Why are House Republicans relevant?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the House only ever needs a simple majority of its members to vote for something. The Democrats should have more than enough.

Republican politicians are often ideological assholes.

But if the crisis is going to end in a depression, would you rather start the depression where we are now or be an additional $700 billion in the hole?

Carl Nyberg makes the salient point: "Republican politicians are often ideological assholes."

No, wait. I meant this one:
"if the crisis is going to end in a depression, would you rather start the depression where we are now or be an additional $700 billion in the hole?"

Only a perverse ideologue would welcome a "purifying" crash.

The Dems are going to have to take control of this situation. Attack the lunatics running the GOP house, make up a primarily Dem package and give it to the White House to sign.

wanna know the weird thing? my mortgage bill came today with a new hundred dollar charge for insurance. I've never paid mortgage insurance before and now it's on my bill and part of the Republican plan?

I love their bailout plan: taxcuts! And McCain is considering throwing in his lot with this crowd. Go John, Go! The wingnuts are going to ride their approval all the way down to zero, like some kind of worthless dotcom stock.

Reading the Corner today was definitely a different experience. They're completely off balance. On the one hand: if Paulson and Bush are telling us we need a bailout, then we have to believe them. But wait... if Gingrich tells us its more important to let the markets fail because that will piss off liberals, maybe we should do that. Yeah, that's the ticket.

They'll be out of political power for a generation.

"It staggers me."

Better toughen up, it's only going to get worse.

I suppose it shouldn't, but it always amazes me that the dipshits at the Corner, Redstate, et al. have a bedrock belief that no matter what happens, THEY'LL still be standing.

Here's a clue: this shit's coming for you, too.

Galbraith in the WAPO:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/24/AR2008092403033.html

Here's a clue: this shit's coming for you, too.

They'll never believe it until they're standing on a street corner begging for change themselves. They still think they're going to be able to sit in their gated communities and not be affected.

You'd think that people who claim to know something about high finance would know that having the banking system collapse is bad for business, but you'll never convince them until they see it for themselves.

Too bad they had to drag the rest of us down with them just so they could see what it would be like.

Gang.. it's too late already. We're already in a liquidity trap. All this is just to position them as against an ineffective bailout to begin with. It's too late to prevent a deep recession. I still think an actual depression would take the utter destruction of the dollar. Bush sucks

"They'll never believe it until they're standing on a street corner begging for change themselves. They still think they're going to be able to sit in their gated communities and not be affected.

You'd think that people who claim to know something about high finance would know that having the banking system collapse is bad for business, but you'll never convince them until they see it for themselves.

Too bad they had to drag the rest of us down with them just so they could see what it would be like."

They're not going to be begging for change because down here) they'll have their dicks knocked in the dirt. They'll beg for a police state to protect them. Guaranteed. McCain gets to play Pinochet.

Think about that statement, and the callousness, lack of imagination, and sheer lack of concern for their country that it shows.

Perhaps these people think, for some reason, that their money is somehow safer and they will continue to have access to it while everyone else is out of luck. Pretty stupid, I know.

For sure dems get the blame if nothing happens. But where is this $$ that has been "lost"?
And why are the oil empires so silent now?
The bushcon people see the fear tactic so successful they want to scare everyone into a do or die corner. Of course everyone chooses do.
Then the looters get some breathing room and continue looting.
Why no questions how bushcon allowed this to happen?
This did not happen overnight.
It took well planned execution down to the exact time this would become public.
And how it would become public.
And what the response would be.
Come on people bushcon owns the media.
All the loot didn't just go away. It was looted.
Just because all the criminals wearing suits talking about this and pretending they are concerned with a fast solution are in charge of the looting.
All the bushcon-corporations have all the money. It's only the people that are down to nothing.
Don't get distracted.
Bushcon is not leaking sewage right now they are pumping it into the media.

As long as it is reported as such, who cares. You could admire the principle had it not been found so late.

Okay, so a question. How long would a 'credit freeze' last? The population is still here, needing basic necessities. Businesses would still need to survive and grow.

There is a ton of money out there, that doesn't want to take on this bad debt that's bundled into crap. So if the holders of the crap died, then someone would emerge to take their place. Not immediately, but soon. And a new entity, unencumbered by the crap, would start pulling in the sidelined money and things would start rolling again.

