Anyone who has followed the decline of General Motors and Chrysler since the two companies received a combined $17-plus billion in bailout money in December won’t be surprised at the news that they need more — or at the government’s convenient weekend timing of the news.

The financial cliff on which Chrysler stands was a given by the time its first bailout installment arrived. But, as shown in early March in a post by yours truly at BizzyBlog (mostly mirrored at NewsBusters), GM’s sales non-performance has deteriorated to the point where it has become worse than Chrysler’s during the two months following the George W. Bush-decided, Barack Obama-supported bailout decision:

January’s and February’s disastrous sales results have probably made GM’s situation at least as perilous as that of its smaller competitor.

On Saturday (naturally), we learned via Bloomberg that GM and Chrysler “may” need more money (“may” apparently now means “as sure as the sun rises in the east”) — lots more:

GM, Chrysler May Need More Aid Than Requested, Rattner Says

General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC may need “considerably” more than the $21.6 billion in aid they requested, which was based on optimistic recovery plans, said Steven Rattner, the Treasury’s chief auto adviser.

President Barack Obama’s auto task force is assessing proposals from GM and Chrysler to decide whether to recommend U.S. assistance or tip the carmakers into bankruptcy. Rattner made the comments yesterday on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

The task force will give its “sense of direction” by March 31, Rattner said. The companies have received $17.4 billion since December and asked for the additional $21.6 billion in aid last month, an amount that depends on achieving turnaround plans that are “somewhat ambitious,” Rattner said.

“It could be considerably higher, I won’t deny that,” Rattner said, when asked whether U.S. aid sought could rise. “Like all management teams they tend to take a reasonably, slightly perhaps, optimistic, view of their business. So it could be more, I can’t rule that out.”

Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, said yesterday its restructuring plan has “a conservative outlook.” The company will continue working with the task force “and we’ll keep them informed of our liquidity needs,” Martin said in an e-mail.

What is particularly galling is that news organizations like Bloomberg that should and probably do know better are letting the companies get away with saying they were overoptimistic before. GM pointedly claimed the exact opposite twice in the past four months:

• In early December, in its aid request to Congress, GM said that it would “only” need $18 billion to “weather the current economic stresses, and …. position the new GM to be profitable.”
• On February 18, GM, as paraphrased by the New York Times, “vowed ….. that its latest request for federal aid would be the last it would need to carry it through the biggest reorganization in its history.”

But now we’re supposed to believe that the companies’ forecasters have finally gotten it right.

There’s a high probability that they are still wrong. GM, and the government, badly underestimated the bailout’s impact on consumers’ willingness to buy its vehicles, either for ideological reasons (opposed to bailouts), practical ones (concerned about warranty and repair issues), or both. The company’s request for even more money than anticipated are likely to worsen that perception problem.

Here’s a former pet phrase notably missing from news coverage of both GM and Chrysler: corporate welfare. The low-rate loans involved, especially if they are never repaid (which appears more and more likely), dwarf the amounts those who have complained about “corporate welfare” in the past could ever hope to cite.

Mark Zandi of Moody’s is looking smarter with each passing day. In early December, he “suggested during one of the auto bailout hearings on Capitol Hill that the Big Three could need between $75 billion to $125 billion over the next two years if they are to survive.” The additional requests by the bailed-out will push the current number to over $40 billion ($17.4 + $21.6 plus “who knows?”) — well past halfway to the Zandi’s low end of $75 billion. Even that doesn’t take into account the $5 billion bailout of suppliers that Treasury whipped through last week, and previous bailout billions provided to GMAC and Chrysler Credit.

Also missing from news coverage: How candidate, president-elect, and now President Obama’s relentless pessimism, his promises to starve the nation of fossil-fuel energy, and his pledges to raise taxes in the teeth of an economic downturn convinced consumers, perhaps in the millions, to postpone major-ticket purchases, particularly of vehicles.

The consequences of these positions, echoed in earnest by congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid since June of last year, are quite ironic, given that the Democratic Party is supposedly best buds with Big Labor. United Auto Workers union members have borne the brunt of an auto-industry downturn that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid helped to make much worse than it should have been. But the well-being of the rank and file was apparently unimportant compared to scoring electoral and then vindictive points. This is yet  another crucial connection the establishment media probably won’t make any time soon.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Note: This column first appeared at Pajamas Media on Friday morning. See the Update below for a look at where the stock indices stood as of the markets’ close on Friday, March 20.

