Geithner Should 'Fess Up

So Timothy Geithner knows where the bodies are buried in the sham "rescue" of banks, brokerages and insurance companies -- that's obviously why Barack Obama picked him for secretary of the treasury. That still does not excuse Democrats and Republicans in Congress bending over as if for a prostate exam in the face of the fact that the guy knowingly failed to pay taxes for several years.

Tax Cheating?

And he didn't discover the "error" himself. He even tried to get away with it until the IRS audited him.

I had a summer job at the IMF eons ago. Without his level of expertise, every U.S. citizen I knew who worked for the IMF knew full well they had to take care of their own taxes because the IMF is an international organization and is exempt from U.S. tax laws as they affect employers.

In fact, the Senate Finance Committee released this week a piece of paper Geithner signed at the time, acknowledging that he knew his obligations. Moreover, after the IRS audited him on three years in 2006, the Obama Transition Team found in December 2008 the same irregularities in the previous two years that the IRS had not found.

It was then that Geithner "voluntarily amended his tax returns," as the release states.

Tell Us All Where the Bodies Are

But there's another reason Geithner should withdraw: he knows where the bodies are buried and he's not ratting out who put them there.

The fact of the matter is that we're on the verge of seeing yet another banking debacle -- if it hasn't broken by the time I finish this -- and there are many months of debacles to come. The truly knowledgeable people have predicted a much, much lower Dow by the time it's all revealed to the public and a number of officials have been hinting at one coming up.

They knew. Some guys in Congress know. Probably Bush knows. Geithner surely knows this in full orchestration and four-part harmony. We the public are the only ones who don't know.

It's just like during the Cold War when the CIA and the KGB knew exactly what each other's government was doing, but they let "surprises" pop up so they could justify their existence and go on asking for ever bigger budgets for themselves and the purveyors of the arms race. We were the dupes.

Geithner has been an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence of the Bush Administration concerning the culprits and the size of the financial swindle.

He's been one of the guys who allowed, nay, made possible the use of $350 billion -- just think of the schools and food assistance and social security stability we could have bought for all that! -- for dividends to stockholders and bonuses to executives and business as usual for the 1 percent that has sucked up most of the gains and profits produced by 90 percent of all Americans.

Appoint him? Even after there's egregious evidence on tax cheating? He should be punished.

If, because he knows where the bodies are and can guide the hapless Democrats to them, he needs to be kept in the tent, he ought to apologize and profusely. He ought to be made to stand up in front of all of us and 'fess up -- and I don't mean just about the tax cheating.

Missing in the Stimulus Talk

Absent from almost all the discussion about stimulating the economy is any mention of the poorest Americans and the unemployed, even though the stimulus bang for the buck is highest for food stamps (aka SNAP) and unemployment compensation and the lowest for tax cuts.

Take today's discussion on NBC's Meet the Press. Only former congressman David Bonior (D-Mich) brought up the notion that the essential problem of the American economy is the growing disparity between the rich and the rest of us.

Bonior mentioned something I have come across at least once a week for the past few years: that 90 percent of all the income gains since the last recession went to the top 10 percent of all income earners. I've mentioned this disparity before (see here).

Yet everyone else was worried about the debt, the deficit, whether infrastructure projects would happen fast enough and whether there were enough tax cuts.

Yet the most effective way to get money circulating out there is to put federal dollars into food aid and unemployment checks. Why? Because the folks who get that aid aren't going to bank the money, they'll spend it right away on necessities. That spending will get consumption back up, build confidence and generate jobs.

The infrastructure projects are great for the skilled middle class, which is fine -- we need a robust middle class. But it's slower and most low-skill, low-wage workers won't benefit.

Tax cuts don't help at all. To owe taxes you have to have income, remember? If you have income, at a time like this you'll likely bank any more money you get. That's right: it will sit in the vaults of the same banks that aren't lending to anyone any more.

See an excellent explanation of how this works here.

Yet instead of the important things that ought to be discussed, Meet the Press host David Gregory did not ask a single question about disparity or about suffering, as if the whole world was composed of comfortable Washington policy gnats like himself and his guests.

Thinking from the Gut

In the plethora of responses, on-blog and off, concerning Israel and Gaza, I keep coming across instances of visceral, rather than cerebral, thinking. To some people, anything having to do with that troubled area of the world is so tied up with who they are that anything "their side" does must necessarily be defended and anything the "other side" does must be attacked.

Bystanders who are neither Arab nor Jewish are regarded as either neo-Nazis or neo-colonialists if they dare question the moral and political infallibility of either the government of Israel or the various movements and governments of the Arab world. Yet -- in actual fact -- the Israeli government, as well as Hamas and the many others on the other side, are both composed of quite fallible human beings.

As a Gentile in the West, I am most exposed to Jews who take personal offense at any criticism of Israel. (I am sure, and in different occasions I have experienced it, pro-Palestinian Arabs can be just as obdurate.)

Yet I am an American who criticizes the U.S. government often and hard, a former Catholic who has put the Catholic philosophical system through the shredder and excoriated the leadership of the Catholic Church, a Democrat who thinks Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are ineffectual wimps, a man who believes in the rights of women and the wrongs of many men, including myself, and so forth.

We will never make progress as human beings until we can all step back and look at our own pet ideas, nations, cultures or groups with detachment. At least when we engage in discourse.