The stock market is falling again today due to December's retail sales drop of 2.7%, which was worse than expected. Hard as they tried, no one on CNBC could find a silver lining in the economy's dark clouds. The grave threat of deflation is growing.

TARP I is a failure. The banksters took the first $350 billion from us taxpayers and used it to buy up other banks, not increase lending. When Congress and regulators asked for an accounting, the banksters told them to go Cheney themselves. Now the banksters want us to give them another $350 billion. Obama is promising accountability for this new money but no one believes him or his embattled Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who was a key architect of TARP I. Why should we?

The fundamental question is: can this economy be saved? Or are we just throwing good money after bad?

Josh Marshall says we need to re-engineer the economy around alternative energy:

Real change almost always comes in the face of crisis. So if you believe that Global Warming is real and that sometime soon will have to be confronted in a big way ... and if you believe that our reliance on oil is not only an environmental threat but a threat to our economic security and national security as well ... and if you believe that we need to start manufacturing things that people in other countries want to buy, when else do you expect real change to come on these issues -- a real start on the big changes -- if not now?

I agree. Josh Marshall is an eminently sensible person, and what we need is an eminently sensible plan. In other words, we need a new Marshall Plan.

So Josh, what's the plan?

Update 1: Newly-elected Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) exposed the charade of the Federal Reserve's $1.2 trillion bailout program, which is separate from TARP, in this Q&A with Fed Vice Chair Donald Kohn.

Update 2: Bush rejected an exit interview with Bill O'Reilly (!!!) because Bush refuses to explain why he didn't see the recession coming.

O'Reilly: Larry, look. The reason I didn't get an exit interview with President Bush -- and we asked -- and I have a good relationship with him -- was that he knew I was going to ask one key question, Larry, one. And that is, Why didn't you guys see this terrible recession when it was coming? Why didn't you see that? He didn't answer that today, did he?

Larry Elder: And the reason he didn't answer it is because it is a long, complicated answer, and primarily the reason nobody saw it, or very few people saw it, was because of government interference.

O'Reilly: But he's the president. He's the president. He's the guy the who's got to protect the folks, and the folks got hammered. And you're right, it's complicated and long, but that really sunk him, even more than Iraq or the war on terror.

Was this just another "intelligence failure"? Update 3: Harold Meyerson explains how Bush transformed our economy from producing good to producing debt:

By 2007, when Wall Street's profits amounted to an astonishing 40 percent of all American profits, the business of American finance was no longer American business -- providing loans for domestic production, technological innovation, that sort of thing -- but swapping bets and hedges on bets and hedges, all for hefty commissions.

Save for devising more ways for Americans to go into debt, Wall Street had basically decoupled itself from the economy in which Americans live and work.

While the nattering nitwits of CNBC hailed the stock market increases of the first seven years of George W. Bush's presidency as evidence that the U.S. economy had never done better, every other economic index made clear that the economy was in dismal shape. As Neil Irwin and Dan Eggen documented in Monday's Post, the rate of job creation and GDP growth during Bush's tenure is the lowest of any president of the post-World War II period. Somehow, our financial geniuses managed to miss this and built a vast financial edifice on the backs of consumers who eventually could consume no more.