_____________________________________________

A time to hope that the worst is over –- and to benchmark its awful record thus far.

_____________________________________________

The performance of the stock market since March 9 provides reason to hope that the POR Economy’s wealth-destroying damage has, at least for the time being, reached its lowest point.

The markets’ broad-based 15% bounce-back since then (as of when this column was written), which has brought cheer to battered investors for the first time in many months, has had four primary causes.

First, there has been decent economic news. January’s retail sales increase was revised upward from 1.0% to 1.8%, representing the largest jump in three years. February’s 0.1% drop beat expectations of -0.5%. Housing starts jumped nicely in January, defying the decline-expecting consensus.

Second, several key companies have reported earnings and other news beating analysts’ predictions.

Third, after months of nearly daily warnings of dire catastrophe, President Barack Obama has altered his public statements on the economy to reflect the type of qualified optimism one ordinarily would expect from the country’s chief executive.

A final, less appreciated reason is that there were signs of a pushback by the bailed-out. Citigroup’s chairman said that the bank doesn’t require any additional government investment. Bank of America’s chairman echoed that sentiment. Even GM, while still on the brink, said it doesn’t need its next cash infusion right away. This seems to indicate that managements chafing under existing, imminent, and/or proposed bailout-driven restrictions on how they run their businesses are either trying to get out from under them, or to minimize their damage. I believe the markets were pleased at the possibility that the creeping nationalization we’ve seen in the past six months may be halted before it goes all-in.

This is all well and good. But before the markets’ trough is forgotten, it’s important to document the damage that POR Economy architects Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid have inflicted on the nation, and to demonstrate just how far the markets have to come back before we can be said to have recovered completely.

The POR Economy began in earnest in June of last year. At that point, as the economy was coming back nicely from a mild fourth-quarter 2007 downturn, two things about the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and congressional leadership became crystal clear to businesses, entrepreneurs, and investors. First, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid were, and still are, willing – no, make that eager — to starve the economy of energy in the name of global warming, one of the biggest hoaxes in human history. Second, they were, and still are, bound and determined to sharply raise taxes on the most productive 5% of the population in the name of “spread(ing) the wealth around.”

The POR Economy kicked into overdrive (or is it under-drive?) in September when the decades-in-the-making Democratic debacles at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (aka Fanron and Fredron) came to a head, forcing those “government-sponsored enterprises” to become “government conservatorship enterprises.” The accumulated effect of Fan’s and Fred’s irresponsible-lending, foreclosure-generating machine finally wrought its long-feared havoc. This in turn led a panicked Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to push for the $700 billion bailout that gave us the Troubled Assets Relief Program. TARP quickly morphed into a partial bank nationalization program.

The stock market tanked badly in the face of this withering assault. That assault continued through Election Day, Inauguration Day, and all the way through March 9. Obama’s non-stop negativity, through victory, inauguration, and his first four weeks in office were all designed to ensure the hasty passage of his precious mislabeled “stimulus” package before the economy began showing enough visible signs of recovery. For several weeks after that, the flailing of new Treasury Secretary Tim “Tax Cheat” Geithner, his persistent failure to fill key positions, and the budding overall perception that Team Obama might be in over their heads further shook the markets. It’s not like any of these problems ended on March 9, but by that point the markets had priced in these factors’ effects.

So what has the POR Economy wrought? The chart below shows where the three major stock market indices stood on the following dates:
- Each index’s October 2007 all-time high.
- June 1, 2008, the approximate start date of the POR Economy.
- November 4, 2008 (Election Day).
- January 20, Obama’s Inauguration Day (at market close).
- March 9, 2009.

Additionally, in the table below, I have adjusted each index’s mid-1990s year-end values for inflation, demonstrating that the market lows of March 9 brought us back to index values that were last seen in real terms in 1995:

Thus, after considering inflation, it’s fair to say that the POR Economy has undone almost all of the stock-market gains achieved since the Gingrich Revolution.

Even ignoring inflation, it won’t be fair to say that we’ve recovered from the ongoing POR Economy until the market indices get back to roughly double their March 9 troughs.

Steven A. Schwartzman of the Blackstone Group has called this decline of an “unprecedented” destruction of worldwide wealth. It should not and will not be forgotten that one U.S. political party and it three principal unprincipled leaders drove the vast majority of this.

Barack Obama was big on “hope” during his presidential campaign. We can now only “hope” that the worst of the markets’ carnage is indeed over.

