To many optimists, the words “information revolution” carry some
dream — if not always the reality — of individual empowerment or bottom-up democracy. But the information revolution, ChinaByte-style, is
something different. For China’s rulers, it means grabbing the economic
benefits of Western technology without ceding an iota of state power.
For Murdoch, it means exploiting the synergy of his cross-media holdings
– books, newspapers, film and television — to create an advertiser-friendly global market that never irks the local authorities.

Murdoch and the Chinese Communists — it’s a match made in hell,
and the courtship hasn’t always gone swimmingly. News Corp. has a
dominating media presence in Australia, the United States and Great
Britain. It owns TV Guide and Twentieth Century Fox, the London Times
and the New York Post and satellite television networks in Asia and
Europe. It’s set to roll out major digital television services in Japan
and India this year. No other media company — not Disney, not Time Warner– has such an extensive global
presence. But China, potentially the largest market of all, has also been
one of the hardest to crack.

China’s leadership holds everyone at arm’s length. But it has
especially distrusted Murdoch since 1993, when News Corp.
purchased a majority stake in the Hong Kong-based STAR
TV, a network whose satellite footprints trample over nearly all of Asia. Murdoch immediately infuriated Chinese leaders with his announcement that satellite technology posed an
“unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

Not the best way to endear yourself to one of the most totalitarian
regimes anywhere — but Murdoch soon mended his ways. In 1994, after
complaints from Chinese officials, he booted the BBC’s television news
service from STAR. In the same year, News Corp.’s publishing division,
HarperCollins, followed that gesture of good will by publishing an
English-language version of an officially approved biography of China’s
paramount leader, the late Deng Xiaoping.

Such tactics are nothing new for Murdoch, who has assisted his
efforts to gain regulatory relief in the United States and Great Britain by
offering million-dollar book deals to Newt Gingrich and Margaret
Thatcher.

“Murdoch, more than most, has practiced this time and time again,”
says James Ledbetter, media critic for the Village Voice. “He thinks
absolutely nothing of making alliances with some of the worst
dictatorships known to man. All his celebration of Western moral values
goes right out the window when it comes to business.”

Murdoch’s rewards came quickly. In 1995, News Corp. landed a 20-year, $5.4 million joint venture with the People’s Daily. And in 1996, a
second deal launched the Phoenix Satellite Television network, a
package of three Chinese-language television channels aimed at the
mainland Chinese market. Finally, in 1997, came the first tangible payoff
from Murdoch’s maneuvering — ChinaByte.

ChinaByte’s managing director, Bruce Dover, says no “favors” were
involved in Murdoch’s deal with the People’s Daily. And some analysts
dispute the notion that the deal was a quid pro quo for Murdoch’s earlier
moves. STAR is still banned for most Chinese, and Phoenix’s distribution
efforts have gone nowhere, they say. “China is not ready for Rupert
Murdoch,” said one Hong Kong-based telecom specialist.

Ready or not, ChinaByte is a clear News Corp. toehold in the Middle
Kingdom, and so far, it is apparently quite successful. After debuting on
Jan. 15, ChinaByte has been attracting 80,000 to 100,000 hits a day,
according to Dover, and the numbers grow by about 10 percent a week.
Dover plans to start selling advertising in a month, and he is thrilled by
the unexpectedly heavy response. It is proof, he says, that the “the
second fastest-growing personal-computer market in the world” (after
Japan) is primed for further exploitation.

Dover, a longtime Asia hand and former journalist permanently
stationed in Beijing, where ChinaByte’s offices and Web servers are
located, sees no contradiction in doing a deal with the People’s Daily.

“At the end of the day, it’s a business decision,” he said, “We see it
as access to a market.”

News Corp. furnishes the technology and the financing — some $2.5
million for ChinaByte alone. The People’s Daily provides the
content — a standard mix of infotech reporting that includes columns on
how to use the Internet, product reviews, e-mail newsletters and a
library of shareware software offerings from Ziff-Davis, the largest
publisher of computer magazines in the world (now owned by Softbank,
the Japanese conglomerate).

This division of responsibility means that News Corp. need not worry
about stepping on the censor’s toes: The censor is the content
provider. “If anyone should know what’s acceptable, it would be them,”
said Dover.

That’s vital knowledge for anyone publishing in China, where
navigating the line between acceptable business coverage and political
transgression is, as former Chinese newspaperman Zhang Weiguo notes, “a big headache” — even for the Party leadership, and especially when the topic at hand is
as complex and potentially subversive as information technology.

