The fix is in, and the bailout is going to be passed in one form or another in the near future.
How do I know?
Because it is now being marketed as a “Rescue plan.”
Bailout was apparently too unpalatable for main street. So take solace that when you, as a taxpayer, take part in this ginormous game of kick the shitpile down the road until after 20 January 2009, you aren’t really “bailing out” greedy Wall Street types, you are rescuing America. Don’t you feel patriotic? Maybe we can put green ribbons on our car next to the yellow support our troops ribbons that are beginning to fade.
I will leave it to someone else to go back to 2003 and document the changes in verbiage in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Excuse me, I mean the liberation of Iraq.
Dennis - SGMM
Mission Accomplished, suckers!
SGEW
Why don’t you want to rescue America, Mr. Cole?!
After all, the markets will greet us as liberators.
kate r
As Sarah says it’s verbage and don’t you dis it, dude. It’s all we got, other than this comical pickle barrel with suspenders we’ll be wearing from now on.
Incertus
On the plus side, I imagine that this will mean the end of the Iraq War even sooner than planned, because we won’t be able to pay for it.
Karmakin
This is what really irritates me.
You say “The fix is in”, but down below you linked (approvingly I took it) to Billmon, who said that this bailout/rescue/whatever is completely necesarry.
Same with Krugman, DeLong, Reich, CR, I mean. People oppose THIS bill for a variety of good reasons, but still think that things really are that dire in the first place.
The fix is in because the conventional wisdom says that this is necessary, no ifs ands or buts. Like it or not, they got us by the short and curlys.
I’m against the CW. I don’t think it’s necessary.
Joshua Norton
Geez. Even BO Reilly seems to have joined the Angry Left with this statement about Chimpy:
“He’s done. He’s through. … He will now go down in history…as an ineffectual leader. And I’ll tell you the reason why, it’s poor leadership on his part. The people that he picked to run certain things have been disastrous. And no leadership and now Americans are getting hurt.”
As we used to say back in Massachusetts, “Light dawns on Marblehead”.
liberal
Goddamned Democrats. Most of what they’re chirping about is “helping homeowners” and punishing executives with salary caps.
What about protecting taxpayers? (Equity stake, blah blah blah.) (I’m wholly in favor of punishing executives, but it’s peanuts compared to the equity issue. Homeowners, I’m not sympathetic to, and besides, much of the time bailing them out is just bailing out the banks who lent them money.)
Yeah, Dodd’s plan makes noises about it, but the fact that it doesn’t seem to be that high a priority, at least in terms of rhetoric, pisses me off to no end.
DSB
We’re paying for it? I thought all that Iraqi gold and oil was paying for it, WTF?
Joshua Norton
I just want to know at what point do we stop shoveling money over the transom for them? The financial sector is already toast. Virtually all of the actors who have been dealing in this toxic debt are already insolvent (if the securities were priced at fair value). This $700 billion won’t save them – or more precisely, enough of them to prevent a collapse – and the result will be a calamity, regardless.
The only way to save any of them is to overpay for the debt. Not only is that unconscionable, the Treasury can’t print enough money fast enough to save most of them. Therefore, all this plan would accomplish is to put $700 billion at the discretion of Paulson and the administration to save some of them – their friends and the ones with the most influence.
Once we realize that the financial sector will collapse in any case, our thinking changes drastically. Instead of pretending to try to stop the unstoppable, we need to figure out how to mitigate the effects of this disaster on the people and taxpayers of the United States, especially the homeowners going into foreclosure.
Meanwhile, I think we should let their precious “free market forces” do their will. Let the unregulated financial firms just go belly up – and straight into the arms of Federal receivership, just as if they had been regulated S&Ls and banks. We can set up a real RTC just as we did in the 1980s.
The Moar You Know
Substitute Bernanke and Paulson with Rumsfeld and Powell, substitute “fiscal collapse” with “mushroom clouds” and we’ve got Iraq, 2003, all over again. Demands for swift action coupled with an almost deranged insistence that the government knows best how to handle this and that any attempts to regulate or place rules on the authorization to take action will lead to unspecified “dire consequences”. Think about it. It’s such a familiar behavior pattern I’m shocked that more people haven’t noticed it.
The Bush administration is like the band Journey; they really only have the one song but it is a guaranteed moneymaker every time they release it.
AkaDad
The economy isn’t on life support. The invisible hand just needs a manicure.
