bailout, still

I wish I could get away from this bailout thing, but my rant yesterday was far too disorganized to stand as my only exploration of this issue. So let me try again (although I’m not in any way sure I can keep the ranting tendency in check). Let me name the figure again: seven hundred billion dollars. That’s a seven followed by eleven zeros: 700,000,000,000. Even the number of zeros is beyond a single digit. Eleven zeros. With no oversight. Paulson and Bernanke were before congress today using the standard Bush administration tactic – fear and panic. “If you don’t give us this power right now the entire world will come apart, the global financial system will disintegrate, the American economy will come crashing down taking with it small businesses, home owners, major financial corporations, the entire credit system, and the terrorists will win.” “Now. We need this power now.”

When some congresspeople – dems and republicans alike – balked, suggested that this be tied to, for example, a limitation on the compensation company executives can receive, or some help to the struggling homeowner, the guys now in charge of the government say not on your life “that would be a disincentive.” A fucking disincentive?! They won’t take free money from the government because they’d have to limit their own income? Actually, and tragically, I believe it. I believe those people would let the economy descend into the black abyss of mammoth bankruptcy and deep irredeemable fiscal depression because they don’t want to give up their 10 million dollar packages.

People in the administration now will soon enough be back on Wall Street, wanting to take advantage of whatever package is finally passed. Once again, the idiot president is insisting threateningly that we must act now and act dramatically or all is lost. The constitutional violations embedded in the package proposal – total power with no oversight to the treasury secretary, conflicts of both interest and interests.

Republican Senator Jim Bunning called it financial socialism – “Unamerican.” (Only the NYTimes reproduces that word as “un-American” because American must always take a capital letter.) Hard to believe that he’d be objecting if it weren’t an election year. They’re desperate to get help for these guys, what other industry could be melting down and demand so much attention? Every day people die from going without health care. Every day children sit in overcrowded classrooms, suffer violence in schools, drop out and fall between the cracks of an educational system that ignores real needs and focuses its slim moment of attention on the administrative farce of “accountability.”

I guess that’s my rant for today. Tomorrow, a few interesting moments from Monday’s Death Penalty Commission hearing.