The Jaundiced Eye of a Citizen or Kill the Bailout

Earlier this evening, Senators McCain and Obama voted for the Paulson bailout plan in the Senate, a plan essentially unchanged in its primary offensiveness from what Paulson originally proposed. We oppose the bailout. Intervention is necessary, but this is not the right solution set. Someone on POTUS 08 likened it to a fleet of ships on a lake. Some of them are sinking, and the response is to blow up the dam and drain the lake. The plan itself is the wrong solution and worse still, it is a wrong solution that will be implemented by the administration with some meddling by Congress, both of whom in the aggregate are a bunch of bumbling cretins.

Hunter @ Daily Kos captures my own sense of outrage well:

".....what this week has demonstrated more than anything else is that I, at least, have absolutely zero trust left that members of congress or the administration or the talking heads on the cable channels will ever, if left to their own devices, do the right thing.

I have lost absolutely all faith that any politician, anywhere, under any circumstances, when faced with the immediate presence of a lobbyist for the corporate world but only the vague, abstract premise of a public to be served, would make the right choice.

The underlying problem -- and you can think back on that lovely Bush administration interpretation of the "signing statement," for an example here -- is that whatever this $700 billion dollar bill looks like, it's going to be implemented in practice by some of the most corrupt and incompetent jackasses ever to grace the halls of power. We're talking about nearly a trillion dollars of money we don't have, which we are going to be indebted for into the far-distant future, to do nothing but patch the most immediate structural flaw of a market that, even when the flaw is patched, will be only barely functional."

This bailout is a sham solution to solve the self inflicted money problems of Wall Street firms unwilling to live with the consequences of their actions. Yes, there is a problem within the financial system, but there are prudent interventions to address that problem that do not carry the risks and pitfalls of the Bush-Paulson plan. We, the public, are being conned via the use of a false sense of emergency and crisis. Our legislators are being stampeded into providing a taxpayer funded windfall to the financial sector and they are either to stupid, too corrupt and bought off, or both to resist the siren call of Paulson and the lobbyists to pass this abomination of a bill. That goes for McCain and Obama too.

The American public knows its getting screwed. We've been communicating that to our legislators, but too many of them, aided by complicit media conglomerates, have decided that the public is too stupid to understand the problem. The fact is that our instincts that are screaming "this is BS" are right on the money. Call your legislators in the House and tell them don't pass the Paulson plan. Call your Senators and thank them if they voted no and to complain if they voted yes.