Crazy Glenn Beck, after spending three and a half minutes acting out what it would be like to set one of his colleagues on fire (in order to demonstrate how put upon we all are under the Obama administration, or something), shouts at the top of his lungs, “DO YOU NOT HEAR THE CRIES OF PEOPLE WHO ARE SAYING STOP! WE WOULD LIKE SOME SANITY IN OUR COUNTRY FOR A SECOND!!!”

All righty then.

Today, April 10th, 2009, would have been Rachel Corrie’s 30th birthday. As weird old Mr. Lincoln said: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.”

As it turns out, the free market will solve all our problems.

Because that’s worked out so well up till now.

You’ll probably see a lot of variations on the theme in the next couple of days.

During World War I, Americans were exhorted to buy Liberty Bonds to help their soldiers on the front.

Now, it seems, they will be asked to come to the aid of their banks — with the added inducement of possibly making some money for themselves.

As part of its sweeping plan to purge banks of troublesome assets, the Obama administration is encouraging several large investment companies to create the financial-crisis equivalent of war bonds: bailout funds.

Story.

Dean Baker, in this USA Today op-ed about Social Security, points out something no one else has:

In effect, the cutters are proposing that the government default on the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund: U.S. government bonds that were purchased with money raised through the designated Social Security tax.

It is truly incredible, and unbelievably galling, that anyone in a position of responsibility would suggest defaulting on the government bonds held by the Social Security trust fund at the precise moment that the government is honoring trillions of dollars of bonds issued by private banks.

While the government has no legal or moral obligations to pay off the banks’ debts to wealthy investors (who presumably understood the risks they were taking), the Social Security bonds carry the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

It is understandable that people are angry. We have a government and an elite that never stop looking for ways to take money from ordinary workers and redistribute it upward to the richest people in the country.

In case you’ve missed it, the Federal Reserve has guaranteed gigantic amounts of bonds issued by banks (see “bank debt” here). Thus, as Baker says, the Social Security cutters don’t just want us to default on U.S. government bonds essentially belonging to Social Security recipients. They want us to do that at the same time we’re paying off Citigroup’s bonds.

The mad tea party!

I have a Twitter feed.

… wow, I have a lot of new Twitter friends! But I want MORE! Keep signing up! I want to hit 500 by the end of the day, or I will consider my life empty and without purpose.

From a recent profile of Larry Summers by Noam Scheiber in the New Republic:

At first glance, Summers might appear to have less to contribute on the bank and credit-market front, the most dangerous part of the current situation. His exposure to Wall Street over the years has been limited…

From the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

Top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers received about $5.2 million over the past year in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from major financial institutions…

In total, Mr. Summers made a total of about 40 speaking appearances to financial sector firms and other places, with fees totaling about $2.77 million. Fees ranged from $10,000 for a Yale University speech to $135,000 for an appearance paid for by Goldman Sachs & Co.

I wonder what would have constituted “significant” exposure to Wall Street. Maybe if he’d worked for D.E. Shaw full time? (Amazingly, Summers was paid $5.2 million for a part-time position. He was still a full-time professor at Harvard. If we’re generous and assume he worked 1000 hours a year for them, he was paid $5,200 an hour.)

Then there are the speaking fees. As the Wall Street Journal mentions, they were mostly from the financial sector—including the “giant government bailout” sector, such as JP Morgan, Citigroup, and two speeches to Goldman Sachs. I’ve pulled out some of the interesting ones from his disclosure form and listed them over at my site.

Next, note also that Summers worked for D.E. Shaw from October, 2006 onwards, so $5.2 million is likely less than half his total haul.

Finally, the New Republic article omitted that Summers was listed as a contributor to their now defunct blog Open University. Though as far as I can tell Summers never wrote anything for it, he was mentioned on it several times—for example, when he was hired by D.E. Shaw.

God, they’re really just awful human beings.