Dennis - SGMM
Not so fast. The Bush administration has quietly begun inquiries into corporate sponsorship. Early next month a task force headed by the carrier USS Coca Cola will escort assault ships carrying the Marine’s Wonderbra Expeditionary Force into the Persian Gulf. The Coca Cola will be escorted by the frigates USS Fritos and USS Campbell’s Soup along with the attack submarine USS Fox Sports.
Stuck in the Fun House
WAR IS PEACE—————> BAILOUT IS RESCUE
Just one more brick in the wall.
jake
If BushCo thinks “We must rescue those poor gagillionaires,” is an improvement on “We must bail out those poor gagillionaires.” Well, they probably do think that. No one tell them that this ain’t 2003.
liberal
Joshua Norton wrote,
Why? The bulk of them made bad bets for selfish reasons. Why should we foot the bill? And many of them won’t lose much $$ if they just mail in the keys, since they didn’t put anything down anyway. (OK, their credit gets trashed. Big deal.)
I like Dean Baker’s plan of keeping people in their homes as renters. But this stuff that taxpayers should pay for gross stupidity is offensive.
Agreed.
LiberalTarian
So, yeah, I’m upset about the freaking New Great Depression as anyone, but … how about musicians who have been fighting the good fight in song since 2000??
HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS at Golden Gate Park is going to be CRAZY good this year. And, its got lots of folks who are going to talk about what jerks Republicans are (yay, enlightened musicians).
On my list to see:
Friday night–Robert Plant and Alison Krauss featuring T Bone Burnett
Saturday–
11:55am Laurie Lewis & Friends
1:30pm Richard Thompson (d’oh, maybe not)
2:05pm Three Girls & Their Buddy (Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin & Buddy Miller)
3:25pm Hot Rize (Tim Obrien!! JOY!!)
4:40pm Odetta
6:00pm Steve Earle & The Bluegrass Dukes (and if they don’t sing their cover of Willin’ by Little Feat I’m gonna cry)
Sunday:
11:20am Darrell Scott Band
2:30pm Elvis Costello’s High Whines & Spirits
3:25pm Iron & Wine
4:40pm Loudon Wainwright III
Sigh. No Gillian Welch this year, but you can’t have everything I guess. I’m hoping for coldish but not pouring down rain so the mob is smaller. I am giddy with excitement. :D Ok, thread hijack over.
rawshark
Rescue Plan? Isn’t that like putting lipstick on a pig?
Martin
Cut them some slack. Tester asked if this was such a looming crisis, why didn’t Paulson come to them when maybe only $200B was needed. Dodd asked what would happen to regular workers if Congress did nothing and Bernaki didn’t exactly give a persuasive answer.
The talk about salaries isn’t punishment. It’s about the $2.5B in bonuses for Lehman employees. At the rate we’re going if we do have a bailout, taxpayers shouldn’t be bailing out bonuses for the fuckers that created this.
And I’m going to go to bat for Chris Cox here. He was my congressman a bit back, and while I disagree with him on a number of things, he’s one of the more competent people in the Bush admin right now. That McCain is calling for his head and not Paulsons is stunning. Paulson was the head of GS. He knew goddamn well how big this problem was.
And I thought it was interesting that they were describing how so many firms were walking the knife-edge on debt until they got tipped into having to scramble for cash. Well, isn’t that precisely the situation that Republicans are blaming every homeowner of doing and suggesting they get fucked?
nicethugbert
What happens if the government taxes banks for holding onto money, raises the minimum wage, deletes out-sourcing incentives, outlaws the irresponsible speculation that got us into this mess, acquires these losers AIG style, fires their executives with no severance pay, cuts them up into peices and feeds them to the competition? Will that get the money flowing again? Isn’t that competition and isn’t it good? Is Bushco into the free lunch business?
TenguPhule
It’s not gay until their own ass gets fucked.
liberal
Martin wrote,
Of course. My point is that the bonuses are a small amount of money compared to the $700 billion. Thus, in terms of not just handing over $$ for free, the question of whether the government gets equity is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than the bonuses crap. That’s just a mathematical fact, making the reasonable assumption that the plan is to pay much more for the toxic sludge than it’s worth. And anyone whose rhetoric doesn’t reflect this either (a) doesn’t understand the basics of the situation, or (b) is just trying to score cheap points.