“On the one hand they see encouraging technology as a way to
raise the standard of living for the masses, but on the other hand they
realize that it is very difficult to control the use to which new technology
is put,” said Zhang, a former editor at the now-defunct Shanghai
Economic Herald, a brash critical voice closed by Chinese authorities as
part of the post-Tiananmen massacre crackdown in June 1989.

It’s as tough for the People’s Daily as anyone else. In the
introduction to ChinaByte, the publishers declare that now Chinese
speakers all over the world will be able to “fully enjoy the boundless and
inexhaustible knowledge available on the Internet.” But at the same time
as ChinaByte executives announce that at last there’s a place to go for
“all these computer-literate Chinese on the Net (who) have never had
anything to access before,” the Chinese government is busy making
sure that Chinese citizens are forbidden access to a swath of
Chinese-related Web sites — precisely those Web sites that have long
been demonstrating the Internet’s real information-delivery potential.

China lifted its blocks on mainstream Western Web sites belonging to
the Wall Street Journal and CNN last month, but the operators of the
main Chinese Internet gateways are still preventing direct access to
long-established expatriate-operated sites such as the China News Digest, Human Rights in China and The International Federation of Chinese Scholars and Students.

The restrictions aren’t watertight. James Xie, an Internet activist at
the University of Chicago, maintains a Web page that details
methods for circumventing the blocks. Both inside and outside of China,
there is no shortage of the technical skills or programming prowess
necessary to manipulate the Internet’s many computer protocols for
mutual benefit. In particular, the long-established “overseas Chinese”
communities that dot the globe have been sending their best and
brightest to electrical engineering departments and top-notch research
laboratories for decades. The Internet is nothing new to them.

In fact, far from being digital Johnny-come-latelies, the Chinese –
outside of China — took to the Internet early and vigorously. The student
protests that led to the Tiananmen crackdown played a major role in
spurring the creation of mailing lists, e-mail newsletters and Usenet
newsgroups as thriving forums for sharing information about the
democracy movement, Taiwanese-Chinese relations and other
politically volatile issues. China News Digest says it receives some 200,000 to 400,000 hits a day and operates a series of newsletters with tens of
thousands of subscribers all over the world. Today, thousands of
Chinese-oriented Web sites, in English and in
Chinese, cover everything from Taoist philosophy to Chinese-language computer shareware.

This, of course, is the true information revolution, unsubsidized by
advertisers or mighty media conglomerates. But is it enough? For while
ChinaByte is far from the only place for Chinese to go on the Net, it is
nevertheless the best-funded and best-equipped Chinese-language
Web site. It enjoys the benefits of the double-barreled marketing and
promotion machines of the Communist Party and News Corp. A source
for neutered info-tidbits and pasteurized technology-news pap, it is a
model demonstration of what more Western involvement in the Chinese
economy looks like, if conducted according to Chinese terms. ChinaByte
is the counter-revolutionary future of the Net — slick, smooth and
inoffensive to everyone. There will be no rough edges in this corporate
future, and that’s exactly the way News Corp. wants it.

Both the expatriate Chinese community and the Western business
community believe that increased contact with the West will lead to
greater human rights and freedom in China. “Engagement” must lead to
more democracy; a rising standard of living will eventually break the back
of one-party rule. It happened in Taiwan. It happened in South Korea.
Why not China?

Even the most staunch dissidents argue that the Party leaders’
attempts to resist the flow are bound to fail. Blockading the Internet, in
particular, is “like using a brick to stop a flood,” according to Xiao
Qiang, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights in China
watchdog group.

But other observers, bruised by years of China-watching, are less
optimistic. While it is true that the Chinese enjoy far more access to
information than ever before, China’s government has still effectively
squelched those forms of expression it perceives as a threat. Holding the
line against unacceptable expression, while still maintaining one of the
world’s faster economic growth rates, hasn’t proven to be that big a
“headache” after all.

In recent years, the Party’s grip over intellectual expression
that might challenge state control has actually tightened, according to
Orville Schell, dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism and author
of numerous books on China.

“They have been more successful than anybody imagined they
would be or could be,” said Schell. “They’ve closed down a number of
publications. This doesn’t mean that they have brought everything to a
standstill, but certain key organs of control remain very much responsive
to the Party.”

The People’s Daily is one of those organs of control. The days when
the subtext of each phrase in the newspaper meant life or death to its
readership may be long gone. But as ChinaByte demonstrates, the
hoary old behemoth is still fit to stake a Party-approved place in
cyberspace. So far, in China, the information revolution, as midwifed by
News Corp., is no threat to the status quo.

“I think a lot of digital revolutionaries,” said Schell, “believe that
the information revolution is uncontrollable, but I’m not so sanguine. I
think it’s uncontrollable for the hard-core hackers, but for ordinary
people it’s quite controllable.”

