The successful auto industry rescue is definitely a feather in the cap for the Administration, protecting up to a million direct and indirect auto industry jobs, and putting GM and Chrysler in a position to succeed. Now there’s a new contract with the United Auto Workers to share the success with labor.

One criticism of the rescue was that the UAW was forced to give up good wages for new employees and accept a two-tier structure for pay and benefits. But unless I have my timeline wrong, that all happened in a contract prior to the decision to forward additional loans to automakers in 2009. That contract expired, and the UAW just inked a new deal with GM that should serve as an industry standard. And they made some significant gains in this contract, a testament to how far back the industry has come.

One-trick ponies and one-foot bike riders; a story of right-wing economists.

James Carville thinks the White House should panic, something that usually doesn’t inspire confidence in leadership. I actually like some of his specific steps – indicting the banks is a good idea way past its time, and defending the Democratic Party platform sounds like a plan. Overall, a Carville agenda sounds like an improvement on the current agenda.

It may be too late for all this, however.

Age of Greed offers a long survey of the rise of regulation liberated financial markets and actors. The historical sweep is artful and well presented. The text argues for a return to more caged financial markets and actors. The steady and mounting pressures on the American middle class are correlated with the rising excesses, fortunes and missteps of financiers and their vehicles.

General Electric is paying no taxes after making $14 billion in profits, and in fact is getting $3 billion in returns from the government. At the same time that the corporation isn’t giving one penny to the government for use of the commons, they are trying to exact wage and benefit cuts on their own workers.

You know what kind of value you are getting when you pay your mechanic or even your administrative assistant. Ask yourself exactly what kind of return on investment we’re getting for our TARP money by helping bail out an industry which pays so much for tanking the economy.

Alan Blinder has a great story in the Wall Street Journal Friday about the US economy and how impossibly tilted it is toward the rich. You have working people producing for their employers and not coming close to sharing in the benefit. You have stagnant incomes for the last 35 years, which is absolutely incredible.

And this leads necessarily to income inequality.

It’s worth noting that there are enough “emergency” pieces of legislation to tide over a session that could be as small as three weeks (one week before Thanksgiving, and perhaps only two weeks after). Congress needs to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running. There are several pieces of legislation that expire on November 30, like extended unemployment benefits and the “doctor’s fix” for Medicare reimbursement rates. And then there are the Bush tax cuts, which expire at the end of the year. Clearly that doesn’t leave much room for energy, child nutrition, DADT, the DREAM Act, labor bills, a Chinese currency measure, the new START treaty or even the deficit commission recommendations, parts or all of which had been promised a vote in the lame duck.

After all the times I’ve heard rich conservatives complain about how unfair it is to force the wealthy to bear a disproportionate share of the tax burden, surely they’d agree that it’s unfair to expect the wealthy to bear the spending burden all by themselves.

In my post about the rumored tax-cut stimulus package being tossed around at the White House, I quoted Dean Baker, who had some ideas on what you could do to stimulate the economy in a fantasy scenario. Since Republicans aren’t likely to let much of anything pass, and a jobs package would be an argument for the elections, something to run on, I think it’s worth making it as robust and attention-grabbing, and as functional, as possible. For example, paying unemployed people to do stuff as a policy.