I Am Now Officially Furious
Sep. 23rd, 2008 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsFor the past few days, we've been reading about the meltdown on Wall Street. We've heard vague details about how these huge companies have pumped up their on-paper value with "toxic" credit, much of which has been blamed (fairly and unfairly) on a mortgage mess where some matrix of irresponsibilty, gullibility, incompetence, desperation and greed met a similar matrix on the other side. In the middle, rating agencies illicitly or incompetently certified these "bundled" collections of mortgage paper as "guaranteed not to fail," and those guarantees were used to create more credit. The whole house of cards has now come crashing down, and you and I are left to pay the bill.
We are in the hands of an operation that must make the Mafia green with envy. Wall Street is now telling us, "That's a nice economy we had there, but it's turned sour. Give us $700 billion dollars or I'll have to hurt you much, much worse."
Bastards.
And now Congress is scrambling, shouting "We have to do something!," even while they admit they have no idea what will help, and Henry Paulson is telling us he needs that $700 billion dollars now. Or else.
This will raise our national debt, put a huge hole in the national budget, and condemn you, me, all of us, and all of our children, to repairing the damage caused by, well, by pretty much everything that's happened since the ContractOn With America. It will destroy businesses, slow down the credit market, and trash our economy anyway. "Just not as bad without it." Oh, and we're being sold this bullshit in Augean volumes, as this morning Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota) said, "The government could make 10 or 20 times what it pays on this." Where have we heard that before?
So what do we learn today? In a short, almost unnoticed article in Roll Call, "The official newspaper of Capitol Hill," I read this:
All of this "emergency powers" stuff that Henry Paulson says he wrote up this weekend, that he needs now, that you don't have the time to review or the wisdow and training to comprehend, has been in the works for months.
Forgive me, I'm losing it. I winced last night when I dialed past Mark Levin trying to blame "regulation" for this problem (go read Roubini's analysis of what's happening to the unregulated "shadow banking" system this week and see if Levin is even on our world) and hit Randi Rhodes claiming that this was the neocons' last act of class warfare against the American working class, indenturing us to their rulership for generations to come.
But Fratto's little confession makes me realize that she's probably right: this is an opportunistic moment when those with the power see their vast reserves of cash as the best way to ride out the coming disaster, at the end of which you and I will still be responsible for paying off the debt with which our political leaders saddled all of us, just so their oligarchal masters can keep their personal Lear jets.
We are in the hands of an operation that must make the Mafia green with envy. Wall Street is now telling us, "That's a nice economy we had there, but it's turned sour. Give us $700 billion dollars or I'll have to hurt you much, much worse."
Bastards.
And now Congress is scrambling, shouting "We have to do something!," even while they admit they have no idea what will help, and Henry Paulson is telling us he needs that $700 billion dollars now. Or else.
This will raise our national debt, put a huge hole in the national budget, and condemn you, me, all of us, and all of our children, to repairing the damage caused by, well, by pretty much everything that's happened since the Contract
So what do we learn today? In a short, almost unnoticed article in Roll Call, "The official newspaper of Capitol Hill," I read this:
[White House Deputy Press Secretary Antonio] Fratto insisted that the plan was not slapped together and had been drawn up as a contingency over previous months and weeks by administration officials. He acknowledged lawmakers were getting only days to peruse it, but he said this should be enough.Re-read that. "Ought to be enough," every square inch of my festering colon.
All of this "emergency powers" stuff that Henry Paulson says he wrote up this weekend, that he needs now, that you don't have the time to review or the wisdow and training to comprehend, has been in the works for months.
Forgive me, I'm losing it. I winced last night when I dialed past Mark Levin trying to blame "regulation" for this problem (go read Roubini's analysis of what's happening to the unregulated "shadow banking" system this week and see if Levin is even on our world) and hit Randi Rhodes claiming that this was the neocons' last act of class warfare against the American working class, indenturing us to their rulership for generations to come.
But Fratto's little confession makes me realize that she's probably right: this is an opportunistic moment when those with the power see their vast reserves of cash as the best way to ride out the coming disaster, at the end of which you and I will still be responsible for paying off the debt with which our political leaders saddled all of us, just so their oligarchal masters can keep their personal Lear jets.