_____________________________________________________

UPDATE: Friday’s closes of 7278, 769, and 1457 for the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ were:

• 48.6%, 50.9%, and 49.0% below their respective October 2007 highs.
• 42.4%, 45.1%, and 42.3% below their respective closes on May 30, just before The POR Economy began.

Disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer clearly sees the current AIG bonus controversy as an opportunity to redeem his reputation.

The Associated Press’s Michael Hill provided rehabilitation assistance in his Friday report.

Spitzer is best remembered for resigning as the Empire State’s chief executive after being caught patronizing high-priced prostitutes over a period of several years, and for having a reputation as an attorney general on a self-aggrandizing crusade against against corporate corruption prior to that.

Spitzer is attempting to capitalize on the public’s incomplete knowledge of his sorry saga to get back in its good graces.

The AP’s Hill gave Spitzer the print equivalent of a soapbox to do just that:

With AIG, Spitzer is Sheriff of Wall Street redux

Eliot Spitzer has a few words to say about the AIG bonus brouhaha: I told you so.

The former New York governor battered American International Group with charges of corruption long before his own dizzying downfall in a prostitution scandal. He has used this latest financial scandal to strike his old populist, Sheriff of Wall Street themes and, just maybe, mend his reputation — though critics contend that he bears a share of the blame for the insurance giant’s historic near-collapse.

….. As for all those politicians piling on AIG this week? Been there. Done that.

“We pursued AIG and Wall Street’s structural failures in a way that others shied away from because it was politically unpalatable for them to address those issues,” Spitzer told host Brian Lehrer Wednesday on WNYC Radio in New York City. “Now it is the flavor of the month. Everybody is jumping up and down serving subpoenas, beating their chests trying to be tougher than the next person.”

On CNN Thursday, Spitzer said his initial probes came from AIG’s “effort from the very top to gin up returns whenever, wherever possible and to push the boundaries in a way that would garner returns almost regardless of risk.

“Back then I said to people, AIG is the center of the web,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

Spitzer pursued AIG for years when he was New York’s attorney general. The company eventually announced in 2006 that it would pay $1.64 billion to resolve allegations that it used deceptive accounting practices to mislead investors and regulatory agencies. AIG’s veteran chief executive officer, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, was forced to resign in 2005 after a long and contentious, sometimes ugly battle with Spitzer.

“He obviously believes history has vindicated him,” said John Coffee, a professor of securities law at Columbia University, “and wants to remind America that he was there first.”

….. Coffee suspects Spitzer is more concerned about reclaiming a legacy than mounting a comeback. Jeffrey Stonecash of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School said the recent comments fit Spitzer, a natural crusader zealous about rooting out financial crimes.

Hill waited until his 19th paragraph to come back to the contrarian take on Spitzer’s legal legacy, noting that “Critics, mostly on the political right, claim that by forcing out Greenberg and creating turmoil at AIG, Spitzer laid the groundwork for the debacle roiling the country today.”

A year ago, in the wake of Spitzer’s resignation, the Wall Street Journal reminded us that the self-styled, media-assisted Spitzer was much more of a legal tyrant than crusader:

Mr. Spitzer’s recklessness with the state’s highest elected office, though, is of a piece with his consistent excesses as Attorney General from 1999 to 2006.

He routinely used the extraordinary threat of indicting entire firms, a financial death sentence, to force the dismissal of executives, such as AIG’s Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. He routinely leaked to the press emails obtained with subpoena power to build public animosity against companies and executives. In the case of Mr. Greenberg, he went on national television to accuse the AIG founder of “illegal” behavior. Within the confines of the law itself, though, he never indicted Mr. Greenberg. Nor did he apologize.

In perhaps the incident most suggestive of Mr. Spitzer’s lack of self-restraint, the then-Attorney General personally threatened John Whitehead after the former Goldman Sachs chief published an article on this page defending Mr. Greenberg. “I will be coming after you,” Mr. Spitzer said, according to Mr. Whitehead’s account. “You will pay the price. This is only the beginning, and you will pay dearly for what you have done.”

Jack Welch, the former head of GE, said he was told to tell Ken Langone — embroiled in Mr. Spitzer’s investigation of former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso — that the AG would “put a spike through Langone’s heart.” New York Congresswoman Sue Kelly, who clashed with Mr. Spitzer in 2003, had her office put out a statement that “the attorney general acted like a thug.”

