There have been no shortage of economists who have declared their opposition to the now-failed bailout. Perhaps they helped make some more confident in opposing the measure than I was.
A few have put forward alternative solutions, and at least now they have time to be considered.
This post by Meteor Blades as DKos is a good place to start. He's done his homework and it's full of authoritative links.
Progressive Solutions
The Leadership of John McCain
Where to start?
At the beginning, where the drama queen of the campaign pulled one of the most notable political stunts in history to place himself in the center of negotiations -- and had no small hand in causing them to fail?
Or in the middle, where he gave himself premature credit for having revived the deal he screwed up (via Politico).
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.
Shortly before the vote, McCain had bragged about his involvement and mocked Sen. Barack Obama for staying on the sidelines.
“I've never been afraid of stepping in to solve problems for the American people, and I'm not going to stop now,” McCain told a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “Sen. Obama took a very different approach to the crisis our country faced. At first he didn't want to get involved. Then he was monitoring the situation.”
McCain, grinning, flashed a sarcastic thumbs up.
“That's not leadership. That's watching from the sidelines,” he added to cheers and applause.
Doug Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser, told reporters on a conference call that McCain "dedicated the past week" to addressing the problem but made "a conscious decision not to attract attention to John McCain."
Why not just start at the end, this afternoon, after the complete and abject failure of the Republican candidate to deliver on his brag. The master of chutzpah himself:
"Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame, it's time to fix the problem."
Doesn't it just make your head spin? Only a Republican could deliver lines like that. Blame everything on your opponent and then admonish your audience not to assign blame!
Or maybe I just misunderstood. Maybe the "don't blame" time doesn't begin until all his campaign's press releases blaming Obama have been sent, or until after this:
(Warning! You are about to encounter the most nauseating pile of shit passing for spin that I have ever seen. Those taking high blood pressure medication may want to pass.)
Chickens Home Roosting
I have been unable to blog this week because I didn't even know what to say. Like many on the left, I have been outraged by this extortion of the US taxpayer by the fat, greedy pigs that created this mess, yet unsure if this so-called bailout wasn't, in fact, necessary.
Right or wrong, however, it's clear that the Bush Administration's chickens have come home to roost. The only rational explanation for what happened today is that the American people, and the majority of Congressional members, simply do not believe Bush when he declares a crisis.
This is the natural fallout from having shredded one's own credibility through eight years of lies.
I'm Back and Pissed
I have been on a self-imposed moratorium from the news for a week. Other than a quick glance at the NY Times front page at Starbucks one day, which sent me into immediate shrieks of rage, I refused to allow the outrage that masquerades as our government interfere with a planned vacation with the womenfriends of my life. My aforementioned reaction to what I did get a glimpse of only reinforced that decision.
So I leave gasping about the bailout of AIG, which came on the heels of the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which came of the heels of the bailout of Bear Stearns, and I come back to THIS?!
The legislation being moved forward by the Administration is breathtaking in the scope of power being shifted to the Secretary of the Treasury. The bill essentially undermines the entire "power of the purse" granted to the Legislative branch and cedes it to an Executive Appointee!
I will definitely have more the say about this when I've had a chance to catch up.
Taking a break
I will be traveling for the next week and postings, if there are any, will be sporadic. Check back on the 25th.
Hostage Taxpayers
I only occasionally post on economics, because I consider myself generally unqualified to have an intelligent opinion. And whenever I do, I always start with that disclaimer.
But the latest bailout of AIG, announced just tonight, has sent me over the edge. We are all standing around like deer with our eyes caught in the headlights while this Administration, on behalf of taxpayers for several generations, turns the economy of this country into some twisted kind of socialized capitalism: privatized gain and socialized risk.
Those 5%, who have gotten fat at the trough of the Bush Administration (the ones McCain will continue to favor,) are like terrorists standing in the middle of our public square wrapped in suicide vests. “Too big to fail” are the words on the suicide note. “You give me your money or I will kill you all.”
This really pisses me off.
Because of course we have to give in. And of course we can have no impact on these decisions because our Congressional leadership has abdicated all of that decision-making to the Treasury and Wall Street. And we are supposed to accept this because we aren’t qualified to have an opinion.
We are only qualified to pay the bill.
And maybe the “experts” are right. Maybe we are currently faced with no options, but I am sick of picking up the freaking bill while other people get rich. Where does it end?
This is going to cost us some of the best hopes for any upcoming administration. On top of the enormous financial pit dug by the current administration, and not even counting the “off books” cost of two wars, how in the world ANY next administration going to be able to afford to do anything?
And another thing……
Do you notice that another result of this debacle is that the companies that have survived are getting bigger?
So we can have even more companies that are too big to fail?
WTF?
