I have a day of medical stuff to do today--nothing serious--so I'll be brief.
Remember weeks ago, when a small number of public voices were counseling to go slow on the $700 billion bailout for Big Finance? They said there was--despite Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's urgent pleas--no need to rush. They said that Congress ought to hold hearings and examine various alternatives to Paulson's blank-check plan. They said that the Bush administration and the Democrats in Congress (including then-presidential candidate Barack Obama) were merely throwing money at a problem without proceeding in a deliberate manner. You can see here for examples of such naysaying.
Well, they (which includes me) were right. Take a gander at the top of the front page of The Washington Post. To the right, you will find a story reporting:
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. announced a series of moves yesterday that redefine the federal government's $700 billion rescue plan for the financial industry in order to tackle what he called a dire situation in the consumer credit markets.
In recasting the program, the Treasury no longer plans to buy troubled assets from financial firms, the idea initially presented to the country, but instead will offer aid to banks and other firms that issue student, auto and credit card loans in part by jump-starting the market that provides financing for these companies.
That is, Treasury is taking those hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars Congress gave it and now using it in a completely different manner than it said it would. Maybe this will be a better deployment of those bucks. Maybe it won't. But shouldn't there have been some public debate or discourse about the shift? Whose money is it, anyway?
Next, shift your eyeballs slightly to the left, and you will see a related article reporting:
In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury's massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country's largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.
Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.
Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.
"It's a mess," said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department's inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. "I don't think anyone understands right now how we're going to do proper oversight of this thing."
Get the picture? The program was misdirected, is being redirected, and has no oversight. By the way, it will probably cost more than the $700 billion first mentioned.
It is a mess. A gigantic mess. Just one of the several George W. Bush (with the help of Congress) is bequeathing Obama. The new president and his people better have some good ideas for making it work better. For even though it was made in the Bush administration, if this quasi-con game continues along this present course after January 20, Obama will own it.
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Comments
DC,
They are also redacting the amounts and there is zero transparency.
It is a robbery not a bailout.
If a company is too big to fail it must be broken up into the failing parts and the NOT-failing parts.
It is just the biggest robbery in history - I guess Bunnypants gets his legacy. He is no Jesse James but a bigger haul of stolen money has never been had by anyone.
Posted by: capt
| November 13, 2008 12:08 PM
WASHINGTON'S $5 TRILLION TAB
According to CreditSights, a research firm in New York and London, the U.S. government has put itself on the hook for some $5 trillion, so far, in an attempt to arrest a collapse of the financial system.
http://tinyurl.com/yu7dqb
This is a mis-statement. The government has not put itself on the hook; it has put YOU on the hook, to the tune of about $50,000 per household.
Plus accruing compound interest.
Posted by: as_if!
| November 13, 2008 12:57 PM
"$5 trillion, so far"
Is really the money quote.
So far . . . .
The SOB's
Posted by: capt
| November 13, 2008 1:08 PM
Bush Treasury Dept. Redacts More Bailout Contracts
[...]
If part of what is ailing the economy is an understandable lack of psychological confidence in Corporate America and our government, then blacking out huge swaths of government-corporate contracts is not the way to turn that psychological tide - it's a way to exacerbate it, especially since the redactions come after both Congress and the Bush administration promised unprecedented transparency.
Indeed, some of these contracts are with companies like Ernst & Young, which were intimately involved in companies like Lehman Brothers and AIG, which are at the center of the meltdown. Shouldn't taxpayers have a right to see - in real time - how our money is now being spent on those same companies? And shouldn't the Treasury Department know that when it publicizes contracts with redacted sections, it only contributes to the overall sense that our government is acting in bad faith?
http://tinyurl.com/5pjk62
*****
If it wasn't criminal then why are they redacting the document? National Security concerns about how our money is being spent? I think it is the biggest rip-off in the history of mankind.
Posted by: capt
| November 13, 2008 2:20 PM
This government needs a complete "do over", that is the only thing that will work. One really has to start from scratch.
Posted by: bacaangel
| November 13, 2008 4:37 PM
Paulson adds to AIG folly
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's decision to inject another US$27 billion into failed insurer AIG and raise the taxpayers' investment to $150 billion suggests he is more intent on helping his pals on Wall Street than protecting taxpayer interests.
http://tinyurl.com/6nnvt3
Posted by: as_if!
| November 13, 2008 5:16 PM
BAIT AND SWITCH
How many more times can they change their story; how many more times can they add to the amounts of money being so freely given to their largest contributors, and to top it off, even the supposed point and purposes behind these public giveaways keep changing with every passing hour: Along with the actual amounts of money that both Paulson & Bernanke are dispensing as if it were water from an open floodgate.
http://rense.com/general84/bait.htm
Posted by: as_if!
| November 13, 2008 5:29 PM
Good cartoon:
http://img.slate.com/media/81/081113_ed.gif
Posted by: capt
| November 13, 2008 7:18 PM
Obama resigns Senate seat effective Sunday
http://tinyurl.com/5bgx7c
As long as he doesn't say: "Just forget about it, call McCain. This place is a mess- I quit!"
Posted by: capt
| November 13, 2008 7:28 PM
UNPRECEDENTED RAPE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE UNDERWAY IN DC
Rape is an ugly word usually attributed to an attack on a woman. It also means an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation: the rape of the countryside.
There is no other word to describe what has been happening in Washington, DC., for the past two and a half months. The so-called bail out of lending institutions and banks has turned into a free for all that is mind boggling, already running in the TRILLIONS with no end in sight. As the layers have been unfolding over the past few weeks, only someone in complete denial can say with a straight face that this unconstitutional looting of the people's labor has been anything but mass rape.
http://tinyurl.com/64fher
Posted by: as_if!
| November 13, 2008 11:23 PM
The original bill gave paulson carte balnche. The reworked bill is being ignored because Paulson has no intention of allowing anyone to oversee what he is doing. His task as designed by the diggers who gave us this nice hole we find ourselves in wish to dig a trillion miles deeper and so they shall.
Paulson is a master digger who happens to occupy a position in the government. His loyalty is to the other diggers who paid him about $700 million while he worked with them.
We have met the enemy and it is Wall Street's major diggers and master thieves.
Posted by: kalpal
| November 14, 2008 10:59 AM
"If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around."
Christina Stead (1903 - 1983), House of All Nations (1938) "Credo"
Posted by: capt
| November 14, 2008 11:38 AM
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