Someone elsewhere has suggested a 'bank' of smaller banks. Most of the little guys didn't invest in the crap, or at least not as much. So they're pretty safe still. A regional 'bank of banks' would also attract some of the sidelined cash.

It would not be pretty, but would it really be a depression?

"They'll never believe it until they're standing on a street corner begging for change themselves."

I'd prefer that the corner be in Kolkata, India. They'll face the realization that they have to cut off their legs to get any sympathy. Then, maybe, they'll understand how the world really works. Maybe they'll even realize that their salary could buy everyone in the world a mosquito net, which they are now in dire need of. When they realize that they are simply human, maybe they might become humane.

As an aside, I've noticed two kinds of financial entities that don't seem to be in trouble: Muslim banks and credit unions. And Warren Buffett, but he's always okay.

The more it crashes, the less cash they have and the more votes we have as people look up and find out that the Repubs have had their hand in the till.

The more it crashes, the less cash they have and the more votes we have as people look up and find out that the Repubs have had their hand in the till.

They're so rich, they'd be fine. They don't give a damn what happens to anyone else if there's a depression. After all, this could be the slippery slope of government spending that leads to, gasp, universal healthcare and actual belief in the power of government to help people. Maybe even higher taxes on the wealthy someday.

Amazing. The Fed can magically afford a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street criminals, but the people next door to me still can't get healthcare. And the best Little Lord Pissypants managed to come up with last night was to stomp his feet and recycle his old, "If you don't give me complete, unchecked, unregulated power, the turrists win." 15 minutes. He and his buddies are directly responsible for this economy going down the shitter, and the best that fascist little Jesus freak could give us was 15 minutes of "Best of Karl Rove."

My brother-in-law is advocating public stonings as a community-building exercise. Sure would relieve a lot of stress! And people would get exercise and do something constructive!

It's a trick question..."for the sake of the altar of the free market system...do you accept a great depression?"....is really not much different than accept the great depression caused by the offerings on the great free market altar...and quick, offer up as much as you can come up with (say $700 bil.) to welcome the great depression. Yet those that caused it...their greed...still keep the billions they have earned and their only loss is not receiving the billions they had planned to continue receiving. The wealthy will not lose their homes or pay a personal cost like the average worker is about to...Blackmail: Bail out the rich or they will make us suffer even more??

Up is down. North is South.

The Democrats are supporting Bush.

Republicans don't want Democrats to help Wall Street.

Oregon St beat USC.

I am slowly losing my sanity. My only crutch is my utter confidence that whatever bill passes will inevitably cause more problems than it solves.

You can't beat Murphy or the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Since I'm not a citizen of the USA, I have a couple of questions:
1.) Since the house is democratic, why can't the Dems in the house not sign the proposed bill?
2.) Since not all Reps are insane: why do they need to listen to some right-wing extremist from - of all - Alabama? Why can't they vote together with the Dems?
3.) If there really are people in the Congress who are willing to risk a depression: why not just letting them vote with "no" - and subsequently make them known for what they were willing to do?

I honestly cannot understand the situation (and believe me: this is widespread in the world outside USA since 8 years). Can someone with insight please explain?

Vokoban, a proper answer to your questions would take awhile. Let's just say that once upon a time the good guys in American journalism were taken seriously. For example, Edward R. Murrow was very good at knocking down demagogues, charlatans and authoritarians. Unfortunately, the American media now features demagogues, charlatans and authoritarians as coequal to Democrats, sensible independents and even traditional Republicans who are not associated with the right-wingers. This started long before 9/11. Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay are demagogues with a strong authoritarian streak who started being taken seriously by the media in the early 1990s. Limbaugh, who is the most buffoonish of the three, was once introduced by a major news network as a 'distinguished journalist.' It has been hell ever since.