Especially when Rupert Murdoch lends a helping hand.

Not only does the foreclosure deal add up to peanuts compared to the $350 billion tobacco settlement, but it also pales before the size of the problem that it is theoretically supposed to address. The amount of negative equity held by Americans in their homes is currently calculated at around $700 billion. As a result of the foreclosure settlement around 750,000 Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure will receive checks of around $2,000 and another million homeowners will see the size of their outstanding loans reduced by an estimated average of around $20,000. Sure, any additional stimulus will be sorely appreciated in today’s demand-constrained U.S. economy, but a $2,000 check isn’t going to make up for a foreclosed home, and it is silly to think the banks will feel more than a slight pinch. The banks have already reserved enough capital to cover the checks that they are going to have to cut (around $5 billion). Compared to the damage caused to American families by both the financial crisis and the rush to foreclosure, the banks are getting off easy.

Obama may be technically correct to say that the settlement “will deliver some measure of justice for some families who have been victims of abusive practices,” but it’s wrong to treat the news as any kind of real payback for bank misdeeds. It’s just nibbling around the margins.

So is it a sellout — “another raw demonstration of who wields power in America,” as Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith, — undoubtedly the harshest critic of the Obama administration on housing policy and bank reform — argues? That’s a little harder to say, and a lot depends on the future course of events.

Some defenders of the settlement are arguing that the size of the deal is smaller than it might otherwise be because the government has retained the right to sue the banks for a wide variety of mortgage-related bad behavior stretching beyond the fraudulent processing of foreclosure paperwork at the heart of this deal. In particular, the states attorneys general of New York and California can continue their own separate investigations. As Felix Salmon writes, “other big-money lawsuits over securitization can and almost certainly will still be brought — which means that the big banks all still have significant litigation risk hanging over their heads.” As if to punctuate this point, on Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal regulators plan to sue some of the largest banks on charges of fraud related to the dodgy securitization of mortgages in 2007 and 2008.

The proof of this theory will only come when we see how hard the Obama administration and states like California go after the banks in the future. Given the track record of this administration, that may be doubtful. (Although, it may be worth noting that at least one conservative critic of the settlement, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, bases his critique precisely on the fact that banks still can’t put the whole crisis behind them. The administration can’t leave well enough alone, complains Holtz-Eakin, or “resist the political temptation to rouse its base with finger-pointing and lawsuits.”)

A more interesting question to consider, however, is how the housing relief contained in this settlement fits into other administration housing policy efforts currently in the works.

First off, government negotiators are still working on roping another nine mortgage providers into the deal, which could raise the overall settlement total from $26 billion to around $40 billion. In March, the rejiggered HARP refinance program will kick in, presumably allowing hundreds of thousands of homeowners to refinance at currently rock bottom mortgage rates. There is also strong pressure coming from the Federal Reserve and the White House to convert currently unoccupied foreclosed homes owned by the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into rental properties, a step that would remove excess inventory from the housing market.

Each individual nibble here is unlikely to make a profound difference, but taken together, all these initiatives add up to the most concerted effort the Obama administration has taken to date to bring relief to the housing sector. It’s also worth noting that it’s all happening without any help whatsoever from Congress. The approach does not address the desire for punishment that so many would like to see meted out upon the banks, but it will likely help spur additional economic growth. At a point when the economy already seems to have solid momentum toward recovery, every extra bit of help is gravy.

President George W. Bush cut taxes for almost everyone who paid income taxes. Romney would make the Bush tax cuts permanent. But that’s only a first step.

He would also raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college.

Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.

To be fair to Romney, when the candidate made his comment on not caring about the poor, he did it in the context of noting that there is a “safety net” for the poor, and if it was broken, he would “fix it.” But it’s a little difficult to square the idea of fixing a broken safety net with the plan to eliminate tax breaks that benefit poor families with children who aspire to a college education. (Not to mention the little problem of figuring out how to pay for that safety net, while at the same time committing to making permanent budget-busting tax cuts.)

Romney’s tax plan appears tailor-made for an Obama attack team to rip to shreds. Of course, judging by the results from the primary and caucus contests so far, poor people don’t seem very inclined to vote for Romney, so maybe he figures he’s got nothing to lose.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Lin. He was a high school phenom in Palo Alto, Calif., and I know some Asian American kids out here in Berkeley who worship the ground he walks on. Lin didn’t make the NBA because he’s freakishly tall, like the 7-foot-4 Yao Ming (Lin is “only” 6″3′). He’s there because he can play ball, because he has a wicked fast first step when he drives to the basket, and he knows how to deliver the rock to the big guys (a skill a surprising number of “legitimate” NBA guards show little interest in mastering). He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles.

