With another AIG bailout in the works, Dean Baker follows the money:

Mr. Geithner wants to use taxpayer dollars to keep bankrupt banks in business. In effect, he wants to tax teachers, fire fighters, and Joe the Plumber to protect the wealth of the banks' shareholders and to pay high salaries to their top executives....

If the government paid the market price for these assets the banks would be bankrupt and we would be back to step 1, nationalization. The point of buying the bad assets is to pay too much, so that the banks can get enough money to stay solvent. (In is worth noting that deciding how much the government will overpay, and to whom, also involves the government in running the banks in a really big way.)

It would be nice if the Post and the rest of the media would report honestly on the bank bailout and stop trying to conceal plans for a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives.

Yep.

Budget me no budgets. That's in the future, may never happen, and budgets are not Obama's to implement in any case, assuming that Article I of the Constitution is still in force. And populism me no populism; I trust the Village on Obama's populism about as much as I trust them on anything else; it's an entirely tenable theory, for example, that they're stressing how populist Obama's approach is precisely because it isn't. (Nah. That would never happen.) And SOTU me no SOTUs; Obama's prints are all over the bailouts, have been since he made the calls for TARP I.

The real action is what Treasury and the Fed are doing. The amount dwarfs everything else in play, and how the class warfare there plays out is going to structure all policy options for years to come. How about we keep trying to shove the Overton Window left, and defend ourselves? There's a time for Obamagasms, no doubt, but this is not one of them.