The problem, complicated though it is, comes down to the media giving the most attention to those who wave their arms, jump up and down, and huff and puff the most. This is the behavior most closely associated with what are called authoritarian dominators: people with no moral scruples whatsoever. These are the clowns who dominate the leadership of the Republican Party and the punditocracy that backs them up. Republican senators are generally more moderate but they are utterly unwilling to stand up to the demagogues in the House or even those in their midst. That's the predicament we're in. Because these demagogues keep fooling just enough people to get a majority or somehow manage to block the actions of the majority by manipulative procedures, the ability of the United States to respond to serious systemic problems is currently severely impaired. Despite being one of the least corrupt nations for decades, the U.S. has essentially succumbed to a bad case of the disease.

People are trying to do something about the mess because many of us know for a fact that the clock is ticking not just on the United States but on the world. Global Warming is only one of the very large threats that we are all facing. The Republicans are obsessed with an inflexible ideological market philosophy that makes it impossible to respond effectively to Global Warming, job creation, energy issues, health care, resource depletion, pollution, forest destruction, desertification, overfishing, etc.

Craig,

thanks for taking your time to answer my question! One would hope though that in these times some people in the House or Senate voted their conscious (as opposed to their party).

I'm from Germany - and watching your nation turning into a crater over the last eight years was an experience I would like to have missed in my lifetime. It first was a shock, then bewilderment and now it closes in on the absurd - from the other side.

Usually this is the time where parties break up and reform along different parameters. But this doesn't seem to be the case in the US.

And I agree: the sorry state of your media proves to be a powerful tool to destruct democracies. One could think this happened with some foresight.

State banks vs the Federal government. Certainly many saw it coming.

Greg suggested we take the "bailout bucks" and set up 7 centers throughout the United States with people of integreity in charge.

Americans being bullied in their own living rooms.... yikes. however, our Commander in Chief is our leader and name calling and blame seems a waste of precious time when we need to focus on "best case senario" vs "worst case senario". America has everything it needs to survive, including citizens of grit. God bless the United States of America.

Look, these Republican sphincters are going to politicize this mess, regardless of what Democrats do. We already have uber-bimbo Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota saying that these bad loans were caused by Bill Clinton's expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act, despite the utter lack of supporting evidence for that assertion. These people are irrational criminals.

I'm in the camp that says, "let it all come crashing down and blame the GOP". That might put them out of power (where they belong) for the next 40 years, like the last Depression did.

It's not that Republicans wanted this crisis, they didn't want the responsibility of preventing this crisis. This way they had a permanent criticism of Democrats -- Democrats favor regulation over free markets.

It also allowed Republicans to cling to the notion that cutting taxes and de-regulation lead to economic prosperity. Well, now we see that only happens when certain other conditions are present, like sound private investments, a secure tax base, balanced budgets, peace.

Simply put, Democrats learned the lessons of the Great Depression 70 years ago. Republicans have been in denial ever since, and now look has been squandered after eight years of George Bush in office.

And here we have an unpredictable, petulant, admittedly ignorant loose cannon named McCain trying to take this failed ideology five more yards down the field? Unbelievable, simply unbelievable. Republicans are behaving like children with power they don't know how to use. They are leading this country right over the precipice.

I think we need some 5th graders in Congress, because these guys don't seem to be as smart as some.

State of Maine tried to move %50 million of AA-rated bonds this week, to finance road repairs. The last batch sold at 3.9%

This week: no takers. At any price. So the jobs don't get done. Which idles the work crews, while the roads get worse.

This is what 'doing nothing' looks like, at a very small scale.

Y'know, it's not as if we haven't seen this train-wreck coming; the overall crisis we now "suddenly" (yeah---there's a cop-out word if I've ever seen one---fuckwits, one and all) find ourselves in is identical to the sheer stupidity of owning an SUV in the realm of peak oil production---on the downhill side of the peak. Now that no one wants to buy your SUV, I'm being told by Herr Bush and his band of bat-shitters that I have to pony up and contribute to paying all the costs for your SUV, to the tune of $700 billion, with absolutely no guarantee that this will fix the problem.

I didn't make this mess; I didn't contribute to the making of this mess; I didn't profit one damned-able penny from this mess, but I've been paying for it all along---and now I'm going to be "legislated" into bearing even more responsibility for it?

Sure---that last sentence looks very, very stingy, doesn't it? But take those 45 words---46, if you count "damned-able" as 2 words---and extrapolate them to represent every man, woman, and child; not only in the United States, but every last one on the planet.

THAT is what these bailouts represent.