Palin as a Feminist Nightmare
I have not always been a fan of Rebecca Traister, but her recent nightmares feel very familiar to me and many of my friends. A taste:
In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism -- a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin's potential power -- means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children's books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.
In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed."
Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party's nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.
What's at stake
It's easy to forget that it's just the soul of the country at stake here.
First in a WaPo series into the 4th branch of government under Cheney:
Get it? The Office of the President had NO RECORD of a Presidential Order authorizing the most sweeping expansion of domestic surveillance authority in history.The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.
The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].
It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these. [emphasis added]
This is the danger of electing Presidents who are essentially tools of the neocons and wingnuts who wield them. Dick Cheney was, for all intents and purposes, the 43rd President of the United States.
Even the Supreme Court didn't choose him.
[UPDATE]
McJoan at DKos reviews a new book by James Pfiffiner with more on the subject of this dramatic expansion of Executive authority, and why it so threatens our Constitution:
--He created military commissions entirely within the executive branch and in doing so ignored U.S. laws that provided authority and procedures for establishing military commissions;
--He used the term "enemy combatant" to exempt the government from granting persons so labeled legal and constitutional rights;
--He denied the writ of habeas corpus to U.S. citizens as well as other detainees suspected of terrorism;
--He suspended the Geneva Conventions, which, because they were agreed to in a treaty, are the "supreme Law of the Land," according to Article VI of the Constitution;
--He authorized the interrogation of detainees using techniques that most of the world considers torture, and which violate the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law;
--He ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the communications of Americans without a warrant as required by FISA; and
--He asserted the sweeping right to ignore more than 1,000 provisions of public law because he deemed them to be in conflict with his authority as president.
A Day to ACT
Here are two items I am asking you to help spread around today. As part of a DKos campaign, the idea is to send these to people you suspect of falling victim to the lies and deceit of the McCain campaign. First, a video:
Then, here is The NY Times calling McCain out. A taste:
Mr. McCain came into the race promoting himself as a truth teller and has long publicly deplored the kinds of negative tactics that helped sink his candidacy in the Republican primaries in 2000. But his strategy now reflects a calculation advisers made this summer — over the strenuous objections of some longtime hands who helped him build his “Straight Talk” image — to shift the campaign more toward disqualifying Mr. Obama in the eyes of voters.
“I think the McCain folks realize if they can get this thing down in the mud, drag Obama into the mud, that’s where they have the best advantage to win,” said Matthew Dowd, who worked with many top McCain campaign advisers when he was President Bush’s chief strategist in the 2004 campaign, but who has since had a falling out with the White House. “If they stay up at 10,000 feet, they don’t.”
Up is Down
I have always loved Garrison Keillor:
So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. And Mayor Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America. Bravo.
Don't Elect Liars
It has been almost amusing to listen to reporters from venues as diverse as NPR and CNN acting surprised that Sarah Palin continues each day to repeat the same lie ("I said to Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks'. If we want that bridge we'll build it ourselves.")
But these are today's Republicans. Because the press has repeatedly confirmed that the statement is untrue (some have even used the "l" word!), they seem to expect Palin to do what past spinners have done: use different phrasing, tighten the boundaries, do something to create some wiggle room for herself instead of continuing to repeat bald-faced lies.
But not these Republicans. These Republicans have figured out that they can completely subvert the traditional power of the press by just going around them. They have figured out that at long as they have powerful enough marketing and enough corresponding echo chambers to amplify the message, it doesn't matter if the entire message is built on lies. They have been perfecting this for at least 20 years and the Iraq war is only the bloodiest consequence so far.
Hunter at DKos is one of my favorite writers on the web. Always spot-on; always insightful. You should read the whole thing, but here is a taste.
For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright. The only relevant question is whether the lie is effective -- not whether it should have been done in the first place.
[snip]
So what of it, if Sarah Palin says crooked things with a straight face? Name me one Republican who will object. Name me one -- just ONE -- diehard conservative who will be angry at the lie, instead of praising her for it. To hell with facts, there is another election to be won.
This is why I consider the Republican Party to be, at this point, a wrecked party. There is no self-consistent philosophy other than the acquisition and protection of their own power: there are certainly no moral or ethical boundaries that the party will internally enforce. … You can lie, you can staff your government with morons and ideologues, you can give a speech saying one thing while doing the exact opposite (a Bush specialty, in his State of the Union speeches.) We bemoan constantly the Democrats' failure to keep a unified front, in order to pass a more meaningful agenda -- but you would be hard pressed to find even a single, lone Republican in Washington willing to buck the moral collapse of their own party. Such people once existed: they were voted out of office.
Don't elect liars.
Shameful and Shameless
Reaction is already starting to the Repubs shameless exploitation of 911 tonight. Via Hunter at DKos, a media post that will set the tone, is my prediction.
