Today’s opining on the public discourse.

The verdict is in on Paulson’s “Let’s Bail Out the Idiots on Wall Street With No Oversight!” deal, and it is this: fuck no.

Hilzoy, in fact, is pissed:

Deciding what to do about the present financial crisis is beyond anything remotely resembling my expertise. However, like Steve Benen, I’ve been reading around, and I can’t find a single decent economist who likes the plan. That scares me, since I expect that the political dynamics will go something like this: Paulson has proposed a plan; not to accept it would deeply damage confidence in the markets and make things much worse, regardless of whether it’s
a good plan or not; therefore, it will be passed. I hope the Democrats try to get some decent regulation and structural reform for all that money.

In the meantime, I do have a few other reactions:

First: throughout all this, I’ve been torn between believing in market discipline and wanting to avoid moral hazard on the one hand, and thinking that of course that commitment flies out the window if we’re seriously threatened with economic collapse, on the other. But it’s worth
remembering that we could have avoided having to choose between these unfortunate options. All we needed to do was have people in government who believed in good regulation.

Second: if anyone ever tells me that Republicans are the party of fiscal discipline ever again, I will either dissolve in laughter or bite their heads off. I don’t know which. You have been warned.

Third: in particular, if any Republican ever tells me that a hundred million or so is just too much to pay to make sure that kids have health insurance, I will definitely bite his or her head off.

Fourth: I do not want to hear people tell me that regulation cripples the economy, unless they are willing to admit that a lack of regulation can also cripple the economy. Not ever. I don’t understand why anyone is so much as tempted to think that “regulation” is good or bad, as a whole: to me, that’s like being for or against “things” or “people”. Some regulations are
good, some are bad; obviously, we want people in government who can tell the difference, and implement regulatory systems that work well. However, altogether too many of my fellow citizens were willing to listen to ideologues, and now we all get to pay for their mistakes.

Fifth: if Obama wins, he and the Democrats will, in all probability, have to be the grownups once again. Reagan spent us blind; Clinton got us out of debt again. Now Bush has spent us even blinder, and we will be tempted, yet again, to put our ideas and aspirations on hold for the sake of the country.

I would like to hear one Republican, just once, acknowledge this fact.

Good fucking luck with that.

And the Republicons are up to their usual stupid tricks: the sky is falling, only they can save us, give us unlimited power and money or else. Oh, and fuck the little guys:

Congress and the administration are currently in negotiations over a $700 billion legislative package to relieve financial institutions of their bad mortgage-based assets. At issue is
to what extent the package should also aid Americans facing foreclosures. “We must insulate Main Street from Wall Street and keep people in their homes by reducing mortgage foreclosures,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

On ABC’s This Week today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) rejected relief for Main Street, labeling it simply “partisan politics” and saying that it doesn’t “need to be part of this
package…”

[snip]

Boehner needs to wake up if he thinks help for Americans facing foreclosure is unnecessary because of last year’s housing bill. Foreclosure filings last month increased 27 percent compared to the same month a year ago. Homeless advocacy groups are “reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation” in part because of rising foreclosures.

Direct relief for the middle-class and Americans struggling to stay in their homes should be a necessary part of the bailout package. Ed Paisely of the Center for American Progress explained:

The legislative package that moves rapidly through Congress to implement Paulson’s new plan should also include expanded unemployment benefits and heating assistance for low-income families, increased food stamps, and assistance for states in providing health coverage to families in need during these difficult times. … It would not be right if the rescue only rescues firms and not families.

President Bush also hinted at opposition to direct help for Main Street in a press conference yesterday, stating, “I think most leaders would understand we need to get this done quickly…the cleaner the better.”

Yeah. Bush would know all about clean… and taking responsibility, and all that. After all, he’s done such a bang-up job so far. Think Progress has the list of egregious Bush mis-management of the taxpayer dollar. It is far too long to reproduce here.

I hope the Dems locate their spines, and tell the Cons to go piss up a rope, because this bailout package is nothing more than corporate robbery. Bush and his buddies want to rape this country to death.

Don’t let them.

McCain, unlike Obama, hasn’t come up with a single coherent thing to say in all of this. It’s not surprising. After all, he’ll feel no pain in this economy whatsoever. He’s trying to portray himself as the common man, but how common
is this:

That’s a lot of cars.

When you have seven homes, that’s a lot of garages to fill. After the fuss over the number of residences owned by the two presidential nominees, NEWSWEEK looked into the candidates’ cars. And based on public vehicle-registration records, here’s the score. John and Cindy McCain: 13. Barack and Michelle Obama: one.

