~ s.c. addison (1 October 2008)
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If George W. Bush is in a hurry, go slow.
In fact, stop completely, or better yet, go the other way.
On other occasions when the Preppy Prez from Texas got real urgent and apocalyptic in demanding actions of his choosing in Congress, the outcomes were not pretty:
The PATRIOT Act shredded constitutional protections, Congress ceded war powers to the Commander to start the Iraq debacle, ‘shock and awe’ dragged into occupation and fear, military commissions were sanctioned in defiance of domestic and international law, energy policies have tripled the price of petroleum, etc., etc.
Now comes the financial crisis, and he has called for a $700 Billion taxpayer outlay to buy up bad debt and shore up the investment sectors, with broad Executive latitudes in Treasury & the Fed to disburse funds as they wish, with no oversight or judicial recourse.
With a few tweaks and niceties added to the package, the bobblehead centrist Democrats are going along, crowing the demise of deregulation – in rootin-tootin cahoots with bankroller Repugnicans covering the easy-money infrastructure. Those most glib and assuring about the economy a few months ago are the most frantic now.
To their credit, a narrow majority of Representatives defeated the end-September weekend bill, another odd bipartisan alliance of a different kind, trying to do the right thing for many reasons,
most of them wrong. A few Repugnicans had visceral knee-jerks about ‘big government’, notwithstanding all the public debt and police powers piled up under their NeoCon domain –
the biggest government there is. The Dems chafed at the brazen Executive power grab, putting $750 billion in the hands of the Treasury Secretary with no accountability for its disbursement –
but still not asking the core questions:
What corporate institutions were being subsidized with What assets to keep doing What things with other peoples money in What sustainable public interest?
This debate has thrust a dubious new ideogram to the fore – telling us, for the good of the country, that these finance houses are “Too Big To Fail”. Au contraire, they’re just bad at their job, unfit for the social/economic task of allocating capital and sustaining liquidity without stealing the money.
All it means is – these operations need to be reorganized to do the job right, cutting the flab.
But instead the Pols are making sure the sycophants-in-suits keep getting money for nothing.
The ensuing first days of October have seen the stock market take its deepest one-day plunge in history, flurries of mega-mergers, acquisitions, and emergency cash infusions, and grim retail figures from the auto business. The ‘percentage racketeers’ cleaned up on inflated and fabricated debt instruments, stole realty equity, drained credit flows dry, and left the People holding the bag.
Laughably the big economic wizards, geeks & ‘quants’ did not see this coming, or stupidly did not know how, or guilefully would not tell. And it is darkly fitting that’s the Bush Leaguers would drop the ball on their laissez-faire free-enterprise small-government pretenses, and close out their 8-year game with a $700,000,000,000 raid on the U.S. Treasury.
We are watching the biggest bank heist in history – by the banks.
Wary activists on the streets saw this coming, the debt balloon with waves of defaults, foreclosures & displacements — while the snoots-in-suits kept crooning the canon of market capitalism. They dared not speak the word “recession”, but now proffer “recovery” like it’s a done deal — as if that’s a good thing, putting the economy back the way it was.
This plays amazingly into the election weeks away… maybe Obama can see this moment and seize the opportunity for real change. We don’t need more fancy words for more of the same.
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OUTLINE NOTES – Exploratories:
CASH-FLOW JONES
RETAIL OLIGOPOLY
AUTONEUROTICA
SURREAL ESTATE
VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE
FUNNY MONEY
DISCONSUMING
POLYCENTRIC REGIONS
WORKHABS©