We're not discussing just 1 bailout; we're ultimately looking at every last dime that the Fed has tossed into this endlessly-flushing toilet called Wall Street, and all the other basket-currencies tossed into other high-finance sectors across the globe by the other central banks. It's been going on for more than a year now; a billion here, a hundred billion there---and to-date, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 or 3 trillion dollars in national debt (that's just here in the US; Europe's no better off, and don't even get me started on the hyper-disaster-in-the-making that's Asia) that's been artificially created, just to line investors' pockets with.

Just a matter of a week or so ago, we were throwing tens of billions into the system---with the promise that "this will fix the problem."

Now, we're throwing hundreds of billions at the same problem---that same, endlessly-flushing toilet I mentioned a handful of lines ago---but the "promise" has become desperately desperate: "This has to work."

I ask a simple question, and simply expect an equally-simple answer: When this doesn't work, what is the next step? Do we start throwing trillions of dollars, then tens of trillions of dollars, and then HUNDREDS of trillions of dollars down that endlessly-flushing toilet?

Or do we finally resign ourselves to the fact that it's time to toss what obviously amounts to a broken toilet to the curb?

No one yet seems to realize that these endless efforts to perform a miracle synonymous to raising the broken, rotted-out remains of the Titanic has diminished the buying power of the USD to a dangerous level, at a time when such diminishment is least needed. In case everyone has forgotten, let me lay a little "factuality" on you:

1.)The United States is in the Northern Hemisphere.

2.)The agricultural season for the United States is just now ending (which means we're not growing our own food any more---it's somewhat difficult to maintain the production of fresh fruits and vegetables when the weather gets cold).

3.) Our supply of fresh fruits, vegetables, and grain-products---now shifts to the Southern Hemisphere.

4.) The producers of our food---who live in that Southern Hemisphere---are not going to charge us the same prices as a year ago, if the USD has been sorely depressed. They will charge more for the same amount of food. A LOT more.

So---that's how I see this "choice" over yet another bailout package. Do I let the Street go into a crash-dive, or do I feed my family this winter?

Starve a profit-mongering investment banker---or starve my kids?

Tough choice, isn't it?

And no---the wafting-aroma-from-the-kitchen of a stockbroker stuffed into my oven (350*F for x-number of hours, with lemon and basil) does not appeal to me.

I don't do that "Soylent Green" thingie....

Vokoban,

1.) Since the house is democratic, why can't the Dems in the house not sign the proposed bill?

Sure, they could do that with a party-line vote. The problem is that this is a very large sum of money ($2,000+ per person in the US), and spending it all at once will have a large and painfully tangible impact on the lives of the population. Finances are tight for many people (Americans habitually depend on heavy borrowing to maintain their lifestyle), and when the cost feeds through into higher taxes, it's going to hurt. That's where the hostility of the electorate comes from. If the Democrats pass this legislation alone without Republican participation, they will be destroyed in the election -- probably several elections. That's not right, but you only get to live one reality, and the Republican argument (amplified further by Limbaugh and friends) would be, "everything would have been fine without the bailout, the Democrats blew all this cash for nothing because they're irresponsible by nature".

2.) Since not all Reps are insane: why do they need to listen to some right-wing extremist from - of all - Alabama? Why can't they vote together with the Dems?

The Republicans have run on the promise of smaller government, lower taxes, and less government interference. (I know, I know, they have delivered precisely the opposite during the last 8 years, but there it is.) They have also campaigned by transforming the word "Democrat" into an obscenity in the minds of the childish and impressionable persons that make up the base of their party. Anyone who sided with the Democrats to vote for this bill would be implicitly branded as a deserter, because the strategy of the demagogues that control the core Republican Party machinery, if the plan is passed with broad Democratic support, would be to castigate the plan and everyone associated with it as a sellout of the American public. There would also be punishments (committee memberships and chairmanships denied, various other forms of ostracism) for those not toeing party line.

3.) If there really are people in the Congress who are willing to risk a depression: why not just letting them vote with "no" - and subsequently make them known for what they were willing to do?

As above, you only get to live one reality, and in the other reality (the road not taken), Supply Side Economics or whatever, the markets would have corrected themselves, the common man would have gone back to watching reruns of As the World Turns, and the world would have witnessed the resurgent power of the Mighty American Economy Phallus.