A Requiem for Moderate Republican Women
With all the talk about glass ceilings these days, and with the Republicans having achieved something the Democrats did 24 years ago, I think it is time to extend our formal condolences to those fine Republican leaders who have had their place in the universe demonstrated so unequivocally: Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Olympia Snowe, Christie Todd Whitman, and others -- all Republican women with much better qualifications than Palin who happen to be pro-choice moderates.
The Republican party has become dependent for its survival on the army of the religious right, and no pro-choice candidate will ever be considered viable as long as this is true. The party will continue to marginalize itself in that way (are we really going to elect someone who wants to teach creationism next to science?!) And so be it.
So to all those moderate Republican women out there -- we welcome you aboard should you decide to play in an arena that has no ceiling.
The Mommy Wars
Interviewed on NPR today, David Brooks responded to questions about Gov. Palin by saying "Oh, I thought we were over the mommy wars."
Once again progressives, and feminists in particular, get to choke till we vomit on the hypocrisy of the Republican right. It appears that all the Christian wingnuts are rallying around Gov. Palin, and suggesting that anyone who criticizes her, her choices, or her qualifications, is sexist. This is a logical extension of the enormous outcry on the part of Christian Conservatives at the media treatment of Hillary Clinton.
Or did you miss that?
So we have Phyllis Shafley, founder of the Eagle Forum, “Patton” in the mommy wars, the woman who led an entire battalion of preachers and pundits and psychologists in the second-wave assault against any woman who had the audacity to suggest that women were equal to men, making a statement for the NY Times today defending Palin’s ability to juggle her particular family’s need with her skyrocketing career.
“It changes your life and gives you a different perspective on the world,” said Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative organizer who helped defeat the equal rights amendment nearly three decades ago.But Phyllis, for years (and YEARS) you told any woman wanting to have a career (like yours, perhaps?) that they should wait until after their children were grown, just like you did. You charged any of us who lacked the freedom or inclination to be stay-at-home moms with the utmost selfishness – putting our careers ahead of our family.
“People who don’t have children or who have only one or two are kind of overwhelmed at the notion of five children,” Ms. Schlafly continued, mentioning that she had raised six children and run for Congress as well. “I think a hard- working,well-organized C.E.O. type can handle it very well.”
And you claimed great backup: Teen pregnancy, the divorce rate, and any number of other social ills were laid at our feet – all the fault of those uppity women – by countless Dobsons, Fallwells and Reeds. And these are not the judgments of three decades ago, they are the same judgments levied today. Remember the reaction when Jamie Lynn Spears became pregnant? If women learned to take responsibility for every stupid decision made on the part of a teenage child, it’s because the Christian conservative right spent the last 25 years telling us it was so.
So I know that we are all progressive feminists, and have evolved beyond using the weapons of the right against them as is their due.
But I would like to figure out how to make them choke as much on their own words as I choke hearing them.
Bleeding a Crisis
It makes me sick to see John McCain making every political advantage of today's hurricane in Louisiana.
First of all, his mere presence is posturing, made even more disgusting because of his record of actual behavior during and after Katrina. (Thanks to Bob Geiger.) He has no role there. Talk about presumptious?!
Then has a campaign event to accuse Obama of putting politics ahead of the country by having a campaign event.
Then Bushie actually lets him be in on a conference call of all affected governors! Has any other sitting President put himself in the middle of a campaign this way?
The Republicans are whores and hypocrites (with apologies to any actual prostitutes.)
Problem Solved
(CNN) – A health care policy adviser for the McCain campaign told a newspaper reporter that nobody in the United States is technically uninsured, because everyone has access to hospital emergency rooms.
"So I have a solution [to the health care crisis]. And it will cost not one thin dime," John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, told the Dallas Morning News in an interview published Thursday.
"The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care. So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."
Vegan Terrorists
Apparently, the Minneapolis Joint Task Force on Terrorism recruited people last spring to go underground at vegan potlucks.
No one could make this stuff up.
And the inevitable result of this sort of bat-shit craziness becomes ugly pretty quickly.
The Republicans can't have it both ways: They are either using the weapons of war against a group of political opponents, or they actually believe a hippie peace group poses a serious terrorist threat.
On an individual level, that kind of thinking would be labeled as paranoid-schizophrenic.
And if we understood the entire neo-con power structure to be engaged in a collective paranoid-psychotic break, it would help explain a lot.
Hostages for Choice
Carly Fiorina has is backwards when she claims that the Democratic party has held women "hostage" over the issue of choice.
It's the other way around. It's the Republicans -- who have made the assault on a woman's right to choose a central mission for the last 20 years, and who have brought themselves very close to victory with recent Supreme Court appointments -- that have forced any self-respecting woman who wants to maintain control over her own body to vote Democratic.
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