The League is comprised of intellectual giants and mutants:
Larry Summers, last seen cowering under the Harvard President's desk as feminists beat him with math text books and slide rulers, will head up the White House Office of Policy Development's National Economic Council.
Mr. Summers has had an illustrious career in many economic fields and in government. His extraordinary power is that he tends to speak the truth when it's least welcomed by those who hired him to lie. This is also is greatest weakness and will offer many opportunities for Mr. Summers to unwittingly sabotage the Obama administration. The NEC was first formed in 1993 by Executive Order 12835 and is charged with four principal functions: to coordinate policy-making for domestic and international economic issues, to coordinate economic policy advice for the President, to ensure that policy decisions and programs are consistent with the President's economic goals, and to monitor implementation of the President's economic policy agenda.Timothy Geithner will serve as Secretary of the Treasury.
Mr. Geithner possesses an illustrious career and presently serves as the 9th president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the top dog in the pack of twelve regional reserve banks. Mr. Geithner is a specialist in creating money out of thin air and giving it to his friends down the street from his Manhattan office. All of that is important and looks very nice on heavy grade bond paper, but, in addition to his preternatural skills with hand gestures, Mr. Geithner's extraordinary power is sourced directly from his thick wavy hair and thus we can expect the press to default always to a photo of Mr. Geithner's head whenever they issue a press release (presently called a newspaper article) on the Obama administration's economic plans, policies and magnificent, unparalleled successes. All League members, however, have a fatal weakness and Mr. Geithner's is that he holds an MA in International Economics and East Asian Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)('85). SAIS grads are prone to hubris, self-aggrandisement and a fatal desire to solve all the world's problems at happy hours. In any event, as Secretary of Treasury, Mr. Geithner will serve as the major policy advisor to the President, having primary responsibility for formulating and recommending domestic and international financial, economic, and tax policy.Peter Orszag will be Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Mr. Orszag's chief strength is that he is the consummate policy dork and thus will be underestimated by all involved until he applies the full fury and might of the OMB by rubber stamping all of Mr. Obama's socialist initiatives throughout the federal government. Mr. Orszag has been applying his prodigious nerd skills as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, whose primary job is to provide cover for Congress' profligacy with your tax dollars. Mr. Orszag pretends to know something about medical expenses and so he will provide a giant blue tarp over the financial pit that Obama will dig for the country when he pushes through his national health care plan in a couple of years. He also is a Clinton retread, having worked at the Council of Economic Advisers during his reign of terror. According to his wikipedia entry, "there is some agreement among associates that he wears a toupee." Ya think? This makes him the anti-Geithner.While not technically a gentlemen, Christina Romer certainly looks like one and will not stand out at League meetings when she represents the Council of Economic Advisers.
Ms. Romer is a UC Berkeley economist. Berkeley. Oh, fuck. Still, from Sydney Brillo Duodenum's perspective, her greatest strength is that, after being offered a tenured position at Harvard University's economic department, she was blackballed by Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust (the one who succeeded Larry Make Me Vomit Summers but not before shaking him down for $50 million for estrogen injections into the Harvard faculty), and thus serves as a direct example of the hypocrisy of Harvard's feminists - it's not women advancing, but only certain women advancing that matters to them; imagine the turmoil that would ensue should a highly regarded, independent, accomplished economist have an opinion different from the Harvard President. There would be an epidemic of fainting. In any event, Ms. Romer allegedly brings deep understanding of the Great Depression and how the country recovered from it, although one doubts she would agree that it's more appropriate to state, "how the country recovered from it despite the best efforts of FDR and his Brain Trust." Essentially, though, she is Professor McGonagle overseeing the new class of Keynesians at the Obamawarts School of Keynesian Wizardry.Melody Barnes will serve as Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Ms. Barnes has recently served as VP at