Where Is The Leadership?

Do we have a President?  Or do we have someone who is drawing a paycheck but isn’t running the country?  The latter seems to be the more accurate assesment.  What leadership has George Bush personally shown to the American people?  None.  He and his cronies knew the financial market freeze up was coming and they decided to do nothing about it.  At a minimum, they allowed banks to fail.  More accurately, they encouraged their failures through destructive policies.  But ever since the Bush Bailout was presented to America (months after they had written it), where is the resolute leadership that pundits were crowing about the past 8 years?  The answer is there wasn’t any leadership to begin with.  Bush can’t demonstrate that which he doesn’t have.

The House of Representatives rightfully rejected the amended Bush Bailout Plan.  Legislators can talk all they want to about how much they negotiated about the bill.  The difference between the original and modified Bush Bailout Plans?  About 100 pages of fluff.  Nothing real was added to or taken away from the bill.  Treasury Secretary Paulson was still going to be left with too much unchecked power.  Homeowners were still going to lose their homes.  Executives were still going to walk away from their experiments which ended in disaster with millions of dollars.  The credit markets were still going to remain stuck in neutral.  And since then?  Bush has exhibited no attribute that is so sorely needed at this time by the middle class.  That’s not by accident – current events are a direct result of planned CONservative economic policies.  Enrich the rich further.  Destroy the middle class and make America look more like a feudal state than a democracy.

Readers of this blog know I have no love for CONservative policies.  They’re too top-down, hypocritical and destructive of democratic principles.  Careful readers of this blog know I don’t pull any punches when it comes time to disagree with Democrats.  This is one of those times.  None of the Congressional leadership, Democratic or Republican, has displayed any kind of useful leadership either.  Many of them are just as guilty in creating this morass as Bush’s cronies are.  Their palms have been greased with too much corporate money during their careers.  During that same time, Democrats lost more races than they won.  Their habits are ingrained in an environment where Republicans could get away with relentlessly attacking them, no matter if those attacks resembled reality or not.  Despite stunning victories in the past 2-4 years, many older Democratic officials still don’t understand that the political landscape has shifted underneath them.  They need not fear absurd Republican attacks like they used to.  But they remain cowed and thus unable to lead at one of the most critical moments in our history.

Democrats should come up with their own legislative bill to address the financial mess.  I know they wanted to go home at the end of last week and campaign, but reality has a rude habit of interrupting plans.  Democrats haven’t reached out to economic experts to work on developing their own policy proposals.  Similar financial situations have cropped up before, both in the U.S. and abroad.  Solutions were identified and implemented before.  Simply looking at those solutions and slightly adjusting them to our current situation would seem prudent.  This particular economic problem cannot be characterized by anything more esoteric than has been witnessed before.  It is an insult to Americans that Democrats, historically so good at dealing with the economy, are offering no plans of their own.  I expected Republicans to drop the ball – and they have.  All they’re proposing is further tax cuts for the rich.  That won’t solve anything for the rest of the 99% of us.

Two Big Reasons the Financial Crisis … Isn’t

Well, well, well.  The more the financial “crisis” and the Bush administration-led “solution” play out, the more the whole thing stinks.  How much does it stink?  Enough so that there should be no way any member of Congress, Democrat or Republian, votes to give the Bushies the power they’re so desperately seeking.

First, it’s not so much of a crisis as Bush would have us believe.  Bush’s cronies have been sitting on this legislation for months.  Which would indicate prudence except they’ve been talking about how good the economy is doing and how stable it is this whole time.  This plan could have been sold faster if they said at any time that the economy was starting to look weak because of the housing and financial institution crises.  More to the point though, the Bush administration waited for months while the financial markets got slaughtered.  Why?  Because they didn’t want another one of their failures to go public prior to this year’s election.  Remember, many Republican Representatives and Senators came out over the weekend saying Democrats shouldn’t try to score political points with this crisis.  Their faux concern rings even more hollow now that the leader of their party did just that while allowing major corporations to fail and allowing our economy to sink further than it otherwise would have.  They should work on cleaning up their own house before looking into their neighbors’.

Second, not only does the Bush administration expect taxpayers to foot the bill of foreign banks with bad debts, they want tax dollars to go to banks who aren’t even in trouble!

You have to remember, these are not all weak or troubled firms that own mortgage-backed securities. A lot of them are very successful banks and investment houses that have done very well, have been responsible, are holding performing assets that have value. They were not necessarily irresponsible players, and so you have to be careful about how you deal with them.

Why does the Bush administration want American taxpayers to help banks who don’t even need it?  Because their solution doesn’t address the real crisis.  There isn’t a quick fix to the mess we’re in.  Banks don’t know how many of their assets are bad or what they’re actually worth.  The legislation Bush wants passed can’t fix a problem that remains undefined.  Democrats need to stand firm and wait for more solid information to become available.

What Do You Want?

As the Bush administration continues to expect taxpayers to shoulder the burden of the out of control gamblers on Wall St., maybe a small dose reality of the options being considered should be presented.  So here is my take.

You can believe the Bushies when they say Congress should do something about the crisis that Bush’s allies created without due consideration of the ramifications.  You can believe that this crisis is so big and so bad that nobody should have any oversight of the Treasury Secretary’s decisions on which bad assets taxpayers get to assume.  You can believe that Bush and his cronies have your best interest in mind as he saddles the country with up to $700 billion (for now) of additional debt and leaves irresponsible, untrustworthy executives in control of their firms.  You can believe these things while the Bush administration makes absolutely no attempt to protect the taxpayer or as it makes no attempt to improve the environment for homeowners or small business owners.  You can believe they’re protecting America by assuming foreign banks debt.

