Town Hall Meeting

#1 Peter Orszag, Obama’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, will join Citibank in a senior position. Where do you think Tim Geithner and the rest of the “economics” team is headed after they leave their current positions? Note that Orszag isn’t starting at the bottom even though his career has yet to involve any commercial experience, according to his wikipedia page. He’s going straight from government to a senior position at a major, bailed out bank.

#2 Richard Holbrooke died and his obituaries by major news media was fawning. Prominent people were lining up to praise him. I personally watched Andrea Mitchell and Rachel Maddow gush. One thing I learned while reading some articles about him is Holbrooke was very careful to make friends with major media people throughout his career. I don’t think it’s okay to speak ill of the dead, but I would just like to put some perspective here because it may not be getting through. Holbrooke was very interested in using war as a means to an end. He was very much behind the Clinton-Bosnia bombings, the Clinton-Iraq Sanctions that killed something like 500,000 children, he was prominently in favor of the W. Bush-Iraq invasion. The list is quite long, he also may have helped aid the genocide in East Timor. When Obama appointed him, it was a clear sign his foreign policy was going to be bad for innocent civilians everywhere. It’s one thing to be sad about someone’s death and say so on TV, it’s a whole other to speak about his record as though he did the opposite of the reality. And I think it’s important to say so.