- TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Why We’re Rescuing Wall Street and Not the Auto Industry: Citigroup Versus General Motors – Viewed from Wall Street, Citi is too big and important to be allowed to fail while GM is simply a big, clunky old manufacturing company that can go into chapter 11 and reorganize itself. The newly conventional wisdom on the Street is that the failure of the Treasury and the Fed to save Lehman Brothers was a grave mistake because Lehman's demise caused creditors and investors to panic, which turned the sub-prime loan mess into a financial catastrophe — a mistake that must not occur again. So, by this view, the government must do everything and anything to keep Citi alive. But GM? GM is just … jobs and communities.
- Understanding the Geography of the 2008 Election | Newgeography.com – An interesting geographic phenomenon should be noted: the emergence of Chicago and the upper Midwest as part of the new Democratic coalition [...] provided Obama with a margin of almost 1.5 million votes, more than NYC or LA. This presaged a gigantic increase in Democratic margins throughout the upper Midwest, including IN, IL, MI, WI, IA, and MN. In this one part of the country more than 150 counties moved from the Republican to the Democratic column. In addition to the big shifts on the coasts, this is where Obama gained the most ground. If this pattern continues, the Democrats may well have achieved a critical mass in their core support, adding a powerful upper Midwest base to their almost total control of both coasts. These would leave the GOP with little more than the heart of the Old Confederacy – even that is threatened in places like North Carolina and Virginia by modernization – as well as more socially conservative regions such as Appalachia and parts of the Great Plains.
Tags: bailout, bankruptcy, barackobama, Citibank, Citigroup, Daily Links, demographics, geography, GM, robertreich, voting