These are not merely acts of routine political rough-and-tumble. They were threats — some rhetorical, some acted upon — by one man with virtually unchecked legal powers.

Eliot Spitzer’s self-destructive inability to recognize any limit on his compulsions was never more evident than his staff’s enlistment of the New York State Police in a campaign to discredit the state’s Senate Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno. On any level, it was nuts. Somehow, Team Spitzer thought they could get by with it. In the wake of that abusive fiasco, his public approval rating plunged.

Spitzer’s campaign of public intimidation by press conference was rarely challenged. Firms that believed they were innocent mostly paid up and forced out key executives like AIG’s Greenberg to make him go away.

As AIG was publicly crumbling last September, I recalled that WSJ editorial, and added this:

Left unsaid, but obvious, is that Greenberg wasn’t indicted because he would have kicked Spitzer’s butt in court — which is why Spitzer avoided the inside of courtrooms like a plague. In the one case I’m aware of where someone stood up to Spitzer all the way through a jury verdict, the New York Attorney General was trounced.

….. Greenberg had at least three successors in the past 3-1/2 years (Frank Zarb (a caretaker), Martin Sullivan, and now-deposed Robert Willumstad.

Now there’s Edward Liddy. If he could get past the bitterness, and if regulators could admit that Spitzer’s publicity-driven ouster of him was wrong, Greenberg, even in his 80s, might have been a better choice.

Who’s at the top matters. So does drift at the top, even for a few months, especially at such a large and complex entity.

Note from taxpayers to Spitzer: Thanks for nothing.

It’s more like “Thanks for $170 billion or more less than nothing.” While AIG’s board of course deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the firm’s debacle, a strong case can be made that the biggest corporate crackup in history might not have occurred, or might have been much less severe, if Spitzer hadn’t chosen to make Hank Greenberg his personal piñata.

That Spitzer is getting unchallenged opportunities to appear on CNN and elsewhere to peddle his fantasies, along with barely concealed hosannas from an AP reporter, is disgraceful — and, sadly, typical.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Wyoming and Colorado:

March 21, 2009

Love really can conquer all.

One Wyoming couple is living proof of that.

Travis “Trey” Vendella and Tiffany (Black) Vendella of Cheyenne had planned to get married in March of 2007.

“He had proposed to her and then left for Iraq,” said Sherry Mascarenas, co-owner of Rumors on Main Street, 612 Main Street.

That was when Tiffany had a “strange feeling” about the whole situation.

“Subconsciously I just knew something was going to happen,” she said. “I knew we had to get married soon.”

Unfortunately, she was right.

Travis was involved in an accident while in Iraq, right before his mid-leave in February of 2007.

“He almost lost his life,” Mascarenas said. “He came back with major scars and without his legs.”

The couple then decided to push the wedding back to give Travis a chance to recover and get used to his new prosthetic legs.

“We did that because he had wanted to walk down the aisle and be able to stand on his legs,” Tiffany said. “We also wanted to celebrate when he felt better.”
The wedding was held on May 24, 2008, in Loveland.

“After losing his legs he became really depressed,” Mascarenas said. “She had told him that of course I still want to marry you, I didn’t fall in love with your legs.”

“He was so grateful and thankful that she still wanted to marry him,” Mascarenas added, “that he decided to do something for her.”

Travis Vendella called the Montel Williams Show and asked if they could do something special for his fiancé.

“I didn’t know he had done that,” Tiffany said. “When they contacted us, I thought the theme of the show was about soldiers who had made sacrifices. I was shocked and surprised to find out they actually wanted to celebrate both of us.”

The show then contacted a local wedding planner, who then put in a call to Rumors asking if they would be willing to donate items for the wedding.

“There was no way that you would say no to that,” Mascarenas said. “It was absolutely an honor.”…..

Go here for the rest of the story.

Properly understood, free-market capitalism works. Free-market capitalism has always worked when allowed to work. Free-market capitalism will work again, if we let it, but US and world leadership seem tragically bound and determined to thwart it.

Mark Levin read this powerful column by Don Boudreaux at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the air last night. It deserved the full airing it received.

Boudreaux brilliantly brings in historical context:

Imagine traveling back in time to 1809. You describe to some people you befriend the reality of personal transportation in America in 2009. You describe the automobile.

