CONGRESS SHOULD ADJOURN. JUST GO HOME. --
1. CONGRESS SHOULD ADJOURN. JUST GO HOME. –The immediate
question, right now, is whether the bailout bill can still be defeated in
Congress. I have no prediction about the outcome—though obviously I hope it
will be defeated. But it is a reasonable prediction that the news media, today
and tomorrow, will be filled with horse-race treatment on the topic. We all
know the kind; it was the kind of media treatment that the Bush team got when trying
to gin up the war with
2. More on immediate remedies: Persons gifted with hundreds of millions of dollars should pick a county and, forthwith, start paying off hard-working fellow Americans’ mortgages. Pick a county, any county [thanx to Groucho Marx]—the one they grew up in, the one they live in, the poorest county in the nation; the single county hardest hit—whichever that might be—by the current ‘liquidity problems’; the county they were born in; the county their parents were born in; etc. Be sentimental. Be clinical. I don’t care. Just pick one, bonanza winner. Secretary Paulson, you could set the example.
Or they could pick a zip code: Admittedly even a multi-millionaire,
could not single-handedly carry away the mortgage debt of a whole state, with
the possible exception of
3. Speaking of personal interest, it is somewhat remarkable how little our journalists are being held to any standard of disclosure, while they scream in favor of the bailout. The WashPost’s Dana Milbank, e.g., published an uncharacteristically heated column Tuesday on how ‘the lunatics had taken over the asylum’ in Congress, and Milbank is not exactly an apache. There is a real question re which journalists screaming in favor of the bailout have 401(k)s affected temporarily by the drop on the stock market on Tues—that kind of bloodthirsty fervor is usually the sign of the small investor—but you notice they’re not saying. Their editors are not making them follow the principle of journalistic disclosure—Hey, why shd they have to follow the rules when their richers and betters don’t. [Disclaimer: In the interest of full disclosure, I am not checking how the immediate situation affects my own family, so I do not know whether I am writing against interest. Obviously I think that our long-term interest, including mine, wd be better served other ways.]
Anyway, an astounding assortment of historians, economists, pop-economists and other commentators weighing in on behalf of this bailout—including some whose commentary I generally respect--are not being required to disclose their personal, individual stake in the topic.
4. A serious list of 200 well-respected economists oppose the bailout. That shd be a sign.
5. And oh yes, on that topic of inflation: GIVEN THE POTENTIAL FOR HYPER-INFLATION IN PUMPING A TRILLION DOLLARS INTO THE FINANCIAL SECTOR, ONE COULD REASONABLY SUSPECT how little the Fed’s concern was ‘inflation,’ all those times it raised the key interest rate, before. Washington novelist David Baldacci (I think--can’t remember the title of the novel) has a passage in one of his whodunits, on how the Fed knows exactly, can compute exactly, the ripple effect of human loss, every time it raises the interest rate: for every quarter of a point, thus much job loss, marital breakups, spikes in gambling and substance abuse . . .
Either it’s going to be hard for the Fed to have credibility, in coming months, raising interest rate to contain ‘inflation,’ or real inflation will give them cover to do exact that—right when the new Obama administration comes in.
6. Our Senate just acted, last night, like Wal-Mart coming into my neighborhood. With the clear sentiment of informed community against them, people at Wal-mart sneakily attached the company’s its permit applications (in county filings) to an old file instead of filing them openly for everyone to see: Likewise, our Senate attached this bailout as a ‘Dodd amendment’ to some more respectable legislation.
7. Obama failed us, as our presidential candidates always do, following the unwritten rules of presidential campaigns that say you’ll shake things up too much if you address the direst problems too directly. Not that McCain cd benefit politically, of course: Obviously the bailout and the situation being used to justify it are GOP products. But just as John Kerry failed to stand for the quickest possible end to the Iraq war in 2004—and suffered a ‘close election’ [actually: election fraud] for it—our candidates this year failed to state clearly that this sky-is-falling blitz by the administration is fiscal disaster. All our presidential candidates failed us, except for Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).—Chris Dodd mega-failed us, helping the Senate to bypass the Constitution, which states that legislation authorizing money has to begin in the House. They followed the letter, according to a Rules expert in the Congressional Research Service. But in my view, they violated the spirit.
I hypothesized years ago that the
single most corrupted state in the union, per capita, is
8. A more general point: There is virtually no emphasis, no focus, in all this, on getting Americans out of debt rather than farther in it.
At least that proposal to raise FDIC coverage from $100,000 to $250,000 in bank accounts, and various proposals to use existing regulations to rein in and correct current problems, is probably a good idea.
Mention of the FDIC always reminds me of something my father used to talk about, remembered from his youth: In the 1930s, under Roosevelt’s New Deal, the banks screamed bloody murder and tried every trick in the book—bolstered by the Republican Party—to prevent any federal regulation whatsoever, including preventing the formation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Then—when they lost, and the FDIC was formed, what did they do? –They eagerly applied for that priceless insurance coverage, guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the American people—and immediately displayed the FDIC sticker on their front windows, as advertising.
Sound familiar?
Stumble It!