One vehicle in the McCain fleet has caused a small flap. United Auto Workers president Ron Gettelfinger, an Obama backer, accused McCain this month of “flip-flopping” on who bought daughter Meghan’s foreign-made Toyota Prius. McCain said last year that he bought it, but then told a Detroit TV station on Sept. 7 that
Meghan “bought it, I believe, herself.” (The McCain campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

A month ago, the McCain campaign launched a television ad that told voters, “Life in the spotlight must be grand, but for the rest of us times are tough.” And the obvious response to McCain continues to be, “What do you mean, ‘us’?”

There is no us, here. And Sarah Palin? Will she be able to answer some of our burning questions? Fuck that – she can’t even face Joe Biden in an open fucking debate:

This may be an elaborate effort to manage expectations, but it seems more likely the McCain campaign is genuinely worried about Sarah Palin’s ability to handle a nationally televised debate.

The Obama and McCain campaigns have agreed to an unusual free-flowing format for the three televised presidential debates, which begin Friday, but the McCain camp fought for and won a much more structured approach for the questioning at the vice-presidential debate, advisers to both campaigns said Saturday.

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival,
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also
be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.

McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive. […]

Fuck the Cons. We need adults in charge now.

Today’s opining on the public discourse.

I know you’re probably reeling from the flurry of punches from Wall Street this week. Time to brace yourselves for the knockout punch. This is the upshot of that grand plan being forced through Congress to Save Wall Street:

Here is the current draft for the latest plan. It’s elegantly simple. The three key provisions: (1) The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled “assets”) [Sec. 6]; (2) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion to accommodate this scheme [Sec. 10]; and (3) best of all: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency” [Sec. 8].

Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.

Go read the whole article. Glenn Greenwald compares it elegantly and chillingly to the naked fearmongering and power-grabs after September 11th and when Bush wanted to get his warrantless wiretapping pushed through. They’re doing the same thing with finance that they did with national security.

Time to get on the phone with your representative and have a chat about adding some safeguards. After all, it’s your money they want to use to bail out the gamblers.

Ian Welsh at Firedoglake breaks it down thusly:

I’ve pasted the text of the bill below the jump. Everyone should read it. But here are the key points:

• No one who foresaw the crisis, such as Krugman or Stiglitz, is involved in making the plan to fix it.
• The man overseeing the bailout is the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street Company. He helped cause the crisis.
• Paulson helped obtain the SEC exemption which allowed brokerages to increase leverage to 60:1 from 12:1.
• The money is Paulson’s to use for buying commercial and residential mortgages and mortgaged backed securities as he chooses. No one has any oversight over him, and he can pay any price he wants to, including face amount of the debt.
• Courts cannot review his decisions, not can any regulators. He has to report to Congress once every six months.
• He gets 700 Billion dollars to use as he sees fit, looking after the taxpayer is a “consideration” not a requirement.
• Bet on that 700 Billion dollars being gone before January 20, 2009. Bet on Treasury asking for more.
• That is $2,324 dollars per man, woman and child in America
• There is no bailout for mortgage holders. Banks get bailed out, but not ordinary people.
• Banks and brokerages made record profits these last eight years. Ordinary Americans barely broke even.
• In 2007 Wall Street paid itself bonuses equal to the raises of 80 million Americans.
• Banks bailed out by this plan need make no changes in how they do business.
• Banks bailed out need not replace the management which drove them into insolvency.
• Shareholders and bondholders of such banks do not lose a cent.
• The securities which caused this crisis are still allowed.
• Expect the 700 billion dollars to increase inflation, especially in oil.
• Bush is asking you to trust his administration with 700 billion after spending 580 billion on the Iraq war. Do you trust him?

Fuck. No.

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, said it best when she kicked Andrew “Blame the Borrowers!” Sullivan square in his doughy little arse:

Klein: The disaster is far from over. They’ve actually just relocated. The disaster was on Wall Street and they have moved the disaster to Main Street by accepting those debts and you said they didn’t have to bomb, the bomb has yet to detonate. The bomb is the debt that has now been transferred to the taxpayers so it detonates when, if John McCain becomes president in the midst of an economic crisis and says look we’re in trouble, we have a disaster on our hands, we have to privatize social security, we can’t afford health care, we can’t afford food stamps, we need more deregulation, more privatization. The thesis of the Shock Doctrine is you need a disaster to rationalize these very unpopular policies so the real disaster has yet to come.The real disaster is the debt that is going to explode on the American taxpayers. And then they do economic shock therapy.

This is exactly what they’re trying to do by bailing out these lenders at the expense of the taxpayers. They’re either setting it up for a convenient disaster if McCain’s elected – in which case, Naomi’s scenario comes into play to give the cons everything they’ve ever wanted – or they’ve just handed Obama an unmitigated disaster they’ll then spend the next four years blaming him for, thus ensuring their return to power.