But you can like Lin, and you can root for him, and yet still find his instantaneous, Tim Tebow-like ascent (in more ways than one!) to pop-cultural phenom — LINSANITY! — to be more than a little disorienting. Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.

We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.

And the crazy thing is, we’re figuring this out as it goes along — and giving the phenomenon more power. As we understand this new world, and submerge ourselves in it, we are beginning to take our cues from it.

Just want every one to know that I wrote about #linsanity this morning long before it became “hip” this afternoon: bit.ly/Apjdq4

— Jon (@viewmyseats) February 8, 2012

The mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself. It’s startling, but also natural: When you see a fire start to blaze, you run to cover to it. And so Linsanity breeds more Linsanity.

You want highlights? Here’s a distilled package of nine minutes of Lin’s exploits from his 28-point explosion on Monday night. You want a tribute video with an original rap soundtrack on top of some T.I. beats?  Someone is recommending it to you on Facebook or Twitter right now. You want analysis, pro or con? Plug “Jeremy Lin” into Google News and say goodbye to the rest of your day.

You want vaguely disconcerting racially tinged jokes playing on Asian, black, and white stereotypes? Twitter’s going crazy:

Jeremy Lin is a huge pickup for the Knicks. Not only is he scoring a ton of points but he is also tutoring his teammates children in math.

— The Bill Walton Trip (@NotBillWalton) February 7, 2012

“We know that Lin has been playing along, but honestly, fellow Knicks, stop bowing to him after a great play.” nymag.com/daily/sports/2…

— Angry Asian Man (@angryasianman) February 8, 2012

Lots of sterile white folks offer to adopt Jeremy Lin, concerned with the all black family he is currently with.

— The Fake ESPN (@TheFakeESPN) February 7, 2012

On Monday, the social media world was also getting worked up about Michigan Republican Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s racist Super Bowl ad, featuring a Chinese woman (labeled “yellowgirl” in the HTML code for the Web version) gloating over all the jobs her country was taking from the U.S. Once thrown into the 24/7 crazy cultural mashup perpetual motion machine, it didn’t take long before anger about that ad ran head on into Jeremy Lin pride. I have seen tweets urging Jeremy Lin to run for the Republican nomination for the Michigan senate seat, tweets warning that the only American jobs in danger from Asians are those belonging to New York Knick starting point guards, and even a tweet riffing off Kobe Bryant’s self-identification as “black mamba” — Jeremy Lin is suddenly  the “yellow mamba.”

It’s a tricky, tricky world. We get pissed off when we learn that an HTML jockey has labeled a Chinese woman “yellowgirl” but we grin when see Lin dubbed “yellow mamba.” Or maybe not; maybe we get mad at both. The tweet-stream moves too fast too tell for sure. It’s just one non-stop improv jazz riff frenzy.

The craziest thing is, from his record so far we know absolutely nothing about Lin’s staying power as a potential long-term starting NBA point guard. Lin won a state championship as a senior high school and broke all kinds of Ivy League records at Harvard, but he wasn’t drafted by a single NBA team, sat on the bench last year as a rookie for the Golden State Warriors, was cut by both Golden State and Houston before this season, and was playing in the NBA’s developmental league just two months ago. He’s had two great games against two bad teams, and once the league figures him out, he could easily become old news as quickly as he became the news. Or he might tear his ACL next week, be out for the season, and never manage a full comeback. His incredible domination of the basketball world right now tells us nothing about his future.

But one thing we do know for sure: There will be something to replace him, sooner rather than later. We’re strapped to a new kind of rollercoaster — the only thing we can be certain of is that our passions will be constantly roiled by whatever new outrage or delight seethes our way via our new information channels. You know that the Susan G. Komen foundation is reeling from their contact with this world. And you’ve got to guess Jeremy Lin is having a strange week.

Who’s next?

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.”

And there’s more where that came from! Banking analyst Dick Bove complains that the government has “basically castrated these companies.” Sorry, Dick, but it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of testosterone-crazed bulls in the entire global economy pasture. Hard times for investment bankers? It’s hard to imagine anything in the world that the average American could care less about, at this particular juncture in time.

2) As proof, amazing as it may seem, that the Dodd-Frank bank reform law is achieving exactly what the U.S. economy needs most: a reversal of the long-term trend in which the financial sector steadily gobbled up more and more of the U.S. economy.

Sherman makes a persuasive case that, even before the full implementation of Dodd-Frank, in anticipation of the new rules the big banks have been forced to make major changes to their businesses that have had a serious negative impact on their bottom line.

