My blood started boiling as I read a Dec. 15  article in the New York Times  coming in to work about how executives of three large banks—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup–did not show up at the White House for a meeting with President Obama that was to deal with getting these institutions to make more loans to small businesses and consumers.

Their excuse?  Bad weather prevented their flights from getting to Washington from New York on Dec. 14.

So, they had to participate in the hour-long meeting by speaker phone.  This is one case where you can literally say “they phoned it in.”

A year ago, these same banks were all too anxious to get to Washington because that was where the money was that would pull their butts out of the disaster they had created through their risk-taking folly.

Now, however, that they seem to be on a sounder financial footing, and have paid back the bailout funds that were so constricting their bonus and compensation schemes, they let some fog or otherwise inclement weather interfere with meeting with the president.

I ask you, if you knew you were supposed to meet with the president on a Monday morning, wouldn’t you have enough sense as the CEO of a multi-billion dollar institution to check what the weather was supposed to be and, if forecast was poor, go to D.C. the day before?   And if you were too busy as said CEO to do so yourself, couldn’t one of your assistants have done it?

But perhaps you were too busy either counting your expected compensation (since your bank was no longer under TARP restrictions) or bemoaning the fact the public outrage had forced you to forego a cash bonus in favor of stock.

This episode, along with the year-long dithering that has just seen the House pass a financial services reform bill and is still waiting for something to emerge in the Senate, makes me believe that not only has nothing changed, but that thing have actually gotten worse.

It is no secret that the banks that took bailout money last year were in a rush to pay it back because of the salary and bonus restrictions for executives that came with the bailout funds.

Some of these banks are stronger than others and could very well be in a position where they could justifiably pay back the money they owed and then some.  

But it is also no secret that some of these banks, such as Citigroup and Bank of America, are in not in a position to do this.  Nonetheless, the Treasury Department has given its approval to every one of the banks that have said they intend to pay back what they owe because they’re strong enough.

Some banks have raised the money to pay back the funds by issuing stock, others through trading profits.  In any case, many analysts have grave doubts about the condition of some of these mega-monsters.  There is still a lot of garbage on their balance sheets that has not seen the light of day but will have to be accounted for in terms of massive losses, probably sometime next year.  Apparently these doubts don’t extend to anyone in charge at Treasury.

There’s been no twisting of arms that I can see.  And further, these banks know that should they approach the brink again, Treasury is there for them, wouldn’t dare to let them fail.

It really is past time for Treasury to get out of bed with Wall Street and start thinking about the rest of us.  And if some bankers sticking their fingers in the president’s eye won’t do it, what will?

So rarely do I find myself agreeing with anything Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has to say (actually, I don’t think it’s ever happened) that I feel compelled to recognize a gesture of his with which I feel in complete agreement.

Coburn likes to play the spoiler and I believe that was the impetus behind his introducing an amendment to the health care reform legislation now being debated in the Senate.  What his amendment said was that senators would have to be covered by any public option plan that ended up in the bill. 

As someone who is dead-set against any public option, Coburn surely meant this as a way of sticking it to his fellow senators (across the aisle, naturally) who are strongly in favor of a public option being included in the bill.

Senators are now covered, in the words of the New York Times, by “gold-plated coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.”  In other words, really good coverage that Coburn probably knows many of his fellow senators would be reluctant to give up.

So perhaps even he was surprised when some Democrats not only supported his amendment but volunteered to co-sponsor it.  One particularly enthusiastic backer of this amendment was, the Times noted, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. 

Brown was quoted as saying, “I think it’s important that we show we mean it, we believe in it, that it works for the public and we’re willing to put our own families on it.  This says we have to go on the public option.  I think they are right.”

If those senators who really believe a public option is necessary were to follow Brown’s lead and commit to being covered by the government-run plan, it could be a game-changer, particularly in the public mind. 

A lot of the resentment against members of Congress is that the laws and regulations they make for us to live by don’t seem to need to apply to them, at least in their estimation.  

So rarely do politicians put their money where their mouth is that we seem to have forgotten that it is still possible.  This amendment would take a nice big whack at the elitism that people feel Congress accords itself as a matter of course.

If Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is truly committed to having a public option in the final bill, then he should start a very public campaign of rounding up the 60 votes to get the amendment passed.  He might not make it, but even if the effort failed, it would be a moral victory of sorts.  And goodness knows there have been few enough of those coming out of Capitol Hill lately.

It’s hard to believe that not only are we drawing close to the end of another year, but also closing in on the end of the first decade of the Third Millennium. 

(I already expect to hear from pedants and calendar officials informing me that in strict terms a decade goes from a year beginning with the number one, not zero.  Then I expect to hear from some people telling me that zero is not a number.  But most of you will know what I mean, and the others will just have to deal with it.)

(By the way, these same folks are very likely the ones who are still preoccupied with what to call the decade now about to end.  My own suggestion (considering the tenor of most of those 10 years) would be the Naughties.)

In any case (and to get back to life outside the parentheses) it’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?  

For many people it will be the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth II’s annus horribilis, 1992, and not because two of their sons’ marriages went bust and one of their castles caught on fire, to cite some of the royal disasters of that year that caused Her Majesty so much distress.

Rather many will remember 2009 as a horrible year because of more mundane reasons. They lost their job and couldn’t find another one.  Or their house (castle) went into foreclosure.  Or their retirement funds, once so safely (or so it seemed) parked in a 401(k) had managed to recoup only a small percentage of the 40% or 50% they had lost when the market went into free fall. Or because they were in sales (including insurance products, of course) and every day was more of an uphill climb than it usually is due to the fact that consumers all over the place were holding on to (not to mention squeezing hard) their depleted shekels.

And on that subject, the first six months of 2009 will be (bitterly) remembered as the time when sales of insurance products saw their steepest decline in nearly 70 years, according to LIMRA International.

Things may have started to pick up in a couple of lines, however.  So, in a time when looking for good news is the equivalent of grasping for straws, then the uptick in whole life sales (which account for a thin sliver of the market) is something worth celebrating.

We could also, I suppose, take cheer from the fact that economists are declaring that the recession officially over.  But the response of many non-economists to that claim is: Really?

The danger in trumpeting the macro view in something like this is that it stretches the disconnect between what people feel in the own lives and what they hear from those who see the “big picture” or who have a stake in pushing the rose-colored view of things that the macro view encourages.  (President Obama, take note.)

Needless to say, the widespread pain has made sales of insurance products ever so much more difficult.  The ‘intangible’ thing combined with the depletion of discretionary income has taken a toll on producers and companies alike.

All of which makes it imperative for both producers and companies to keep plugging away and using this time of trouble to reinforce the message of the security that insurance products provide.  Even if sales of those products come later.  

The reality is that these tough times will pass, although not as quickly as we would surely like.  But if producers and companies don’t stay on message now, they will have to compete with a myriad of consumer preoccupations later on (like looking for the best HDTV).

So many consumers are still very scared and want to hear about security. And that’s whether they can pay for it now or not.