In your own mind, of course, you’re describing an ordinary contrivance that makes possible experiences that are perfectly ordinary to denizens of the early 21st century, such as zooming along at 70 mph. But to your early 19th-century listeners, you’re describing a barely imaginable wonder.

“What?!” they ask. “People in the future will drive machines made out of metal and filled with highly flammable liquids? Surely that will be intolerably dangerous. And to what purpose? No one has any need to travel at such unheard-of speeds!

….. I suspect that your friends in 1809 would not believe your account. And what I suspect they would find most unbelievable is not the progress of technology that automobiles require. Rather, what would be most difficult to comprehend is the fact that such an amazingly complex development and coordination of economic activities can occur without being consciously arranged. After all, it’s not just that people in 2009 can easily afford automobiles, but also that whole industries exist to support automobile driving.

Oil exploration and refining, tire manufacturing, steel production, auto-parts making and retailing, automobile insuring, road-building — these are only some of the many industries whose existence is promoted by, and whose existence promotes, automobile manufacturing. Yet no one designed, or even foresaw, this outcome. No one designed how all the many industries’ efforts are coordinated with each other. This outcome evolved into its modern-day pattern through billions upon billions of individual decisions, some bigger than others, but none larger than a tiny part of the total number of decisions that combined with each other to make automobile driving an unremarkable reality in the early 21st century.

Stupendous coordination of millions of individual plans and talents emerged spontaneously — and not only in the automobile industry. The entire economy is a testament to such spontaneous coordination.

The single greatest fact about capitalist society is that the great bulk of it appears to be the handiwork of a master designer but, in fact, is unplanned and even unimaginable before it becomes real and familiar.

Remember this lesson whenever you hear alleged “experts” insisting that only conscious effort by government to “stimulate” demand can save the economy from its current downturn.

Of course, read the whole thing.

Allow me to expand on the paragraph I bolded, and to disagree with Boudreaux on one point.

There is “handiwork of a master designer” involved. That designer is God.

The lack of belief that what has been proven to work before — what Boudreaux calls “spontaneous coordination” — won’t work again is rooted in a fundamental lack of belief in God, that the Master Designer will either fail us this time, or that He doesn’t exist in the first place.

Instead, the active and unprecedented (in the US) attempts to prevent the spontaneous coordination Boudreaux referred to from occurring reflect a fundamental belief that the self-appointed elites among us are gods — that somehow, the “best and the brightest” can manage the billions and billions of interactions and decisions involved in commerce and, ultimately, individual lives better than individuals can themselves. They can’t. It is utter folly to believe they can.

Sometimes, when the elites fail, as they always have, they get mad. Occasionally they get vengeful when they see that they can’t control things to their liking, or that those they attempt to control don’t buy into their supposedly self-evident wisdom; the tens of millions killed by the Soviet Union and Communist China in the 20th Century are a testament to that.

Those of us who have a belief in God know that, as long as the people in a society are guided by His moral and ethical principles (whether we as a nation remain that way is a subject for another time), His handiwork, working through us, will:

• Show us, as is now happening before our eyes, how to conquer disease and illness without resorting to murder.
• Prove that human progress is not a recipe for planetary destruction.
• Over time, raise up the poorest among without resorting to outright theft from those who have.

Properly understood and carried out, free-market capitalism is faith-based free-market capitalism.

Faith-based free-market capitalism works. Faith-based free-market capitalism has always worked when allowed to work. Faith-based free-market capitalism will work again, if we let it, but US and world leadership seem tragically bound and determined to thwart it.

From Toledo (video is at link):

Friday, March 20, 2009 | 7:20 PM

Toledo nurse and firefighter pulled two from a burning car

A Toledo firefighter and nurse is being hailed as a hero for his actions after the wrong-way crash in Cygnet.

It happened on Monday on I-75. The wrong-way driver died. But witnesses say one extraordinary man saved the lives of two others trapped in a burning car.

Ernie Gehrke works at Toledo fire station 25. He says he doesn’t consider his actions on Monday heroic. He says he instinctively did what he was trained to do.

Gehrke works two full-time jobs. He has been a Toledo firefighter for 20 years, a nurse for 17 years.

He was off-duty on Monday driving to Findlay when “I saw smoke coming from a car and the closer I got, I could see the wreckage and I pulled over and I could see that one of the cars was on fire.”

What happened next, witnesses say, displayed extraordinary courage. Since the doors were locked, Gehrke started kicking and punching at the windows of the car that was on fire with two people trapped inside.

