BASELINESCENARIO.COM

Geithner may be on the way out.

“The White House is floating, ever so gently, the notion that they are open to nominations for the position of “Tim Geithner’s Successor.”

It’s not clear if they mean this job is likely to be advertised formally sometime in 2012 or 20 minutes after the November midterms. Nor is it obvious if this is a real request for proposals – it could be just an effort to make critics “put up or shut up.”

WHO HELPED THE CORPORATE RICH GET RICHER? YOU DID

NY Timess Blog’s Final Word on World Economic Forum in Davos

“Davos has wrapped up, and if there was one takeaway from the annual gathering of business and political leaders this year, it was this: trust in governments, corporations and above all banks has become as elusive as sure footing on the icy streets of this Alpine resort.

Still, there was general relief that the financial system had been pulled back from the abyss glimpsed by many speakers at Davos a year ago, The New York Times reports.

Naked Capitalism: TARP Under Investigation

You have to love it. If the allegations prove true, it provides further evidence that the banksters cannot contain themselves. Here they get their bacon saved by the TARP (which was way too cheaply priced relative to the risk involved) and a host of hidden subsidies and supports. Yet the employees cannot stand to let an opportunity for personal enrichment go to waste, legal or not.

The Financial Times appears to have broken the story that the Office of the Special Inspector General is investigating reports of insider trading in connection with the TARP. And what makes this probe potentially serious (aside from the brazenness of it) is that the suspects include executives as well as foot soldiers:

Eight of the largest banks in the US received between $2bn and $25bn in October 2008 under a programme to prop up the financial system led by Hank Paulson, then Treasury secretary.

Dozens more institutions followed and Mr Barofsky, who examines the troubled asset relief programme, is looking into whether information improperly made its way to trading rooms during a feverish period in which the government and banks were frequently exchanging information.

“We have pending investigations looking into that – typically into insider trading,” he said. “Once upon a time getting Tarp funds actually meant your stock price would go up and we are looking at specific trading around Tarp announcements by insiders or looking at potential tips from insiders.”

Economist Dean Baker speaks about his new book False Profits.

TEACHING THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY: ANOTHER HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER SPEAKS OUT

There have been many tributes to Howard Zinn, but the most significant in my mind come from teachers who used Howard’s work to raise awareness among their students. Larry Aaronson was one such teacher at a high school in Cambridge. MA. This is from an essay he wrote about Zinn who was a friend as well as a mentor:

I first started teaching Howard Zinn?s A Peoples’s History of the United States in the Fall of 1981. “A Peoples? History” had just appeared. I was one of the very first public high school history teachers allowed to teach Zinn?s revisionist history. I taught in a progressive alternative school program, The Pilot School, at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High (CRLS), in Cambridge, MA. I taught from “The Peoples? History” for the next 20 years.

I openly proclaimed myself a radical teacher. Howard Zinn was a personal friend. We both shared an affiliation with SNCC and an affinity for radical progressive education. I first taught in DC public schools from 1965-1969. This was in a so-called “inner city school,” Cardozo, located smack in the heart of one of the poorest urban ghettoes in Washington. Those first four years of teaching fully radicalized me.

I became a full-fledged radical teacher, teaching revisionist history in a progressive alternative school. I needed an appropriate history textbook. I considered conventional high school history textbooks an oxymoron. Choosing “A Peoples? History” seemed a no-brainer. The very first chapter, “Columbus, Indians, and Human Progress,” professed powerfully against historical narratives that pretend to be objective and neutral confronting the oppression of any people.

More compellingly, Howard explicitly stated his own bias: avoid romanticizing or victimizing the powerless; instead “disclose those hidden episodes of the past when, even in brief flashes people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am hoping that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”

Bottom line: Zinn’s over-arching understanding goal: Teach and learn to practice direct agency. To study Howard’s revisionist history is to understand that there is no such creature as historical objectivity as professed by standard high school history textbooks.

I submit there is a direct correlation between the introduction of Zinn’s book and the extraordinary awakening of student leadership in Cambridge Rindge and Latin during the 80?s and lasted until early 90?s. The change in the political culture in the school was palpable. Student leaders angered by US indifference to the Apartheid in South Africa, drove out all Coca-Cola dispenser machines from CRLS when they learned the corporation lied about their divestment policy. Their response to the LAPD’s debacle with Rodney King was to organize with teachers and alumni to produce their own revisionist multicultural curriculum writing project (Onesimus), dedicated to combat racial, gender and class prejudice and stereotypes in our schools.

When a recent graduate was senselessly murdered outside a housing project, students established Students Against Violence and For Equality (SAVE). When local educators, parents and civic leaders feared the worst– an rampaging AIDS epidemic amongst our at risk youth, youth peer leaders organized a condom distributions program in our schools

Howard Zinn’s example as an activist history professor informed and inspired my own version of radical pedagogy. There was a seamless connection between Howard the professor and Howard the activist organizer. That creates many pedagogical challenges for a tenured professor at a highly reputable university. It is exceedingly more risky for an untenured history teacher at a public high school. Howie’s students lauded his accessibility and his tireless commitment to their many requests to join their causes.”

Footnote: I spoke today to a journalist who wrote the obituary for Howard Zinn in a leading newspaper. He told me that he had called Zinn and told him he was doing a pre-obit and asked to interview him. Howard, ever the joker, asked him if he knew something he didn’t. Alas, it seems as if he had an instinct about what was to come.