Steve @ 7:06 AM got me wondering... does anyone know whatever became of this...

Ben Stein almost lets out the Big Secret

The crisis occurred (to greatly oversimplify) because the financial system allowed entities to place bets on whether or not those mortgages would ever be paid. You didn't have to own a mortgage to make the bets. These bets, called Credit Default Swaps, are complex. But in a nutshell, they allow someone to profit immensely - staggeringly - if large numbers of subprime mortgages are not paid off and go into default.

The profit can be wildly out of proportion to the real amount of defaults, because speculators can push down the price of instruments tied to the subprime mortgages far beyond what the real rates of loss have been. As I said, the profits here can be beyond imagining. (In fact, they can be so large that one might well wonder if the whole subprime fiasco was not set up just to allow speculators to profit wildly on its collapse...)

These Credit Default Swaps have been written (as insurance is written) as private contracts. There is nil government regulation of them. Who writes these policies? Banks. Investment banks. Insurance companies. They now owe the buyers of these Credit Default Swaps on junk mortgage debt trillions of dollars. It is this liability that is the bottomless pit of liability for the financial institutions of America.

Just who does Bush think we are: The Texas Rangers?!!!

Let it all come crashing down and then start rebuilding under president Obama. $700B can put a lot of people to work on a lot of infrastructure projects and give us national healthcare (especially if the insurance companies who lobbied heavily against healthcare fails). It would be healthier in the long run if the crazy banks fail and Americans all learn a lesson about speculative excess.

Let it all come crashing down and then start rebuilding under president Obama. $700B can put a lot of people to work on a lot of infrastructure projects and give us national healthcare (especially if the insurance companies who lobbied heavily against healthcare fails). It would be healthier in the long run if the crazy banks fail and Americans all learn a lesson about speculative excess.

This is where I sit as well. Let them fail as an object lesson.

They're going to fail ANYWAY. There were plenty of "plans" to save the economy in 1930, and none of them worked.

Use the money for New Deal II.

Relax, it's when they arrest Democrats that we should start to worry.

Thanks, beep, for the Stein quote.

It makes me realize that one of the pillars of sand propping up the Republican free market illusion is that if there is some crazy-ass way to monetize debts (through debt swaps or whatever) this justifies a complete government "hands-off" approach to the capital markets.

In other words, as long as some flim-flam financier with an MBA can do a regression analysis that shows a way to game the monetary system with yet one more financial scheme this somehow completely validates the free market.

These Wall Street wizards of finance and their sycophantic wannabes in Congress are bankrupt, utterly delusional. Many members of Congress deciding our fate right now are no smarter than McCain and Palin when it comes to the economy.

Our economic fate is in the hands of people who finished fourth from the bottom of their class in college. It's come down to this -- the guys who didn't do their homework, skipped class and flunked tests are revolting against the heads of the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and their own party to decide the fate of the international monetary system. God save us.

Coda:

I hope one thing we learn from this crisis is that you need subject matter expertise to be a good leader. Too much attention to theatricality diminishes the role of serious leaders.

This is the heart of it. House Republicans are not trying to tie things up in order to find a better solution than the compromise bill moving forward in Congress. They do not want any solution at all if it involves government in any way. That is why the only thing they could offer was another capital gains tax cut.

The reality is that these hard right wing Republicans do not know how to live in a world that actually believes government can be part of the solution instead of always being the problem itself. When the dust settles after this crisis I think we will recognize that we have reached the end of the Reagan Era. Grover Norquist will no longer be able to get Republicans to sign his anti-government pledges because there will be a new appreciation that our democratic community, acting through the instruments of our democratic state, matters in our daily lives.

And these Republicans do not have it in them to let Reagan and his anti-government mantras go. They are lost without him. They don't know how to govern except as agents for more and more tax cuts and smaller government -- no matter how big the deficit gets. Their heads would literally explode if they had to operate in a world where markets were flawed and required collective policing by the state to keep them working. They have no experience with that and don't want to learn or evolve. Like most reactionaries, they would rather take all of us down with them and see our economy go into depression than rethink their cherished ideals about the purity of the free market. Look at that idiot from Kentucky, Sen. Bunning, for god's sake, talking about the "socialism" and "communism" in a bailout bill offered by the most conservative president in a century.

