only the first and less interesting Movies With Maureen® moment. Dowd is impressed that Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank knows his old-time movies.

Treasury officials and Barney Frank are dubious about recouping bonuses. “Paulson let the cat out of the bag,” Frank said of Henry Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, “and it can’t be gotten back.”

But aren’t taxpayers shareholders in these corporations now, and can’t shareholders sue or scream “You misspent my money!” like Judy Holliday?

“In ‘The Solid Gold Cadillac,’ ” said Frank, who knows the movie.

“We got some preferred shares,” he mused, “but I don’t think we could sue on that basis.”

The Solid Gold Cadillac is a 50s era morality story set amidst crooked defense contractors that are bilking the government. Amazon.com capsulizes it thus:

Judy Holliday shines as an idealistic stockholder who uncovers corruption at the top rung of a major corporation in this lighthearted romantic comedy.

Even better, it also won an Oscar for Best Costume Design. For those of us not as tuned in, we can catch it Monday afternoon on Turner Classic Movies.

Speaking of awards, the clear winner in Most Over-Used Crossword Clue™ category is now held by “lacunae”.

Following fast on Geithner’s tax lacunae, Tom Daschle’s nomination hit a pothole when he had to pay $140,000 in back taxes he owed mostly for three years’ use of a car and a driver provided by a private equity firm.

After an eight year absence from Dowd’s vocabulary, she has used it four times in the past year, most notably here and here. But, we do get one really good double Alliteration Alert®:

Some Obama policy makers still buy into the notion that if they’re too strict, these economic royalists, to use F.D.R.’s epithet, might balk at the bailout, preferring perks over the prospect of their banks going belly-up.

And Maureen buries in body of the column the best rallying cry so far:

Spare the rod, spoil the jackal.

Because it's not the bears and bulls on Wall Street you have to worry about, it's the jackals and vultures.

Bonfire Of The Vanity Table

Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 27, 2009

Maureen Dowd must have checked her 401(k) because she is going Biblical on the moneychangers.

As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.

Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet?

Normally Dowd leaves the finance stuff to Krugman and the guys that understand numbers, but luxury goods she understands. The entire column is a Robb Report of umbrage full of outrageous prices. From corporate jets:

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

To furniture:

Bartiromo also asked Thain to explain, when jobs and salaries were being cut at his firm, how he could justify spending $1 million to renovate his office. As The Daily Beast and CNBC reported, big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a “Roman Shade” for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.”

She even borrows a RudeName from the Post for the collectively clueless leadership of the country’s biggest bank.

The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.

We get one Wolfe-ian reference that is pretty slim, but since it can count as both a Movies With Maureen® (especially since Tom Hanks was the most famous of the shut-outs at her now infamous Georgetown kegger) and a Dowdversion®, so it will have to do.

The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours.

She is so outraged, she is ready to storm the castle with pitchforks.

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

Let this be a lesson to the titans of finance. If you want to raise the ire of Maureen Dowd to the level she usually reserves for the Clintons, just go buy some office furnishings that would look better in her 2.5 million dollar townhome.

Let The Tumbrels Rumble

After W., Le Deluge
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 18, 2008

Maureen Dowd, the Queen Bee of the Forth Estate has decreed that the current economic disaster be compared to the French Revolution. Let’s go through the references.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

Since most people’s knowledge of the French Revolution starts and ends with A Tale of Two Cities, that is where Maureen starts, fittingly with the first line from Charles Dickens's high school reading list classic. She then moves on to the book’s famous plotting knitter.

I’m feeling as vengeful and bloodthirsty as Madame Defarge sharpening her knitting needles at the guillotine.

But it doesn’t end there. She makes a decent pun on Reign of Terror by recasting it as Dubya’s more mistake prone epoch.

The best of times because W.’s long Reign of Error is about to end.

She also makes reference to Marie Antoinette:

In an astonishing let-them-eat-cake moment, the A.I.G. big shot Sebastian Preil held court at the bar and told an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.”

And finally, the Crossword Puzzle Clue Of The Week is also guillotine related. A tumbrel is “a crude cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their place of execution, as during the French Revolution.”

I can’t wait to see the tumbrels rumble up and down Wall Street picking up the heedless and greedy financial aristocracy that plundered and sundered free-market capitalism.

Dowd also raises the bonus degree of difficulty of sneaking in two internal rhymes into that one sentence.

Most of the article is outrage directed at the outrageous behavior of AIG executives who are beyond the ability to be shamed publicly. Dowd suggests public mockery.

The New York Times should follow up the excellent Portraits of Grief it did after 9/11 with Portraits of Greed.

But beyond the storming the Bastille rhetoric, she saves some asides for McCain’s latest living metaphor.

The paper reported that the A.I.G. revelers stayed at Plumber Manor — not the ancestral home of Joe the Plumber, a 17th-century country house in Dorset — and spent $17,500 for food and rooms.

Poor Joe is also the victim of another aside:

John McCain wasted his last-chance debate Wednesday by trying to stir up faux class rage against Barack Obama with Joe the Unvetted Plumber instead of tapping into the real class rage the country feels over bailing out ungrateful financiers who gambled away the life savings of working people.

And when it comes to expressing class rage, nobody outclasses Maureen.

Heads must roll.

And when Maureen says "Off with their head!" Somebody gets a really really close shave.