the Center for American Progress, which is a "progressive" (e.g., leftist) American policy and activism factory run by UFOologist and Obama advisor and former Clinton hack John Podesta. CAP's stated mission is to build "upon progressive ideals put forth by such leaders as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King [and to] draw from the great social movements of the 20th century—from labor rights and worker safety, to civil rights and women's suffrage [and] translate those values into new ideas and action firmly rooted in the economic and political realities of the 21st century." Yes, "Oh Fuck" is right! So really, Ms. Barnes will be tapping into all that heady goodness of progressive (e.g., leftist) success of the past 80 years and apply it to the 21st Century, when no one really remembers what a flaming wreck it all was. Ms. Barnes learned many of her dark arts while serving as Chief Counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. This gives her mega street cred and allows Obama to use Senator Kennedy's brain tumor to his advantage as he positions himself as the rightful heir of Kennedy benevolence on behalf of the downtrodden little people. Ms. Barnes principle extraordinary weakness is that she resembles Michelle Obama and thus her access to President Obama will diminish over time because he's going to be getting enough shit from Mrs. Shadow President in private quarters, so the last thing he is going to want to see is MiniMichelle.Sydney Brillo Duodenum specializes in maintaining close ties to the Washington power brokers and so has come into possession of a document listing Mr. Obama's "round two" choices for his economic team. These names will not be announced until after the January Investiture. They are:
Suze Orman, personal financial advice guru and host of the The Suze Orman Show on CNN and author of New York Times bestsellers.
Ms. Orman will head up the new White House Office of Personal Financial Advice. Under this new directive, and based upon the principle that the government knows more than you do about what's good for you, the White House will provide financial advice directly to the American people. The program will be limited to women in their 50s who have never worked, do not own any property, have no credit cards in their name, and who have decided to divorce their husbands after 25 years of marriage because they are no longer "understood."Jim Cramer of Cramerica and Mad Money fame on CNBC.
Mr. Cramer will serve as Mr. Obama's Court Jester during meetings of the League of Extraordinary Economic Gentlemen. His principle duties will be playing sound effects (bulls, bears, guns, bombs, screams, etc.) as League members present their recommendations to President Obama; throwing rubber dolls at reporters who ask questions not preapproved by the President; and advising Mr. Obama to pour all of his political capital into the plans or pull all of his political capital out of the plans, depending on which way the gas emanating from Larry Summers is blowing.Mrs. Col. Mbeki Gnutulu, widow of deposed African strongman Col. Mbeki Gnutulu.
Mrs. Guntulu will head the US Mint. She is a relatively outside-the-beltway appointee who came to Mr. Obama's attention through an e-mail he received on his beloved Blackberry device. Mrs. Col. Mbeki Gnutulu has presented plans to Mr. Obama on the repatriation of funds from overseas. Mr. Obama sees her as a critical player in finding lost dollars owed the US Treasury. From her position at the US Mint, Mrs. Col. Mbeki Gnutulu has promised to deposit these lost monies in the US Mint prior to their transfer to the US Treasury. Mr. Obama promises that once he is inaugurated, she will be provided with the necessary bank account information at the US Mint to finesse the transfer and secure to these monies to the benefit of US taxpayers.In any event, the League, not even sworn in by Congress, in its mere announcement of its formation, has already trespassed upon ground never before touched by humanity. In an extraordinary masterstroke of masterful extraordinariness, the League has announced a two part dickover plan for saving our asses. First, Obama will "jolt" the economy by spending billions and billions of tax payer dollars, maybe even a trillion, not yet collected from people and businesses in order to create 2.5 million new minium wage jobs by 2011, even though it will be at the expense of driving out of business the ones paying billions and billions of dollars in taxes. It only makes sense when one considers the paltry $7.5 trillion already committed by the federal purse to alleving our national constipation. The second prong of Obama's two-dick plan is shear genius never before considered by the modern mind - budget cuts, reform and budget reform of cuts to the budget.
The great Thomas Sowell distills these developments into a potent dram of a paragraph:
What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them.