Now, on the other hand, if we could somehow take all the money these a**holes on WS made over the past many years, that really could be quite a sum of money. (While we’re at it, throw in the comissions of every single mortgage broker who didn’t act as if he had fiduciary responsibility.) But this isn’t possible, unfortunately, for legal reasons.
liberal
Martin wrote,
I do think that it’s hardly proven by Bernacke/Paulson/et al. that the method where we inject capital only after a firm fails isn’t workable.
srv
I don’t like Rescue either. How about Domestic Liberation Plan?
Chris Johnson
I worry about the Red states. Up here in Vermont we take care of our people pretty well- our Senators etc. are pretty clued in, and I have some confidence that we’ll get by. We’re also fairly rural, so when gas gets tough to come by, people aren’t really going to be hot to travel for hundreds of miles IN CASE they could loot some small town when there will be many more nearby small towns (I’m concerned for my parents, not half an hour out of Boston)
The thing is, they’re rolling prefab prison cells into Utah. I see it as a redstate/bluestate thing and as unfair as it is, I think someone is really setting up to go all Pinochet on the red staters, and I don’t like that one bit.
It’s like when I went down to Memphis for a con and saw that for some reason everything in their Wal-Marts seemed strangely more expensive. I can’t prove that because around here we tend to go elsewhere, there’s active opposition to corporate takeover, and maybe that is reason enough that our Walmarts would be running cheaper prices. The impression I got was that they were paying for that by soaking the Southerners, who hadn’t been hostile to Walmart on that kind of scale.
I think it’s going to be like that in terms of justice too.
In blue state country, people will have rallies and riots and be very very upset when anyone even gets tasered. It’ll be a huge amount of hysteria over military/police type action that would’ve been shocking ten years ago.
Meanwhile in the red states, we’re going to have people lined up and shot- or put in those porta-jails and left there until they starve. Their police are going to militarize further, what militias and things they come up with are going to be steamrollered by brutal military action, they’re going to be absolutely raped financially even though per capita they’re not so much capital holders.
I hope we can keep communications up- perhaps through blogging and such things, wireless samizdat if all else fails. We are all Americans together. By the time the dust settles, we’re not going to be looking at the red states with resentment for getting us into all this, we’re going to be rescuing them from abuses more common to Somalia or Afghanistan. I think those guys are going to be in a lot of trouble judging from the detention camps and porta-jails and the Third Infantry’s First Brigade Combat Team pulled out of Iraq and deployed to counter ‘civil unrest’ here in the USA.
Interrobang
The economy isn’t on life support. The invisible hand just needs a manicure.
I agree. The Invisible Hand needs the kind of manicure you get in hardline Islamic countries if you act the way the Invisible Hand has been acting lately.
binzinerator
How do you know that Blackwater won’t be hauling your bluestate Vermont ass over to Utah and throwing it in one of those porta-prisons? No reason those prisons have to be filled with locals.
Maybe they’re going to get more brutal with detained protesters held in red states because they know they can without local outcry over ‘harsh interrogation techniques’. Red state voters never had a problem with that. Just label those bluestaters as “latte-sipping coastal elites” — oops, already done that — I mean, as ‘terrorists’ and ‘enemy combatants’ and they will cheer on any sort of sadistic treatment.
If a militarized police can get away with worse degrees of abuses in red states, it’s precisely because the people there thought cops tasering people protesting (read people exercising their Constitutional rights) is no biggie.
It’s for these reasons, but especially because the red staters voted into power twice these authoritarian jackboot wannabees that I don’t worry one bit if the fucking government they insisted on goes all Pinochet on them. They then will get the government they deserve.
And yes, I’m on the M.U.P. You shoulda heard me before.
Oh brother. There’s lots of tinfoil on that hat.
But have you considered Wal-Mart is merely charging what the market can bear? Maybe they’re soaking Southerners because Wal-Mart knows they’ll suck it up? After Wal-Mart fucked over the downtown and ran the Mom & Pops and small hardware stores and corner groceries out of business, the big hub of social life in the community is now Wal-Marts. Maybe Wal-Mart has become such a big part of their cultural identity now they don’t care if they get dicked over. They’ll gladly pay a premium. It’s a part of their lifestyle now.
It’s like those idiots who drive huge-ass SUVs and got a yellow ribbon magnet on it and a my-son-is-in-Iraq bumpersticker. They don’t care a gas hog car culture undermines their own best interests. They sure loves their SUV. They think the cost is worth it.