Hannah Arendt famously observed, with a presumed chill up her spine, how ordinary and banal the evil Adolf Eichmann appeared at his trial in Jerusalem in 1963. He was "just" an obedient civil servant of the Reich, and a lawful one too. Well, Tim Geithner is not evil, but he is banal, and an unlawful banal tax cheat at that. I fear Jonah Goldberg's next book will be titled the Banality of American Liberal Fascism (see Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left). While many authors, left and right, harped on their favorite agenda item in response to the "Geithner Plan", many missed the forest for the trees. Paul Krugman, on his blog, almost had a panic attack at the thought someone in the private sector might make money. Conservative pundit Jed Babbitt referred to the plan as "layered and textured". Even on my blog, I gave it  Simon Cowell "damn with faint praise" treatment in saying that anything fixed in stone is better than a trial balloon a week.

Geithner had a busy week. He announced his plan on Monday. Tuesday, Obama discussed outsourcing new constitutional authorities on corporate takeovers to the Treasury Secretary. And on Wednesday Geithner revealed his openness to some global reserve currency in response to the Chinese moaning about how much we import from them (or as they like to say, how many Treasuries they buy from us). But our Liberal Fascist administration is not yet ready to make the Hegelian dialectical move into combining global Marxism with Liberal Fascism. That is next year's agenda.

Geithner's plan was revealing as a function of what is in the plan and what is not. The "Goldbergian" Liberal Fascist point, which was central to the Geithner proposal, is that it is a "public-private" partnership. This is the central feature of any Fascist economy. As Sheldon Richman stated in an article entitled "Fascism", "fascism {seeks economic} control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners". We have already seen this with how the banks have been treated. We have witnessed the administration's willingness to abrogate contracts, propose de facto (soon de jure) nationalized health care, propose massive monetary and regulatory subsidies on behalf of ludicrously named "green energy" enterprises and are now trying to suck non bank financial entities into their web through the "Geithner Plan". Why would any asset manager in their right mind concede to this? While he assures us that the managers will be in total control, all transactions will ultimately be approved and monitored by some banal bureaucrat.

What incentives have been offered? This is TARP 1.001, with a Liberal Fascist add on. Like TARP 1.0, Treasury will purchase mortgages outright (just what is borrowing to invest in both "debt and equity" except an outright purchase?). The Liberal Fascist part is the government will lend money to investors to buy certain defined assets in exchange for them putting "equity" in dollar for dollar to match the government's "equity" contribution. Many moan about the implied guarantees or "non-recourse" loans the government is supplying. But the guarantee levels are set so far from the current "implied default rate", given how far prices have already fallen, that if they are hit, the economy will be so distraught, we will be growing vegetables in our back yard to survive. This is basically a lending program at low rates to entice buyers. It took Geithner how long to come up with this? It is an absurd and trivial adaptation to TARP 1.0, were it not for the "public-private" partnership principle. This will end up being an arm twisting exercise by the Treasury. They will push buyers and sellers together to establish the precedent of the effectiveness of "public-private" partnerships. Keep your eye on this---this will be pushed hard. Conservatives continue to not believe what they are seeing, and I include myself in that critique. What else does Obama have to do before we accept full stop what he is about?

There is no mention in Geithner's plan on how we got to where we are. Just what are those failed mortgages? UVA professor William Lucy has an extraordinary detailed work on how California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida have 87% of the current foreclosures Study: Foreclosures in States and Metropolitan Areas: Patterns, Forecasts, and Pricing Toxic Assets. Isn't this important for policy reasons? The implications of this are profound. Dollars to donuts the "localized" nature of this crisis leads back to various Committee Chairs in Congress. What happened to the CDOs in Geithner's plan? Several hundred billion were issued with mortgages in 2004-2007---no mention. This plan was pathetic--worse, it will provide an opportunity for "the Laughing President" to continue his step by step Statist objectives.  Little if anything from this administration fits what America is about. From Saul Alinsky to Black Liberation Theology to the Woods Foundation to confiscatory tax rates to "public-private" partnerships, Barack Obama and all his banal men have one objective in mind, Liberal Fascism.