Yesterday, the Republican leaders in the House all came out from the vote on the bailout bill and tried to blame the defeat on Nancy Pelosi for making partisan remarks at the last minute. You have to give them credit for trying, but that was more transparent than Saran Wrap. Well, here’s her speech. There’s no doubt that it wasn’t the best time to stand up and point fingers, but it’s not like she was making anything up out of thin air (like the people who pulled the figure of $700 billion out of their asses). It made the Republicans look incredibly petty and whiny at the worst possible time, and Barney Frank got in one of the best comeback zingers of all time (you’ll have to listen to Cenk Uygur for about a minute into that clip, but he makes a decent point too). By this morning, though, even the Republicans were willing to go on TV and say that her speech had nothing to do with it.
But Jeebus H. Tittyfucking Christ On A Pogo Stick, the partisanship has to end. There’s no doubt that the bill they brought to the floor was bad — even Pelosi and Frank were willing to say it was a stinker, but as the leadership of the House they had to make the effort. Voting the bill down was without a doubt the best thing that could have happened, because it lays bare the lie that the proposals from Paulson and the administration are anything short of plundering the wealth of the citizens of this country. When the far-right and the far-left (such as we define “right and left” in our political spectrum) wrap around so far that they touch and agree on an issue, then you have truly failed at whatever you were trying to achieve.
What went mostly unnoticed while the House was fighting over all this is that the Federal Reserve did an end-run around them anyway and pumped $630 billiion into the banking system. How did they do that? They borrowed money from the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank. Well now that’s the thing to do when your entire banking system is failing due to unsustainable debt — borrow a little more money from someone else! So now all this cash goes into the system to ease the credit crunch, which is what we’ve been told for the last week was the whole point of the bailout in the first place. And guess what? The stock market is rebounding from yesterday’s big dump! (although the credit market remains locked up)
So the time is NOW to throw out the bill that Barney Frank had to bring to the floor yesterday. There is still a LOT of opposition to the idea of a bailout whatsoever, and with the Fed dumping all that cash to quiet things down, it only shows up the TARP as a ploy to let the banks off the hook and stick the public with the consequences. Below the fold, I give you the complete text of the New York Times Editorial Board’s remarks from this morning’s edition:
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:
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.
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.
It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough. His resignation should not be accepted as an appeasement. Senate Judiciary Committe Chairman Patrick Leahy absolutely should continue with his investigations into the misdeeds of the Justice Department up to and including ex officio impeachment of Gonzales. Unchecked and unpunished, they cause irreparable harm to the balance of power institutionalized by the Constitution.
The same continues to hold true for the high crimes and misdeamenors of the President and Vice President. There can be no more willful disregard by the Democratic leadership. Last week in Slate, Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein wrote that Speaker Pelosi should be removed from her office if she continues to leave impeachment “off the table” (he also recently made the case for impeachment in this op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle).
Allowing this administration to run out the clock, letting its most nefarious actors scuttle away without sufficient investigation into their crimes against the Constitution, failing to follow through on Iraq, wiretapping, or any of the other issues that they should be fighting tooth-and-nail on indicts Pelosi and Reid nearly as thoroughly as the growing list of complaints against Bush and Cheney.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s blog has some of the particulars in this recent kerfuffle, including Congressman Henry Waxman’s demands (in his role as chairman of the Oversight Committee) that Cheney cough up a variety of pieces of information regarding the Scooter Libby case.
I know this is being covered wall-to-wall on every newsy blog and mainstream news outlet, but I have come to the conclusion that every time shit like this is made public that it is the duty of every single American to shout from the rooftops about the unabashed abuse of power that has been the hallmark of these evil people. My friend Tony has recently discovered the following quote:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” – Theodore Roosevelt
And while I appreciate that he is using this to chide me for getting my rant on (and I do take his point), it really is nothing short of an obligation to muster some degree of outrage about all this. There is little practical redress to the situation — it is a foregone conclusion that there will be no impeachment proceedings despite more than ample grounds for prosecuting Cheney, and we are compelled to wait out the remaining days until January 20, 2009. One can only hope that the hue and cry is loud and prolonged enough to reach the ears of the several dozen individuals presently hoping to succeed him and convince them that this is the wrong path.
Or, perhaps the time really has come to take up arms and, as the Declaration of Independence says, “…institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
