To Bail, Or Not To Bail… That Is the Question
The short version: Paulsen and Pelosi thought they had a done deal. A faction of house Republicans (and some Democrats)were unhappy with the bill. McCain showed up at the talks, told Boehner that the Republicans could not support the plan without core changes. Obama pressed McCain on alternatives. McCain refused to answer and left the meeting. Nancy made a speech. The house voted. The measure failed.
The big question is whether or not it was a good thing that the bailout failed. They’re nationalizing banks in Britain, Belgium, and Iceland. Still, it’s unclear whether the bailout is actually necessary. Here’s my observation: Our country’s economic system is predicated on the success of the ultra-wealthy. Nobody talks about this any more since Ayn Rand, but it’s a fact. If the captains of industry don’t succeed, we all fail. We are the wide-end of the pyramid supporting the top. Conversely, if there’s no top, there are no jobs, no grocery stores, no corporations to employ millions. Our system is capitalistic. It’s the nature of the beast. So, what the president and congresspeople cannot say, is that we need to bail out a lot of ultra-wealthy people or we’re all screwed.
Here’s a quote from a 2005 Businessweek article discussing who owns AIG:
AIG has a highly unusual arrangement with three private entities, governed and controlled by Greenberg and other AIG executives. Each serves a different purpose and raises unique concerns. SICO is a holding company that owns about 12% of AIG stock — making it the company’s largest shareholder — and pays out some of that stock to an elite group of AIG managers as deferred compensation. Greenberg and other AIG directors sit on the board, have large personal stakes, and decide who gets paid what. Regulators believe SICO hides executive pay and takes away powers that should rightly lie with the compensation committee of the board.
C.V. Starr & Co., on the other hand, is a group of agencies that develops business and issues specialized policies for AIG. It’s owned and operated by AIG executives — many of whom perform functions similar to what they do at AIG — and controls 1.8% of AIG shares… The arrangement creates endless possibilities for conflicts of interest. Says North Carolina State Treasurer Richard H. Moore, who oversees a stake in AIG worth more than $300 million: “I don’t think you can have a publicly traded company that allows board members to own a private entity that does business with the publicly traded company. [It's] impossible to know if shareholders are being taken advantage of.”
Yikes. Thank goodness the government bailed those guys out.
Is it fair? No. Is it right? I don’t know. But it is a fact of our country, the great secret the Republicans, who have become the great guards of the wealthy, don’t talk about. It’s the secret most Americans don’t want to think about. We spend all our time imagining that someday, we or our children will make it to that top income bracket. The American Dream. Republicans know this. They know it so well, that they’re planning a big distraction to get their guy elected.
According to the Times Online:
Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”
Don’t think about the bailout. The press will keep you titillated with BUZZ about Bristol’s choice of wedding dress to cover “the bump.” Aaaaack!
$700 Billion: What it Could Pay For
So, I was trying to get a vision for how much money $700 billion dollars really is, especially since “billion” sounds so much like “million” that I’m failing to grasp the geometry of the difference. I did some minor research and came up with these estimates. Each of these is a separate estimate for the $700,000,000,000:
- $3,000 per person in the US. Family of four worth $12,000. Family of ten worth $30,000. (current US pop: 305 million)
- $104 per person across the planet. EVERYONE ON THE PLANET!!! (current population: 6.7 billion)
- $10,000 per single-family-detached house in US. (Estimated number of houses is 70 million.)
- $8,860 per adult currently estimated to be struggling with health care debt (current estimate 79 million).
- $19,178 per person currently living below the poverty line. $76,712 per family of four. (36.5 million for 2006 estimate.)
- $800 million to 875 research facilities to pay for R&D on developing new antibiotics.
- $2,187,500 per person currently employed as a securities, commodities, or financial services sales agent in the US (320,000 as of 2006).
oh my.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Oh. My.
Or it could pay for roughly 16 months of US military spending.
I think I might be ill.
A World-Crisis: One More Opportunity to Play the Blame Game
Wow. There’s some heavy stuff going down in Washington. And once again, I am loathe to trust anything I hear because it’s all so steeped and occluded in “messaging,” “spin,” and deluxe finger-pointing. It’s really hard to be an informed citizen these days. You begin to feel as though there really is no TRUTH. Just somebody’s version of it. And as in all things politics, it’s being bent to serve a purpose.