The free ride for the free market is over, just as it was in 1929, and these House Republicans just don't know how to go back to their delusional conservative constituencies that they have worked so hard to gerrymander and tell them that the days of Ronald Reagan are over and a New Day for American democratic capitalism is dawning.

Think about that statement, and the callousness, lack of imagination, and sheer lack of concern for their country that it shows. It staggers me.

Now it staggers you? Dear Hilzoy, I have to ask: What country have you been living in for the last 40 years?

Way too much credit is being given the GOP House members, and the strange folk at the right wing sites. This "plan" isn't about governance; they have never cared about actual governance as far as I can tell. It's about political theater, setting up future talking points when they know they will be even more powerless than they are now, and rallying what supporters they still have. It's strategic.

To people who regard integrity as a character flaw, messing with adults in the room is both sport and a future opportunity. The adults must respond constructively, which is much harder but absolutely necessary anyway because the failure to treat the voters as adults so far has left this opening. The first step is to tell us what Paulson and Breneke told them. I suspect that some of it will be embarrassing to Pelosi and Reid, but so be it. Then, there needs to be an honest assessment of what the problem is. It's pretty clear that liquidity is only part of what is driving this crisis and it is far from clear that the framework originally proposed by Paulson will do anything beyond enriching his cronies. We don't need a blue ribbon commission, but a panel of eminent economists at a prime time joint hearing of House and Senate committees might coalesce opinion around sensible proposals. Come back with that, ignore the GOP House members that won't grow up, and present the White House with a better plan, widely supported, and dare them to plunge us into a depression immediately before an election. The Republicans think they have set a trap. I hope that the politicians on my side can show them both what responsible governance can do, and what real political risk looks like.

Think about that statement, and the callousness, lack of imagination, and sheer lack of concern for their country that it shows.

It staggers me.
=====

Why? These are Republicans. What's surprising about any of this?

State of Maine tried to move %50 million of AA-rated bonds this week, to finance road repairs. The last batch sold at 3.9%

This week: no takers. At any price. So the jobs don't get done. Which idles the work crews, while the roads get worse.

This is what 'doing nothing' looks like, at a very small scale.

And I still have to ask, though, why it wouldn't be better for the government to set aside hundreds of billions, even on the order of $1 Trillion, to directly purchase these worthwhile new investments that also contribute directly to the public welfare to keep the economy going, rather than having the government spend the same amount of taxpayer money buying bad investments at above market value from the banks whose poor decisions caused this mess in the hopes that they will then make both financially wise and socially productive investment decisions with the taxpayer money that has been gifted to them.

Doing something ill-advised isn't the only alternative to doing nothing.

Screw the banks, make credit default swaps retroactively illegal and at most those investors get back what they invested.

Give the money to the people who are having trouble paying their mortgages.

They keep their homes, the banks ultimately get the money they are rightfully owed.

If anyone who invested in a credit default swap gets a dime out of this it will be not better than paying for your own rape kit.

Obama-McCain Joint Statement on Bush "Bailout" Plan

"The American people are facing a moment of economic crisis. No matter how this began, we all have a responsibility to work through it and restore confidence in our economy. The jobs, savings, and prosperity of the American people are at stake.

"Now is a time to come together -- Democrats and Republicans -- in a spirit of cooperation for the sake of the American people. The plan that has been submitted to Congress by the Bush Administration is flawed, but the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.

"This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country."

This is the kind of "bipartisanship" that Joe Lieberman can be proud of.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Only seven percent (7%) of voters think the federal government should use taxpayer funds to keep a large financial institution solvent. Sixty-five percent (65%) say let the company file for bankruptcy.

Source: Rasmussen Reports

Sorry, Hilzoy,

Not with you.

Passing a bailout that doesn't call for true accountability simply reloads the same broken system with more money to squander.

Any company receiving a bailout because it's "too big to fail" needs to be split up so that future economic irresponsibility WILL lead to corporate death.

The current BS about CEO's pulling 400k just means the VP will make 18 mill and really run the show while the mail room guy gets a squeaky new title and signs off on the press releases. Has Dick Cheney's power model taught us NOTHING about placing undue importance on a man's title?