Let’s not let them get away with it this time. Contact your congresscritter. Contact your senator. Let them know we expect spine. We need to stabilize Wall Street, but not by giving the criminals who got us into this fiasco a free pass, letting them keep all of their ill-gotten gains while turning people like you and me into the victims who have to pay for their crimes. There are ways of achieving the goal of avoiding a complete marketplace meltdown while still ensuring ordinary people are protected and the greedy fuckers responsible get their just desserts.

Now, let’s talk about the unmitigated disaster that is John McCain.

Here’s where he stands on health care:

The McCain campaign probably never even saw it coming. Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries, published an article by John McCain, titled, “Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American” (pdf). As far as the McCain campaign was concerned, few would actually see the piece, and the likelihood of it having a serious impact on the campaign was negligible.

Oops.

Paul Krugman got a heads-up on this jaw-dropper from McCain’s article: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in ba
nking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

Remember, this doesn’t reflect McCain’s thinking from previous years — the article was published in the current, Sept/Oct issue of the magazine. McCain believed, very recently, that the key to “better” care at “lower” costs was to make the healthcare industry look more like the financial industry.

His dumbfuckery doesn’t stop there. This is where he stands on Social Security:

From the AP:

“Wall Street turmoil left John McCain scrambling to explain why the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remained strong. It also left him defending his support for privately investing Social Security money in the same markets that had tanked earlier in the week.

The Republican presidential nominee says all options must be considered to stave off insolvency for the government insurance and retirement program, and top McCain advisers say that includes so-called personal retirement accounts like those President Bush pushed in 2005 but abandoned in the face of congressional opposition.”

I’ll bet he’s scrambling. I can’t imagine anyone would accept the idea of investing their Social Security pension in the stock market with equanimity right now.

[snip]

Besides that, “top McCain advisors” are repeating another complete myth: that personal retirement accounts are a way to “stave off insolvency” for Social Security. If political journalists knew more about policy, McCain’s “top policy advisors” might not have been able to complete the interview, because the reporters would have been laughing too hard. A statement like “all options must be considered to stave off insolvency for the government insurance and retirement program, and (…) that includes so-called personal retirement accounts” is, in fact, on a par with saying something like: “all options must be considered for making people healthier, including encouraging them to start smoking, operate chain saws while drunk, and take long, luxurious baths with their electric appliances.”

It really is exactly that dumb.

Hilzoy’s piece includes some simple stick-figure illustrations that could prove a boon to you in discussions with the terminally hard-of-thinking. According to recent polls, that’s about 45% of the country right now.

Just in case you run into the demented few who swallow McCain’s “Aw, Shucks, I Wouldn’t Do That!” pandering – yes, he would. Even now.

You can show them this simple picture to explain why Obama is a better choice than McCain in this economic climate:

Oh, and McCain, after cheerleading bailouts for a few days, has decided he’s bored now and would like the Fed to stop doing its job:

Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Yeah, about that Surge leading to a downturn in violence and stuff… oops, maybe not:

A new study released today by the University of California, Los Angeles concludes that ethnic violence — not the Bush administration’s surge — was the primary factor in reducing violence in Iraq. As FP Passport notes, researchers used satellite imagery from the Pentagon to track “electricity use in Iraq before, during, and after the surge took place”:

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time,” says Thomas Gillespie, one of the co-authors, in a press release. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.”

In other words, the various factions in Iraq were nearly done killing and expelling the folks they wanted despised when we came charging in with our Surge and claimed that the reduction in violence that followed was all due to our intervention. Looks like certain United States dumbfuck pols – I’m looking at you, McSurge – are going to need lessons in how correlation doesn’t prove causation.

They also need lessons in the realities of fighting terrorism. Namely, the more you piss off people by invading their countries, sending in commandos to shoot indiscriminately, allowing your bestest bidness buddies to gang rape them economically, and strut around talking about how awesome you are, the more people might begin to look at strap-on bombs as the fashion accessory of the year:

The Washington Post confirms that yesterday’s terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaa was the work of an Al Qaeda affiliate, using tactics developed in Iraq:

The use of two vehicle bombs — one to breach the perimeter of a compound, a second to drive inside and explode — is a tactic used by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. […]

He said a new, less-compromising generation of al-Qaeda leaders emerged, many of them moving into action after escaping from a Yemeni prison that year, he said.[…]

The new leaders have found followers among al-Qaeda fighters returning from Iraq. “The quieter it is in Iraq, the more inflamed it is here,” as Yemeni fighters travel back and forth, said Nabil al-Sofee, a former spokesman for a Yemeni Islamist political party who is now an analyst.

Those who have been following the Iraq debate might remember “flypaper theory,” which was one of the earliest exponents of the “incoherent post hoc justifications for the Iraq war” genre. The idea was that there was some limited number of terrorists in the Middle East, and the presence of an occupying U.S. army would lure them to Iraq, whereupon they could all be conveniently killed, presumably as soon as they stepped off the bus.

