If you're wondering just how taken for granted such arrangements are in today's Washington/ Versailles, here's a data point. The Washington Post, still aspiring to be official journal of politics, has not published a single story about Orszag's new job. Here is what its search function shows just now:



"Please try another search" indeed. How about "things that are depressing"? To their credit, the Post's Ezra Klein and Ed O'Keefe each had one-line links on their sites, pointing to (respectively) the NYT "Dealbook" and Reuters stories on Orszag. (And those links come up if you search the Post's site for "Orszag Citigroup." Otherwise there appears to have been no "news" coverage by the Post. Klein also had this follow-up link to an item called "Our Peter Orszag Problem" on the Economist's site.) The gap between the things the Post considers "scandals," and a development like this, so taken for granted as not to merit mention, says too much about our politics.

Or, consider a Google News chart of coverage of the story. There's a little flurry when the deal was announced (a "real" story would generate vastly more coverage), then... it goes away. Pathetically, the "C" on that chart is my own original item on the story -- with nothing in the mainstream press since then. The chart doesn't show mainstream press results after Dec 11, because there don't seem to be any.

Here's a reader reaction:

>>I think the situation is even worse than you suggest. Many of us who supported the idea of a bailout for the reason you suggest -- the likely negative consequences of not bailing them out were terrifying -- urged that the bailout be conditioned on major changes in the size and operations of the financial sector behemoths who'd become too big to fail. The Volcker rule was one example. Serious changes in compensation practices. Breaking up of these banks was possible and desirable. Strict regulation of derivatives. And so on.



The final outcome, however, has been pathetically inadequate, if the goal was to prevent another crisis like 2008. And Orszag signing up with Citi for several million $ per year puts that policy failure in even worse light. What chance is there that the government will get tough on the big banks when key economic policy makers move back and forth between government and those banks?

Two more reader reactions after the jump. Eventually I'll publish a few defenses of Orszag that have come in. Really, I don't have anything against him personally, though I think this was a big misjudgment. What I can't get away from is the two twinned aspects of taking this move for granted. From the "elite" level -- the editors who decide not to put it in the paper -- taking it for granted means: Sure, that's reasonable, what else would you expect? And from everyone else's level, taking it for granted means: Sure, that's how the world works. Them that has, gets. What else would you expect?