What is even more startling about this reversal is that few thought the much-vilified Dodd-Frank act would have much effect at all … And yet, from the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16 — in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent. Partly, this is a function of the economic headwinds. But the bill’s major provisions — forcing banks to reduce leverage, imposing a ban on proprietary trading, making derivatives markets more transparent, and ending abusive debit-card practices — have taken a pickax to the Wall Street business model

If true, this is great news. In 1986, Wall Street accounted for 19 percent of all U.S. corporate profits. Just before the financial crash that figure had grown to 41 percent. That’s not a healthy economy. That’s an economy of speculators trading with each other and blowing up financial bubbles. Obama has gotten no end of grief from the left for not breaking up the big banks immediately after becoming president, even though one could make a good argument that to do so in the middle of the crisis would have damaged the U.S. economy even further. If, in fact, the long-run resolution of this drama is a Wall Street that is withering on the vine, while the “real” “Main Street” economy gradually strengthens, then we are looking at something remarkable: a profound transformation of the U.S. economy, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Reagan administration.

3) As unwarranted hype.

Of course, Dodd-Frank has not been fully implemented, and financial sector lobbyists are busily exerting tremendous pressure to make sure every new rule gets written so as to have the weakest effect possible. At the same time, Wall Street will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign of Mitt Romney, who has promised to make rolling back Dodd-Frank one of the primary goals of his presidency. Profits may be bad this year, and bankers might be whining about their bonuses, but Wall Street will regroup, Dodd-Frank will be neutered, and it will be business as usual in just a few years.

Readings 2 and 3 are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. It’s possible for Dodd-Frank to already be having a salutary effect and for that effect to be short-lived. In some ways, Dodd-Frank’s legacy may be what November’s election ends up deciding — although whichever party wins the White House in 2012, the power of the financial sector over the political process is unlikely to diminish significantly.

But regardless of which reading you choose, the piece itself is amazing if only for the plethora of quotes from bankers lamenting how the times have changed. There’s a self-awareness of the fact that the country headed down the wrong road, that maybe, just maybe, there was something wrong with all the easy money. Wall Street sounds chastened. Whether or not the Occupy movement, or Dodd-Frank, or the bad economy is most responsible for this reality is impossible to say, but for now, let’s call it progress.

For the conservative bomb-throwing blogger Michelle Malkin, Eastwood’s stance was an affront to free market principles:

“WTH? Did I just see Clint Eastwood fronting an auto bailout ad???”

For liberal Michael Moore, it was an endorsement of President Obama.

“Your sermon seemed 2 b a call 2 give O his ‘second half.’”

Charges of hypocrisy poured in like Giants defensive linemen collapsing on Tom Brady. Clint Eastwood has long been regarded as a solidly libertarian conservative, and he is on record as having opposed the auto bailout. Yet here he was, cashing in, indirectly, on the auto bailout: taking what must surely have been a hefty paycheck to tout Detroit’s comeback!

Of course, Eastwood is also a smart man, and by the evidence of his long career, he is not crazy. So maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he saw what’s happened since the auto bailout and decided that in this case, government intervention was good policy. And maybe he’s been looking at what passes for conservativism in the United States over the past few years, and he’s disgusted. Because whatever you might think about the hypocrisy issue, there’s absolutely no question that “Halftime in America” has a clear political subtext.

The commercial analogizes Detroit’s comeback from hard times to the still unrealized recovery of the United States from the Great Recession. And it bemoans not just the hardship, but the hard feelings and disunity that currently define our political landscape. Here’s one key section:

I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.

Not only is that passage clearly a reference to the political fighting and harsh rhetoric of the past three years, but during that section, the commercial shows images of demonstrators in Wisconsin, protesting the effort by Gov. Scott Walker to break public sector unions! You can’t get more political than that. Sure, as John Nichols at the Nation reports, the pro-union signs of the demonstrators were surgically removed from the shots, but even that revisionism doesn’t obscure the power of the reference.. As a country, we’re fighting each other, Eastwood is saying. Let’s come back together … and support government intervention in the economy!

Seriously, what else are we to make of this?

It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.

As commentator Greg Mitchell pointed out almost immediately at the Nation, mister straight-shooter Clint is not being factually accurate. We did not all pull together. Obama bailed out Detroit, and faced enormous criticism for it. It’s exhibit A in the case for Obama’s supposed campaign to create the United Socialist States of America!

The conclusion seems clear: If we’re all supposed to pull together to reach a full economic recovery, just like we pulled together to rescue Detroit, then clearly we should be pulling together to reelect Obama. It certainly wouldn’t make sense to all pull together to elect the guy who wanted us to let Detroit go bankrupt, would it?