What if we plowed that money from the tax cuts for the rich into a payroll tax cut for everyone, a “people’s tax cut,” if you will?

In fact, the banks essentially created HAMP. It was their counter-offer to cramdown, their attempt to put a foreclosure-mitigation scheme friendlier to their interests in place. Under the proposal, the banks would be allowed to work out their terms with borrowers first, before resorting to a bankruptcy judge. This is how it worked in the House version of cramdown, which passed in March 2009; the homeowner had to negotiate a voluntary loan mod with the lender before going to the bankruptcy judge. And this may have worked, but only because, for the servicers, cramdown would have loomed in the background as a big stick, forcing a negotiation with a level playing field for the borrower.

Instead, you ended up with a voluntary program that provided meager incentive payments to the servicers, but didn’t force them in any way to work out terms. You got all carrot but no stick.

Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist during the Presidential campaign and a member of the economic team currently, will become the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, replacing Christina Romer. If Romer’s tenure on the CEA is any expectation, Goolsbee will spend his time there butting heads with Larry Summers and being stymied on getting his advice to the President.

John Boehner (R-OH), in what is being billed as a major speech, will call for the firing of Barack Obama’s economic team today, and an end to the Administration’s economic policies. He will not offer up anything yet as an alternative, except the buzzwords of “getting America back to work.” But I must admit that this is a pretty smart move.

Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer will become the second member of the White House economic team to resign in a few months, according to Reid Wilson. But unlike Peter Orszag, who was reportedly burnt out, Romer is resigning in frustration with the inability to penetrate the inner circle of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, and reach the President on economic issues. This is a much more revealing resignation.

I think we ought to have someone in there who doesn’t spend most of their time devising ways for the big banks to stay alive, and who may look over at the regular person and decide that he or she needs a shot when going up against all that power and privilege. Warren embodies this different worldview, and will deliver on her promises. And that’s why she must be appointed.

Clearly, the lesson that Grijalva learned from the health care debate was that he wasn’t willing to carry out his threats, so to stay out of trouble he should just stop issuing threats. Basically, he’s been domesticated, trained to take whatever scraps he can get.

Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and one of the chairs of the Populist Caucus in the House, just called for the firing of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, saying that Barack Obama’s economic team is failing him. He said that there’s a “growing sense” in the caucus that a new economic team committed to jobs and American workers is needed to replace the one primarily concerned with Wall Street.

President Obama’s dilemma was born of America’s past acceptance of elite control of politics and the economy. To restore confidence, he turned to “acceptable” insiders who helped cause the crash.