Where did those pig lips get off to?

There they are! I need them for Congressman Pete (I used to be district manager for marketing at Southwestern Bell so I'm an expert on economic realities) Sessions from Dallas. The Dallas Morning News reports Pistol Pete flapping his yap today:

Sessions told The New York Times that the administration intends to “diminish employment and diminish stock prices” as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy.

And he asserted that the Obama agenda is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”

Precisely how a nefarious divide-and-conquer strategy will arise from staggering unemployment numbers and slumping equity values I don't know. Just why an administration with Obama's very high approval ratings would want to divide and conquer anybody I don't know either. Nor can I know the congressman's ability to divine the President's intentions to undermine capitalism, given all the gigabucks he and his have poured into our ailing financial institutions in an effort to save capitalism.

Moreover, blaming current employment numbers and stock prices on an administration which has been in power for less than four months is patently bad faith partisan posturing in a recession that's a year older than that. Below is a screen grab of a chart for the S&P 500 during the previous administration.


Note the precipitous decline at the end of 2008. That stomach-churning drop at the right begins in September, when Bushman Hank Paulson let Lehman fail. And it is most important to remember that in the several years before that fall as much as 40% of all profits reported by US corporations came from financial institutions, companies whose earnings statements we now know involved magical thinking about the valuations of the derivatives like CDOs, CMOs, and CDSs they had on their books. This made their stock valuations a fraud and unreasonably inflated the whole index. That boom in '06 and '07 was made of air. Talk about inflicting damage on the free enterprise system.

So I just visited Pistol Pete's Web site and left him a message about his utter ignorance. I doubt he'll read it, but I had to say something.

The pig lips I reserved for my blog.