A window was finally broken with a crow bar. Gehrke pulled the driver out of the car, but he couldn’t get the passenger out. So he climbed inside the burning car and sat with him until emergency crews arrived and were able to get him out. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

Note: This post will stay at the top through Friday.

_______________________

An important story appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Tuesday. Here’s how it began (Warren County is adjacent to and northeast of Cincinnati’s Hamilton County):

County: no more food stamps for rich

Warren County’s poor (population) does not include someone with $80,000 in the bank, a paid-off $311,000 home and a Mercedes, members of the Warren County Board of Commissioners said Tuesday.

And if they have to fight the state and federal government over it, they will.

Recently the commissioners learned that this person, with the before-mentioned property, qualified for $500 a month in food stamps after she lost her job.

The Enquirer never told us why the County suddenly became motivated to do what it did.

Here’s why (and how typical it is that the Enquirer either doesn’t know this, or refused to give credit where due).

Someone who is “a source in the business” e-mailed State of Ohio Blogger Alliance founder Matt Hurley of Weapons of Mass Discussion. Matt put up a memorable post on March 13 containing the text of that e-mail:

Subject: Food Stamp Case

One of the workers here just approved an ongoing food stamp case where the family have over $80,000 in bank, own a 2001 Toyota and 2006 Mercedes Benz, and a $311,000 home that is paid for. Monthly benefits of over $500 in FS, received over $300 in expedited.

3 household members–husband, wife and child. Wife recently lost job, husband receives SS benefits.

THERE’S SOMETHING BAD WRONG WITH THIS PROGRAM THAT ALLOWS A FAMILY THAT KIND OF RESOURCES AND STILL GET FOOD STAMPS.

This is where things have gotten to. I would think the world would want to know about this.

Well, Warren County and Southwestern Ohio certainly found out.
(more…)

He knew about the AIG bonuses on March 3.

He said he first learned of them on March 10.

He lied. The gun smokes. At a private company, he’d have been gone at least 24 hours ago.

I don’t know how anyone inside or outside the Beltway can stand any more of this. He must go.

It’s here.

It will go up at BizzyBlog on Sunday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

The column has two graphics. I posted the first here yesterday. Here it is again, showing how far the indices as of March 9 had fallen since their October 2007 highs and May 30, 2008, just before The POR Economy began:

The POR Economy’s beginning and its initial causes were observed by yours truly in early July 2008.

Here is the second graphic at the column, which is an update of similar graphics posted during the past couple of weeks, showing how, in real, inflation-adjusted terms, the POR Economy has undone virtually all of the markets’ gains since the beginning of the Gingrich Revolution in 1995:

After yesterday’s 1% or so pullback, the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ are at 7401, 784 and 1483, respectively. These values are:

• 47.8%, 49.9%, and 48.1% below their October 2007 highs.
• 41.4%, 44.0%, and 41.2% below their closes just before The POR Economy began.

I hope we don’t see the March 9 troughs again. Yesterday’s performances by Tax Cheat Tim Geithner, Chris Dodd, the People’s House, and the ‘Prompter President, especially his claim that Geithner is doing an “outstanding job,” provide little comfort in that regard.

From the Bronx, and East St. Louis, IL:

Saturday, March 7th 2009, 11:32 PM

It was just two weeks ago that Suena Williams was finalizing her suicide plans: A fistful of sleeping pills, a bottle of rum, a note already written.

Out of work and overwhelmed, the Bronx woman looked forward to death. And then, amid the anonymity of cyberspace, she found an angel: an Illinois woman who saved her life.

“You live with the pain every day, feeling so alone, so isolated,” Williams said Saturday, alive and upbeat in her neat-as-a-pin Riverdale apartment. “I never expected a perfect stranger to help.”

Williams found Linda Lawson, 44, of East St. Louis, Ill., on the Daily News Web site on Feb. 20. Both were reading about an aspiring male model who committed suicide at a Brooklyn park after posting a note on Facebook.

Williams, 43, posted on a readers’ message board about the cavalcade of woe that had buried her: No job prospects. A year’s worth of unpaid rent. Feelings of depression laced with desperation.

Lawson recognized herself in those words. A suicide attempt survivor herself, she posted her e-mail address and asked Williams to reach out.

“When I saw her comments, I distinctly knew she was going to be out of here in about two days,” Lawson recalled. “It was just a desperate move: ‘Here is my e-mail, don’t give up.’”