From today’s decidedly left-leaning HuffPost:
Some people have been wondering whether Dick Cheney and George Bush, to preserve their legacy and their secrets, would spring an October surprise to secure the election of John McCain–the clearest and almost the only urgent goal of this administration as it winds down. We have wondered whether the trigger could be in Georgia, or Iran, or Pakistan. Yet the banking crisis, in the manner of its management, now looks like the October surprise one week early and with one week longer to turn it to advantage.”
Gawd. Really? I mean, could that be true? I think not. I think the people in Washington can’t help working every situation to their advantage, but I guarantee that this crisis was not “manufactured.” A ridiculous assumption. There are too many people in Washington, including Pelosi, Barney Frank, and a gazillion others who would be aware of it. It’s cynicism maximized into paranoid delusion. That said, would the Bush Administration and Cheney, et al, work this situation to their advantage? Yup. No doubt. One begins to wonder: if the result is the same as if it were manufactured, then there are far scarier things going on in Washington than I can stomach. I am naive enough to believe that the leaders of our country, ALL of them, care about the people and want to do what’s right. Greater good and all that.
Republicans, on the other hand, argue that the Clinton Administration forced the bad subprime loan practices by insisting that low/no credit borrowers be allowed to borrow anyway (Community Reinvestment Act). According to Investor’s Business Daily (emphasis added):
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Reinvestment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.” Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
Uh, yeah. So, all that subprime credit was just irresistibly JUICY and the Democrats practically FORCED all those poor victimized hedge-fund managers and senior-level Wall Street investors to re-package it and sell it worldwide in a disguised form that then crumbled everyone’s assets. I understand. It’s quite clearly the Democrats’ fault. Those bad, bad social engineers and their JUICY, JUICY subprime mortgages! It was NOT POSSIBLE TO RESIST THAT TEMPTATION. Kind of like Eve bringing down the whole scene and the downfall of all humanity. Really. All her fault. Democrats. All their fault. Nothing to do with de-regulation at all. (Which, some Democrats supported, I might add.)
The important take-away for all this is to choose a side. Be sure to rant whenever possible about FAULT and point-
fingers. Be sure to maximize cynical thinking by looking intensely for political maneuvering rather than solutions. McCain’s decision to delay the debate seemed like a good idea. I was a little shocked by the Obama camp objecting to debate delays. I’m sure all he heard for days was, “Don’t do it! That’s what they want!” Then I read his statement that the American people need the debates more than ever. Oh yeah. Dang. It’s so hard to remember what I want!
Dood. All WE THE PEOPLE want is to know that our representatives are responsible, clear-thinking individuals who will do what’s right for the greater good. It’s just world markets we’re talking about. And remember, if you’re going to seek some completely unprecedented solution? Maybe you can make sure there’s some justice involved. Those bankers came from both parties. Jails don’t care who you voted for.
Damn, I Love Comments!
Don’t you just LOVE to read the sassy stuff people write in comments? It’s completely fascinating (and sometimes scary, as when I read at Little Green Footballs about how all us “liberal moonbats” want to move to Iran and cuddle with terrorists) but mostly just dang fun! And so, without further ado, here are some of the funny bits I’ve come across lately.
The Awesome Comment List
- “Methinks that McCranky is getting just a little bit pissed because they made him pick Caribou Barbie for his running mate.”
- “I find it disturbing that Palin supporters haven’t realised how she’s being treated by the McCain campaign. They roll her out and let he re-read the same old tired speech and then send her back into obscurity until they decide to use her again. They’re attempting to sell her as someone who will “shake things up”…when the truth is she’s someone they have on a very short leash. Its doubtful she’ll be treated any differently in an Administration than she is in a campaign. While they claim “sexism” at any critiszm of her policies, its they who practice it daily….no no honey, you just read the speech we wrote for you and let the men handle campaign.“
- “Tell me again, why is impeachment off the table? Seriously, Clinton perjured himself about getting a BJ from an overweight chick and impeachment proceedings go through. Bush destroys a country. Hrm.”
