The bailout failed in the House today, but there's still a good chance they'll rehash it until it passes.
What's crazy is that this is one argument that finds liberals and conservatives on the same side. No one wants to bail out Wall Street. I read a piece by Michael Moore this morning where, rhetoric aside, he basically agrees with Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. What is the world coming to?
The only people who really want the bailout are Wall St. itself and the Bush administration.
The big question for me is why Ben Bernanke is so keen on it. If it were just Bush and his crew, a lot of Dems in congress would be more skeptical, I think. But I've heard several of them say that they trust Bernanke to be apolitical, so if he says a bailout is needed, they're inclined to believe him.
Bernanke is supposed to be this economics wonk fresh from academia, but all his colleagues seem to be against the bailout. I'd like to hear a point-by-point rebuttal from Bernanke about why he disagrees with someone like Allan Meltzer, or any one of these guys, for that matter. We need to find a way to tease out Bernanke's true motivations on this whole thing.
Glenn Greenwald lists the following ten principles for how our government functions, and how each one of them applies to the bailout.
1. Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency.
2. Those who created the crisis, were wrong about everything, drive the process.
3. Public opinion is largely ignored, as always, and public anger is placated through illusory, symbolic and largely meaningless concessions.
4. The Government begins with demands for absolute power so brazen and absurd that anything, by comparison, seems reasonable.
5. Wall Street, large corporations and their lobbyists own the Federal Government and both parties, and therefore they always win.
6. The people who run the Washington Establishment are drowning in conflicts of interest.
7. For all the anger over what Wall St. has done, the Government--as it bails them out--isn't doing anything to rein in their practices.
8. When the Government wants greater and greater power and wants to engage in pure corruption, it need only put the population in extreme fear and it gets its way in every case.
9. On the most consequential and fundamental questions that define the country, the establishment/leadership of both political parties are in full agreement, and insulate themselves from any political ramifications by acting jointly.
10. Whenever you think that the Government has done things so extreme that it can't top itself--torture, theories of presidential lawbreaking, a six-year war justified by blatantly false pretenses--it always tops itself.
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Friday, November 21, 2008
