Have the White House coconspirators with Big Money interests become so shameless that they don't even feel a need to cover their tracks?

"[A]t the company where I work, as at many others, the latest round of layoffs will be completed by Christmas. Even for the survivors it feels a little like serial deaths in the family. And who believes we're near the end of this story? For all of Wall Street's and Washington's rumors of a recovery, the fate of Americans on the ground remains very much up in the air."

-- Frank Rich, in his NYT column yesterday,
"Hollywood's Brilliant Coda to America's Dark Year"

"[White House economic adviser Larry] Summers said flatly [on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos] that 'everyone agrees the recession is over.' But on NBC's 'Meet the Press' Christina Romer, another White House economic adviser, countered: 'I'm not going to say the recession is over until the unemployment rate is down to normal levels.' Ms. Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, placed that figure in the 5 percent range."

-- from a NYT report by Joseph Berger,
"Summers Predicts Job Growth by Spring"

by Ken

If you're following "Is the recession over or is it ain't?" split within the White House economic team, you may be relieved to learn that none other than our own economic Mr. Sunshine (and Clarity) is on the job, bridging the gap:

[Also on Meet the Press] Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to early 2006, tried to reconcile the contradiction between the two presidential advisers by distinguishing between economic activity and joblessness. The low point in terms of economic activity was reached in June or July, he said. But, he added, “merely having gotten by the bottom is not all that terrific because, by definition, at the bottom is when things are worse.”

Now don't tell me that doesn't make you feel better. Or maybe worse, I'm not exactly sure.

It seems as if Larry Summers is brimful of confidence that the Obama administration has this little economic hiccough we've been through under control. In his TV appearance, Mr. Berger reports him saying:

"[I]t doesn't cost anything to encourage banks, as the president will be doing, to meet their responsibilities and expand the flow of credit to small business." He said the president will remind the bankers of what the federal government did to bail out banks when they were in trouble, "that no major bank would be intact, would be in a position to pay bonuses, if that extraordinary support had not been provided."

The president, he said, "will be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country."

"We were there for them and the banks need to do everything they can to be sure they're there for customers across this country," he said.

Which makes you wonder, are Mr. Summers and the president thinking of the same bankers, the same banksters, who've been thumbing their noses at us since they crashed the economy? Are these really people who are going to respond to friendly exhortations from their pals in the White House to moderate even slightly their all-consuming greed? the heck should they? Huh? Huh? Who's gonna make 'em? Huh? Huh?

Even in political terms, is this economic fantasyland that the White House seems to have become not a disaster in the making? The administration champions of the Wall Street and bankster predators, not to mention Master Rahm Emanuel's criminally bumbling political operation, which has made it clear that it serves no one except the economic elites, have left it to an uncaring, born-to-be-bought crook like Miss Mitch McConnell to voice what most Americans believe: "A sharp dissenter from Mr. Summers's declaration that the recession is over was Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, who said that, given a 10 percent national unemployment rate and 11 percent in Kentucky, 'I don't think it's over.'"

Miss Mitch has spent his entire political career assisting the raping and plundering of the average American, and now the garbage brains of the Democratic "center" are doing everything in their power to make the lying slimeball a populist hero. This can't just be economic and political dimwittitude. Masters Larry and Rahm appear so secure in their allegiance to Big Money that they don't feel any need to cover their tracks.

Somebody here has gone nuts, and fortunately for those of us who look on with astonishment and horror, Frank Rich suggests in his column today that it's not our side.

I suspect that the column is going to sell more than a few tickets for the upcoming Christmas movie Up in the Air, which stars George Clooney as a guy who works for a company that contracts to do other companies' firings. "How could a film with that premise be a Christmas hit in a country reeling from the highest unemployment rate in decades?" Rich asks. "By using the power of pop culture to salve national wounds that continue to fester in the real world."

He doesn't give away too much more about the movie, bless him, but he has some trenchant observations about conditions that make the country potentially receptive to its subject.

Here is an America whose battered inhabitants realize that the economic deck is stacked against them, gamed by distant, powerful figures they can't see or know. "Up in the Air" may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, "The Grapes of Wrath," did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

Of the potential receptiveness of present-day society to a takedown of the Reign of Big Money, Rich writes later:

In rolling out his latest jobs initiative last week, President Obama said, "Sometimes it's hard to break out of the bubble here in Washington and remind ourselves that behind these statistics are people's lives, their capacity to do right by their families." True enough, and in this movie you see a few of the lives behind the statistics, however fleetingly. But the point of "Up in the Air" is not to deliver the message that mass unemployment is a terrible tragedy. We hardly need a movie -- or a politician -- to deliver that news at this late date.

What gives our Great Recession its particular darkness -- and gives this film its haunting afterlife -- is the disconnect between the corporate culture that is dictating the firing and the rest of us. In the shorthand of the day, it's the dichotomy between Wall Street and Main Street, though that oversimplifies the divide. This disconnect isn't just about the huge gap in income between the financial sector and the rest of America. Nor is it just about the inequities of a government bailout that rescued the irresponsible bankers who helped crash the economy while shortchanging the innocent victims of their reckless gambles. What "Up in the Air" captures is less didactic. It makes palpable the cultural and even physical chasm that opened up between the two Americas for years before the financial collapse.

The private-equity deal makers who bought and sold once-solid companies like trading cards, saddling them with debt, never saw the workers whose jobs were shredded by their cunning games of financial looting. The geniuses in Washington and on Wall Street who invented junk mortgages and then bundled and sold them as securities didn't live in the same neighborhoods as the mortgagees, small investors and retirees left holding the bag once the housing bubble burst.

Those at the top are separated from the consequences of their actions. They are exemplified by Robert Rubin, formerly of Citigroup and a mentor to both Obama's Treasury secretary and chief economic adviser. He looked the other way when his bank made ruinous high-risk bets, and then cashed out and split, leaving taxpayers to pay for the wreckage while he escaped any accountability. Such economic wise men peer down at the country from a hermetically sealed bubble of privilege and self-interest, much as Ryan does from the plane flying him to his next mass firing. And they tend to think, as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs notoriously put it, that they are doing "God's work" to sustain our free-market system.

As if to reassure me that I'm not entirely nuts, and indeed am not the only one who's noticed that Masters Larry and Rahm are living in a cocooned fantasyland, Rich writes:

Last week Goldman Sachs announced it would grant some of this year's bonuses in stock, not cash, to try to stanch the public backlash to the record profits it piled up thanks to government largess. But Washington remains strangely oblivious to the mood out there. Financial reform has been embattled on Capitol Hill, where the financial industry has spent $344 million on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2009. The big ratings agencies that gave triple-A stamps of approval to Wall Street's junk are back to business as usual. Bank of America and Citi are racing to return TARP money to Washington not because they have necessarily recovered but because they want to shower rewards on their executives with impunity.

The rage engendered by this status quo is across the political map. As unlikely as it sounds, Ron Paul and Jim DeMint, political heroes of the tea party right, and Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson, similarly revered on the left, have found a common cause in vilifying the Federal Reserve Bank and its chairman, Ben Bernanke. The Fed is hardly the root of all evil, but you can see why it is a handy scapegoat. Like the institutions it failed to police during the boom, it wields its power from on high with little transparency to those below.

Then he concludes with the paragraph I've quoted at the top of this post. Which concludes, you'll recall:

"For all of Wall Street's and Washington's rumors of a recovery, the fate of Americans on the ground remains very much up in the air."

#