Half a Monkey

September 22, 2008

George W. Bush's Final Fuck You

Dubya's $700B plan to bail out his BFF's on Wall Street is his final gift to the United States. Perhaps hedging his bets in the face of a likely Obama victory, it's his (and Cheney's, of course) attempt to bankrupt the U.S. government once and for all, ensuring that the next president (and the next and the next and ...) has no resources with which to reverse the staggering damage Bush has done to the country, the constitution, the environment, and the economy.

Democrats and republicans are both calling the bill out as a poorly written, panicked response to a problem we knew has been building for years. Even Newt Gingrich is decrying it as "a very, very bad idea", pointing out that the proposal's author, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, has spent the last year and a half saying there was no problem at all and now wants $700B to solve that lack of a problem.

But this being a Bush Whitehouse plan, the proposal is deceptive. A large part of the outcry focuses on the provision that there be no judicial oversight, no accountability, no way to track nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars as they flow directly into the pockets of Wall Street's wealthiest. This is all subterfuge: by putting in a clause so outrageously extreme, Bush has given himself a convenient bargaining chip. He can easily concede those terms without giving up any significant part of the real proposal. Congress gets to say they pushed back and won concessions while Bush and his cronies walk away with the biggest payday in history.

The feigned urgency with which Bush, Bernanke, and Paulson are pushing this plan belies their true intentions: given a moment of analysis, Congress and the world would see the scam for what it is. For a crisis to have materialized in a matter of weeks with such urgency that action must be taken within days to avert a global economic meltdown would require a sudden economic shift of gargantuan proportions.

The Bush administration's stubborn denial of any economic worries for the last several years, in spite of endless and repeated warning signs, followed by sudden calls to action can be explained one of two ways: either they were lying to us then that there was nothing wrong and are now panicking because it's already too late; or they are lying to us now about how dire the problem has become in order to shove through legislation that borders on criminal. (For the time being, I will set aside the third option, that they are colossally inept and honestly did not see this coming.)

Whatever the genesis of this proposal, it is clearly fundamentally flawed, in that it seeks to erase the debts that Wall Street incurred with little or no penalty on the perpetrators, while foisting the entire burden on those who can least afford it. Any bailout, if such action is truly necessary, should be crafted in such a way that it pays the minimum amount possible to keep these banks afloat.

It should hold the banks and their $73M-a-year executives accountable for their actions (just as Bush does our nation's shamefully underpaid teachers).

Tax the executives at 90% (they'll survive on the remaining $7.3M) and see how many loans you can buy back.

And reinstate the regulations that were designed to prevent this sort of unrestrained corruption from taking control of our economy—and our government—in the first place.

Posted by brendan at September 22, 2008 9:53 PM

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