This plan was prevented from working only by the fact that it was staggeringly dumb. The U.S. occupation radicalized scores of young Muslims, many of whom traveled to Iraq, where they learned terror warfare and were galvanized in the global jihad. And now they’ve begun returning home, to share the tactics and technology developed in a laboratory we provided for them by invading Iraq. The violence in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in May 2007 was one instance of this. Yesterday’s attack in Yemen is another.

What other “staggeringly dumb” policies have unleashed a whirlwind we’re now forced to reap? Oh, yeah – going to play Macho Invaders in Iraq before we’d finished beating the stuffing out of extremeists and putting an effective government in place in Afghanistan:

I know nobody cares, what with the global financial system collapsing around our ears, but things aren’t going too well in Afghanistan these days. Laura King reports:

A summer of heavy fighting during which Western military leaders had hoped to seize the initiative from Islamic militants has instead revealed an insurgency capable of employing complex new tactics and fighting across a broad swath of Afghanistan.

….”In all, we feel that things are going very, very well for us,” said a Taliban field commander in Kandahar province whose men fought hit-and-run battles with Canadian and British forces during the summer, the season when fighting is most intense. “And what is more, time is on our side.”

….In large swaths of the countryside, insurgents have been able to intimidate local officials into cooperating, in part because President Hamid Karzai’s government is perceived to be corrupt and inefficient. “Once, people would look to the government for justice,” said Abdul Qadoos, a businessman and tribal leader in Kandahar province. “Now they go to the Taliban.”

You know what? Even I knew that was going to happen if we just kicked the crap out of the Taliban and then ran off after shiny oil in Iraq without filling the power vacuum – and that was back in 2003, before I’d started studying politics, international relations, war, and insurgencies. Do you know how fucking apalling it is to be more savvy than your own fucking government?

Here’s another thing I saw coming: the fact that a lot of countries with disgusting human rights records would respond with glee to the Bush regime’s decision to use the Constitution as toilet paper and legalize torture. It didn’t take a genius to know they’d point to us and crow, “See? America does it, too!” whenever someone called them out on their abuses. Well, sho ’nuff (h/t Tristero):

Such efforts have provided China’s rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with Ch
ina’s Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI’s massive e-mail-mining operations. “It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.” Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. “Bush helped me get my vision,” he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China’s horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, “There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay.”

That burbling sound you hear is America’s moral authority being sucked down the sewers, my darlings.

Somehow, I don’t think Mr. “No, Really, I Meant to Malign Spain!” McCain is the one to reestablish our credibility. For fuck’s sake, he can only come up with one response to the financial crisis: Obama didit!

In an odd turn, John McCain this morning blamed Barack Obama for the crisis on Wall Street, saying it was Obama’s judgment that “contribut[ed] to these problems,” and it was Obama who was “busy gaming the system,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.

Soon after, Obama delivered a speech in Miami where I think he struck the right note: he accused McCain of feeling “a little panicked.”

“This morning Senator McCain gave a speech in which his big solution to this worldwide economic crisis was to blame me for it,” Obama said.

“This is a guy who’s spent nearly three decades in Washington, and after spending the entire campaign saying I haven’t been in Washington long enough, he apparently now is willing to assign me responsibility for all of Washington’s failures.

“Now, I think it’s a pretty clear that Senator McCain is a little panicked right now. At this point he seems to be willing to say anything or do anything or change any position or violate any principle to try and win this election, and I’ve got to say it’s kind of sad to see. That’s not the politics we need.

“It’s also been disappointing to see my opponent’s reaction to this economic crisis. His first reaction on Monday was to stand up and repeat the line he’s said over and over again throughout this campaign — ‘the fundamentals of the economy are strong’ — the comment was so out of touch that even George Bush’s White House couldn’t agree with it.”

We’ve already seen that the Bush White House couldn’t agree with McLame on foreign policy. Something tells me that angry foreign governments, potential terrorists, and pissed-off civillian victims of war aren’t going to be terribly impressed with the “Blame Obama!” schtick, either. Try telling the rest of the world it’s all Obama’s fault when the world financial markets get dragged down by American corporate greed, fed by the lack of regulations McCain and his economic gurus advocated, and I think we’ll hear howls of derision from one pole to the other.

I think this could be why my own dear Seattle Times had this to say when they endorsed Obama today:

Obama should be the next president of the United States because he is the most qualified change agent. Obama is a little young, but also brilliant. If he sometimes seems brainy and professorial, that’s OK. We need the leader of the free world to think things through, carefully. We have seen the sorry results of shooting from the hip.

Shot from the hip right into our feet, we did. If this keeps up, we won’t have a leg to stand on.

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