Equity in any company receiving a bailout isn't bad either, but that just makes the company that much less likely to be allowed to fail and that company can then blame the government ownership and obstructionist regulations for future failures caused by recklessness.

the LACK of free markets is the reason to take your chances with a depression rather than keep this sickly farce of capitalism alive a few more years until we find ourselves STILL at the mercy of a handful of huge incompetent corporations.

Anti-trust efforts have been mentioned by Bernie Sanders, but no one else. This is the fruit Bill Cliton's pro-business paradigm has wrought,. Almost no one is willing to speak up for the benefits of creative destruction because all the current players have stuffed 5 spots into both parties' g-strings.

cmdicely, I'm sure the Maine DOT is agnostic about where the $50 million comes from. But the choice in any real-world scenario is binary -- from floating a bond (it's actually an revenue-anticipation note, based on gas taxes and vehicle registration fees) on Wall Street, or nothing.

Because a direct subvention to the states for public works, however logical, however desirable, is just not going to happen with the polity we actually have.

This is all straight out of the Nazi playbook:

1)The above-the-law, answerable to no one Blackwater mercenaries are in place

2) The cowed, complicit Congress and public are terrorized by the 387 or so extremist fanatics that the largest, most sophisticated, most technologically advanced military in the entire history of the entire world cannot seem to locate much less eradicate

3) Media consolidated in the hands of a few

4) Last step: devalue the currency

The total fascist takeover nearly complete

What I find so stupidly amusing is the credibility you assign to the same "experts" now claiming the sky is falling who were saying everything was "contained" three months ago. Has it ever occurred to you that they're just wrong?

You DON'T have any clue about how precarious the financial system is. No one else does either. But I'll guarantee you that Paulson knows just how he's going to take 7x10e9 bucks and spend them.

Stop being naive and suggesting that people who oppose the bailout are really saying they want the system to crash and burn. What they are really saying is that they don't think it will and that the chicken little tactics of Ben&Hanky Inc. are geared to bailing out Wall Street and nothing else.

I'm inclined to agree. That's not unpatriotic.

It's becoming more apparent that letting Democrats and Republicans try and figure this thing out is about the same as giving a blank check to Wall Street to run the tables again.

Everyone has a personal agenda.

Bring in the top economists from around the country and hammer something out.

Democrats are afraid to push the "modified" Paulson plan for fear of failure. Republican would rather make up their own plan good or bad so they can give McCain credit for something we wouldn't know would work or not until after the election.

It would be interesting to know the course of events if this was not 40 days before election. Paulson is part of Bush Administration isn't he?

Hitting this bottom was absolutely necessary to motivate a new direction for government...making it more efficient and a bigger regulator of our economy. It is our government, not some alien force and we collectively can solve our collective problems. We have the solutions and always have but those very greedy among us have neglected to try to make government work for all of us and not just them. You stop thriving when your thriving becomes detrimental to the nation as a whole.

The republicans have wrecked America...leading to the great depression...again. Unregulated greed will do it every time. Government composed of us, for us, can efficiently preserve our democracy but it always means a sharing of the wealth so no person becomes too wealthy or too poor. This is the balance republican policies disrupt by removing economic regulations. Rather than try to make government efficient they try to make sure it doesn't work...they treat it like a club rather than a deliberative function by the people. They use government to reward and punish rather than solve problems or find solutions. They need to go and let caring serious people restore our democracy and end this corporatocracy.

For years the conservative mantra for creating smaller government was to "starve the beast." Cut funding for the government and government spending will have to decrease, and thus governmental power. Of course, with Bush in power they've starved the beast and bled it at the same time. They defunded and over-spent. The problem is that our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people. The "beast" is us. Ah, terror- the masses. But while intending to starve and shrink bureaucracy, new beasts have risen through greed and cronyism into a stumbling plutocracy. And suddenly this new beast is starving. And the democracy, we the people, are being asked to feed it. The powers that be will be lucky if they don't get socialism in exchange.
Populism is alive, the people are just struggling to remember how to wield power after being smothered for so long.
Change is a dangerous word for McCain to be throwing around. People may just wake up to what it means.