By doing so, of course, you then support the following.  You don’t want to shift our energy from fossil fuels to renewables.  You don’t want to address global warming.  You don’t want any investment in our country’s infrastructure.  You want the next generation to live under a system that pays billions of dollars per year on interest on the debts that you incurred.  You want Social Security to fail.  You want Medicare to fail.  You don’t want any meaningful change to our broken health care system.  You don’t want any improvements to our education system.  You don’t want America to move any further into the 21st century because we’ll still be paying off our 20th century debts.  You want to cover foreign bank mistakes as well as domestic bank mistakes.

Here is the thing nobody is talking about: if regular Americans are on the hook for multiple Trillion dollar games (i.e. Iraq, Wall St. rip-off, hurricane recoveries, etc.), there’s no money for anything else.  Republicans want government to fail.  They’ve purposefully created a culture where higher taxes are forbidden.  At the same time, Republicans have created the largest government spending programs in our history and now have overextended America’s financial obligations to such a degree that something has to give.  Do you think Republicans are going to allow the War (“defense”) budget to be cut?  It represents, by far, the largest expenditures of your tax dollars.  If the government doesn’t collect any more money, programs will have to be cut.  If “defense” is off the table, Republicans have been honest about their goal for years: no social programs.  A small group of extremists are working very hard to force those programs to be cut out of the budget.

So we can pay for Wall Street’s immoral gambling problem.  Or we can hold a small group of executives and government officials responsible for their long history of mistakes and get back to work ensuring America can continue towards a prosperous 21st century future.  What do you want?

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[Update]: Barack Obama recognizes what I’ve described above.  Health care, energy, education and everything else will have to take a back seat if Bush’s immoral bailout goes through.

Front Seat: Economic Concerns

The big news continues to be the Bush administration’s response to the collapse of the U.S. financial sector and Americans’ response to that.  Yesterday, I outlined the “rescue plan” and offered some thoughts of my own and others’ as well.  Today, I’m reading disturbing things in the corporate media about the “rescue plan”.  In a nutshell, a number of overpaid economists who were dead wrong about the state of the economy leading up to the stelllar failures are presenting this as an either-or situation.  That approach is incredibly narrow-sighted, especially given some of the alternative solutions I wrote about.

Don’t get me wrong: we are all facing a crisis that could get a whole lot worse.  I duly recognize that fact.  What counts moving forward is how we deal with that crisis.  Adding $700 billion to the national debt and taking one point of economic growth per year away from the next five years is the wrong solution.  CNN’s Paul LeMonica’s view is we can choose between that solution and doing nothing.  Seriously, that’s all Paul (and others!) can offer?  How about enforcing some penalty on the gamblers responsible for this crisis?  Once again, the richest among us are perilously close to getting off scott-free after making the worst possible decisions and sticking the rest of us with their gambling debt.  The fact that folks like Paul offer up only two extreme solutions to this crisis is indicative of how scared they are of the monied interests of Wall St.  They should be afraid of the interests of Main St.

What’s most insulting about this offering of extremes is the warnings accompanying them.  Jobs might be lost, people might lose their homes, incomes could fall, blah, blah, blah.  Hey!  Wake up, pundits!  All that has been happening.  Bush’s Republican government has created the fewest jobs in 8 years’ time since WWII.  Foreclosures are occurring at record rates.  Real incomes haven’t increased in 8 years’ time.  Not doing anything about the Wall St. crisis won’t create some new economic reality for Main St.  It’s Main St. that has had to deal with their own economic crisis and now that Wall St. is feeling the pinch, suddenly it’s time to roll out the rescue plans.  On Main St.’s back, I might add.

Meanwhile, the markets contine to roil.  The dollar fell today, oil spiked by $20 per barrel (the highest one-day gain ever) to $130!!, and the Dow is down 370 points again, just to name a few.

2008 Economic Crisis – Conservative Economics Have Failed

The American taxpayer is being tapped for up to $700 billion (for now) to cover the bad bets of unregulated financial entities for the next two years.  There’s a lot to talk about in that one sentence.  I’m going to start by pointing out that too many companies were gambling.  They lost the bet, but taxpayers are being called upon to pay up.  Read this carefully: that is immoral.  It is even more immoral in the face of Bush’s administration refusal to offer homeowners any kind of possibility to keep their homes over the past two years.  It’s the main pillar of Republican ideology: you’re on your own.

I’ve heard and read that the government could recoup the money.  I have heard zero details on how that could happen.  It’s a vague request for trust by this Republican-led government that needs to demonstrate it’s worthy of that trust.  Remember, Bush’s administration has received everything it has asked for for seven years, from both Republican and Democratic Congresses.  That includes supplementals for the invasion and occupation of Iraq – totaling some $600 billion so far.  That includes tax cuts for billionaires and the largest corporations.  Now Bush and his cronies want Americans to assume the debt from Wall Street’s gambling habit.  What about what Americans want, including keeping their homes, their jobs, their wages, their health care, and their hard-earned money.  We’ve heard for years from conservatives that Americans should be able to keep their money.  Now conservatives want Americans’ money to prop up their irresponsible corporate allies?!  Even though conseravtives’ ideological economic policies have failed on every level, we’ll never hear them admit it, despite their greed for our money to cover for those failures.