First, the entertainment portion of our program:
It is a damn good thing that the Bush Administration chose to announce their agreement to pay the $700 billion ransom demand made by Wall Street over the weekend. If this had happened during the work-week, the pressure on Congress to Just.Do.Something. would have been overwhelming, especially after Ben Bernanke used the “nuclear option” on Congress to tell them just how serious this problem is. And, given that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bend over for Geroge Bush more than a Greenwich Village tranny during Fleet Week, they would have gone along in a snap. But the weekend gave every pundit known to humanity a chance to take a deep breath, sort out the details, and come to the conclusion that the bailout plan, as proposed, is FUCKING WACK.
If the Bush bailout plan were put into place without modification, you might as well cancel the November election, because Hank Paulson would be the de facto Ruler Of The Free World. With a blank check, zero accountability, and virtually unlimited authority to do whatever he wants to the American economy, and thus by extension the entire world, he might as well declare himself King Henry the First and be done with it. It was apparently not enough to hand over a trillion dollars to Halliburton, not to mention $9 billion (UPDATED: make that $23 billion) IN CASH to the gang posing as the Iraqi government, but with less than six months remaining in their administration, they needed to make sure that Paulson’s buddies on Wall Street got their welfare checks AND the option to buy up all the failing banks in America at a deep discount.
You know it’s a bad idea when even such Republican lickspittles as William Kristol go on record in the New York Times as calling it a duck. I have been collecting links all morning to the various and sundry politicians, pundits and other bloviating gasbags and here’s the lineup I have so far of people who have said the bailout is a Bad Thing:
- Paul Krugman called it “Cash For Trash”
- Robert Reich says no blank check without some conditions, and even has a suggestion for a totally different sort of plan
- Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders offers a proposal that warms the cockles of my sclerotic pinko heart: Make the rich pay for the bailout, bring back strict regulation to the financial sector, and stand ready to roll out a Second New Deal to rebuild American infrastructure and put millions to work. (In a perfect world, I would be voting for a Kucinich/Sanders ticket come November…)
- Speakng of Kucinich, he has picked up on Krugman’s “Cash For Trash” line, and says he will introduce a counter-proposal to distribute the remaining good assets of the failed banks to each and every American citizen to the tune of the $2,300.00-per-person figure that has been bandied about as the per-capita cost of the bailout.
- Meanwhile, Kucinich’s chief economic adviser from his primary campaign, University of Missouri Professor Michael Hudson, spoke about the crisis in this interview last week (pre-bailout announcement) with DemocracyNow.org (video here if you’re interested). He doesn’t even think the AIG bailout is a good idea…and he’s right.
- This post at DailyKos has a quick roundup of punditry, including Krugman. Even the Wall Street Journal isn’t too keen on the plan
- Politico.com’s round-up adds University of Chicago School of Business Professor Luigi Zingales (who wrote the 2003 book “Saving Capitalism From The Capitalists”), Mitt Romney’s financial adviser Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw, Time Magazine’s Justin Fox, annd Conde Nast Portfolio writer Felix Salmon.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times is one of the few places where you’ll read anything good about the plan, and even their recommendation is lackluster, and some of their columnists are even less certain about it all. Then there’s this moron writing in Time, who seems to think it’s 2002 all over again by declaring us the “United States of France” for even SUGGESTING a bailout plan.
Then there are the side effects to consider:
Jason Rosenbaum at The Seminal, is quick to point out that while Hank Paulson is shoveling out the contents of the U.S. Treasury to his former co-workers at Goldman Sachs, John McCain STILL thinks it’s a good idea to deregulate the health insurance industry the same way he voted for deregulating the investment banks over the last 25 years. And let’s not forget that McCain LOVES the idea of creating private retirement accounts instead of funding Social Security, so that we can hand over our hard-earned money more efficiently to Wall Street.
At least Barack Obama isn’t ready to hand over all the money so easily, but he isn’t exactly stepping up to the plate yet either. The Boston Herald reports that he spent some time this weekend meeting with Warren Buffet, Larry Sanders, Paul Volcker and a bunch of other Serious People to get a better handle on the situation and maybe come up with something. But, seriously, Barry, you need to pull something out of your ass that isn’t just some rhetorical flourish on top of a wishy-washy do-nothing plan like the rest of your platform. Somebody tell me again why you think he’s better than McCain, because I still just don’t feel the love for him that you do. Running on “I’m not John McCain” isn’t much of a change, you know.
Much has been made of this e-mail from an unnamed Democratic congressman who isn’t too happy with the events of the last few days. He’s ready to vote for anything that “…would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling… That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me. I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them. I think he’s on the right track myself, but over at MetaFilter the user named “Pastabagel” has a very salient reminder about spreading the blame for all this around. While I feel the Congress-critter’s pain, Pastabagel has a very valid point: we gave the Democrats back the majority to take care of this bullshit and they have let us down immensely. Republicans and Democrats alike need to be thoroughly beaten with sharp and pointy objects for their complicity in this clusterfuck.
And the general public? Well, we’ve been enjoying our bread and circuses, of course. The Pew Research Center’s weekly analysis of news content says that in the week of September 8-14, which is the week before the market tanked and people started to get nervous, 42% of all news coverage was devoted to some aspect of Sarah Palin, with nearly 25% of that coverage being about the “lipstick on a pig” comment, while the crumbling economy got 4% of the newsmedia’s attention. Forty-two fucking percent of their seemingly limitless time thrown away on some white-trash “hockey mom” who can “see Russia from her house”, while the millionaires line up for their bags of money taken directly from our pockets. We, the people of this country, also deserve a full measure of blame for this. And we’re going to get it. Soon.
