"So is it time to sound the all clear? Here are four reasons to be cautious about the economic outlook.

"So now that I’ve got everyone depressed, what’s the answer? Persistence.

"History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.

"The Obama administration’s economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there’s a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.

"Barack Obama’s commitment to helping labor has always been suspect, but handing over the American car business to the investment banker Steven Rattner might well turn the president into the last great union buster.

"To be sure, we’re already long past the point where industrial unions have any real clout in our so-called service economy— this thanks to “free trade” (that is, guaranteed cheap labor in foreign locales and low import tariffs on foreign-made goods) and Bill Clinton’s alliance with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Franklin Roosevelt’s old party of labor is now almost entirely the party of Wall Street and only a severe depression might alter this political reality. When Obama sent economist Austen Goolsbee to reassure the Canadian government that the candidate’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Ohio primary didn’t mean anything, he meant it.

"But this isn’t to say there aren’t a few remaining pockets of working-class resistance to the money power that Wall Street and the DLC would like to crush. And right now, Rattner and the Treasury Department task force’s biggest target is not the overpaid executive staff at General Motors, but the United Auto Workers union, the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization.

"Just wait a few weeks, and the demands for concessions from the allegedly overpaid and cosseted UAW members will rise to levels of shrillness far greater than the very brief — and ineffective — outcry over the AIG bonuses.

"Bankruptcy would make it easier to break union contracts, but the UAW, relentlessly attacked for being too successful for its members and so far unable to organize Japanese car plants in the United States, will probably cave in for PR reasons before it comes to Chapter 11. If that happens, it won’t be a union anymore.

"Meanwhile, autoworkers (and automakers) in Japan will continue to benefit from government-funded national health insurance unavailable to American employees of non-union Japanese plants in the U.S. And Steven Rattner can go on throwing benefits for Democrats at his home on Fifth Avenue."

For more information on Mr. Rattner, another questionable Obama pick, here is a story from the NYTimes: 

"Although he is not named in the documents, a person with knowledge of the inquiry said the investment executive is Steven Rattner, co-founder of the Quadrangle Group, the prominent private equity firm.

"The S.E.C. complaint, filed as part of an expansive state and federal investigation into corruption at the state pension fund, details the efforts of Quadrangle to gain business from the pension fund beginning in 2004.

"The person who received most of the $1 million-plus payment has been indicted, accused of selling access to the fund.