The message resonated with Williams, and the women swapped e-mails for the next 11 days as Williams’ suicidal feelings slowly abated.

“She kept me alive,” Williams said. “I didn’t expect to find help reading the Daily News articles that day. That’s one of the biggest miracles in all of this.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

The House’s Republican leader should have flung it towards the nearest trash can.

Boehner asks some great questions:

Excerpts:

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, I caught a little grief five weeks ago when we had the stimulus bill on the floor.  Remember the 1,100-page bill that no one had time to read and that no one did read?  Obviously the President didn’t have time to read it either because in that bill was this one sentence.  This one sentence that made it clear that someone knew that these AIG bonuses were about to be paid and they didn’t want them stopped.  So somehow in the dark of night this one sentence was added to the bill so that AIG would pay these bonuses to their executives.

“This language wasn’t in the House bill.  This language wasn’t in the Senate bill.  This language showed up in the dead of night and no one got to see it.  I’m wondering where did the language come from?  Who wrote it?  Who asked the conferees to put it in the bill?  What conferees on the part of the House agreed to this?  I’m looking for somebody to put their hand up.

“That’s the whole issue.  This political circus that’s going on here today with this bill is not getting to the bottom of the questions of who knew what and when did they know it.  Somebody was responsible to draw up this language.  Someone brought it to the conferees.  Someone brought it to the Democrat Leadership who wrote this bill in secret and put this language in there.  But we have no idea who it was.

That said, I totally disagree with the Boehner’s proposal to take 100% of the bonuses back, for three reasons:

• One, a deal is a deal, and to the extent these bonuses were supported by contracts, changing them after the fact will introduce even more uncertainty into the economy about how solid any and all contracts are. That said, if the contractual language is as clear as I understand it is, bonuses should be retrieved from those AIG execs who contractually promised to stay and then, once the direct deposits were made, took the money and ran. Though obviously larger amounts are involved, this is is no different than forcing an employee inadvertently overpaid by a company’s payroll system to give back the amount mistakenly paid. My understanding is that an employee who tries to hang on to the money in this kind of situation can be criminally prosecuted for theft if they balk at repaying. Again, if the contractual language is ironclad, the AIG execs who took the money and ran also committed theft — very grand theft.
• Second, retroactive targeted taxation of legally completed transactions under laws that existed at the time of those transactions is, or certainly should be, illegal.
• Finally, as a political move, letting the bonuses stand — which I believe is the only legally defensible option anyway — would create ammunition opponents can use against any and all congressmen and senators who supported the stimulus monstrosity. Those who voted for the bill agreed to allow the AIG bonuses to be paid because they didn’t read the bill. This happened because they didn’t insist on having the time to read the bill. Plainly stated, they didn’t do the job they were elected to do, and they richly deserve to be stuck with the political consequences of that dereliction of duty. It is all on them. They shouldn’t be given cover, as Boehner is doing, by agreeing with the idea that pulling back any of the legally paid and keepable bonuses is okay. It isn’t.

I’d be willing to write off less than 0.02% of the stimulus package in return for having an easily understood Exhibit A demonstrating how utterly negligent the current congressional majority and administration are, and continue to be.

My next Pajamas Media column will go up on Friday or Saturday (Update: It’s here).

I have put together two graphics that will be in it. Following up on a request from the sensible center-right blogosphere to chart the POR Economy through to its trough (we hope), I am showing the first one now:

I’m using June 1, 2008 to approximate when The (POR Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy began.

The column will also have another graphic with more lookback detail that places the markets’ decline in historical perspective and considers inflation.

I’ll link to the column as soon as I learn of its appearance.

Further elaboration requires waiting until the column appears, but the above chart does a pretty good job of speaking for itself.

Those who think we should be impressed that the markets have bounced back should note that yesterday’s closes of 7487, 794 and 1491 for the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ were still:

• 47.1%, 49.3%, and 47.8% below their respective October 2007 highs. Given that October 2007 is the first month during which a Pelosi- Reid-passed budget was officially in place, it is fair to say that they deserve a significant share of the blame for the markets’ decline from that point forward.
• 40.8%, 43.3%, and 40.9% below their respective closes on May 30, just before The POR Economy began. For reasons discussed when I made the call in early July, Pelosi, Obama, Reid, and their handiwork get the overwhelming share of the blame for the declines in the indices since then.

As to the last 10 days: Relieved? Yes. Impressed? No Nyet.