03 December 2008

Free higher education...

...like universal health care, is something that the newly empowered Democrats will deliver to Americans if the Democrats are worth a damn. One approach, advocated here, is to extend the G.I. Bill to all Americans. But regardless of how free higher ed is done, it must be done. Because the current system's costs are putting college out of reach of most Americans:

(click to enlarge)

02 December 2008

Robert Rubin? Obama, we deserve better...

MarketWatch.com's David Weidner notes that the economic team Obama has assembled includes an awful lot of Clinton era faces - including Robert Rubin, one of the biggest baddies of the current credit crisis. The more things change, the more they stay the same:

Rubin is the Mole of today's economic crisis. Given the opportunity to protect the country from deregulation of financial services, at Treasury he worked with then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to redesign or roll back Depression-era reforms.

Of course, the greatest beneficiary of deregulation was Citigroup. Formed in 1998 through the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group, the new company combined some of America's biggest banks, investment banks and insurance companies under one roof.

So, when Rubin decided to step down at Treasury, yielding that post to Larry Summers, it wasn't long before Citi's chairman and chief executive, Sandy Weill, came calling. He offered Wall Street's equivalent of a no-show job. Rubin worked in the office of the chairman and led Citigroup's executive committee. He was paid $115 million over nine years.

Now, the government has been forced to invest $45 billion in Citigroup and backstop $270 billion of its $2 trillion balance sheet. How does Rubin respond when critics say he should bear some responsibility?

"Nobody was prepared for this," he told The Wall Street Journal. Was he overpaid? "I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more," he said.


Yikes.