- “Move along folks, nothing to see here. Only a few trillions were stolen. Nobody has to go to jail. It’s not like some black teen stole a stereo or something. Because then I would be really outraged.”
- On Homeland Security Detects Terrorist Threats by Reading Your Mind…
“dear america,
your orwellian development incarnated in that thoughtcrime-doomsday-device really feaks us out.
sincerely
the rest of the world” - And lastly, this isn’t a comment, it’s a link to a fine site. One we all need to visit! Check out buymyshitpile.com. Because it’s only fair that the government should have to buy back my worthless junk, too! It’s not fair that I paid GOOD MONEY for this! I need $700bn today!
Please forward your favorites! I love the Internet…
The Invisible Hand Just Slapped Us All. Are We Awake Yet?
Oh yeah. It’s cool. My government owns a great big company, an unimaginably huge company called AIG. All over the world the socialist governments that we have scorned (France, Venezuela, heck – Cuba!) are laughing. Hard. Because this is the kind of socialism the US offers: socialism for investors. We don’t bother using our grand wealth to pay for things like six weeks of vacation. That would be such a waste!! We’d rather work ourselves to the bone and give the money away to people who made bad investments: on houses, on hedge funds, on way-swapped out bad credit not worth the paper. We’d rather sweat and toil in factories for rotten “minimum-wage” jobs and then die slow deaths from diseases that are not covered by insurance. We know how to live the life! The great Puritan ethic of hard-work will never die!
Unless, of course, you are an investment banker still collecting your massive bonus from last year. The one you get even though your company went down in flames. Because everyone knows, ever American at least, people with money deserve more money, much more than people who’ve never had any. Yay!
Is it unpatriotic of me to question these actions? We could’ve paid for so many productive helpful programs and improved the quality of life for so many with $700 billion. Has anyone asked how much we would’ve SAVED if we’d just had a government program to subsidize home ownership for low-to-medium income families in the first place?!?!
This country has been divided for too long between intransigent, ideology-driven parties that 
don’t ever even look at our country’s fundamental flaws. Isn’t anyone ready to have a real conversation about better models? Or are we still going to perpetuate the lie that pure capitalism trumps all.
There’s no name for a party I’d love, but it would enjoy all the freedoms of Libertarians and all the peace-inducing, care-taking of Socialists.
Above the Law? Come on Down, Snowmobile Boy!
Dang it smells like Karl Rove around here lately, what with TODD PALIN, SNOWMOBILE HERO, AND FIRST “DUDE” ALSO COMPLETELY ABOVE THE LAW AND REFUSING TO TESTIFY even though he’s been subpoenaed by a BI-PARTISAN, YES, A BIPARTISAN committee whose investigation began PRIOR TO Palin (the Lipstick Pig, why is Lipstick Pitbull okay, but not pig? They’re both noble animals!) being picked as VP and subsequently launched into a blinding vision of righteousness by the Republicans. According to the family lawyer, Thomas van Flein:
“We maintain our general objections that the legislative council investigation, besides being pursued for partisan purposes, is being conducted in violation of all accepted norms of due process.”
So let’s talk about Lipstick Boy, shall we? He sits in on almost all legislative sessions and Sarah copies her husband on all official state business, yet he works for BP as an oil employee. Okay, so I can get past the whole conflict of interest thing, but what is up with his “unusual” involvement in Sarah’s governing? Is this Biblical subordination to the husband? Is this a deep-seated insecurity that maybe Sarah does not know what the heck she’s doing? Is it to make sure Todd agrees whenever she fires someone?
However, speaking of conflict of interest, according to one news source:
In a letter listing Todd Palin’s objections, his Anchorage attorney, Thomas Van Flein, argued that legislators lack legal authority to investigate the governor, [ED., WHAT?!?!] that French has shown his bias by talking of potential impeachment, and that Branchflower has a conflict of interest because his wife worked under Monegan at the Anchorage Police Department.[ED., EMPHASIS ADDED]
I don’t like these people! It’s illegal not to testify when you’re subpoenaed by a BIPARTISAN 
committee. Conflict of interest, my butt! I’ve had it with eight years of above-the-law behavior from the Bush administration. DON’T LET THESE PEOPLE GET ELECTED!!
Okay, deep breaths. I’m better now.
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