October 2, 2008
It was the opportunity for a “game-changing move” in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Just as John McCain was dropping back in the polls, providing Barack Obama the chance to “close the deal” even more decisively than he did with Hillary Clinton, McCain missed the opportunity to turn the game around. Last week, he arrived in Washington (after the pseudo-suspension of his campaign) on a mission to save us all from the crisis declared by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. After McCain arrived, he found a number of both Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives opposed to the revised, 110-page, economic “bailout bill” (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008). At that point in time, McCain had the opportunity to break with the unpopular Bush Administration and band together with the 133 Republican and 95 Democratic House members (who eventually voted against the bill) to form a “coalition of mavericks” (oxymoron, non-sequitur or both?) resisting this bailout of the big banks and other “fat cats” on Wall Street. He didn’t. He chose instead, to copy whatever Barack Obama was doing. Besides, his move dovetailed well with the pseudo-“bipartisan” duet he had been playing, throughout the entire campaign, with Joe “The Tool” Lieberman. Had McCain stood with those 133 young Republican members of the House and the 95 Democrats (many of whom consider themselves conservative, “Blue Dog” Democrats) he could have re-ignited his flatulent campaign. (Is it really safe to do that? — Let’s ask Johnny Knoxville.)
Howard Fineman provided an interesting retrospective of this phase in the evolution the economic “bailout bill” at the Newsweek website on September 30:
The Paulson Plan is not great. Some two hundred academic economists have ridiculed it, and so have the House Republicans, by a 2-1 margin. Public opinion (and not just the angry phone callers) is turning against the measure—to the extent that anybody understands it.
But the consensus is that Washington has to do something, and that the current version is far better than what the lawmakers started with.
McCain made a show of returning to Washington to try to jam the original measure through. He deserves credit for the instinct. An old Navy motto is: Don’t just stand there, DO something! That is McCain to the core, and so much the better for it.
But when he got to town, he realized something that no one had bothered to tell him, apparently: the grassroots of his own party (the grassroots that has never really trusted him) hated the Paulson Plan. They weren’t about to support it and risk their own necks. McCain worked the phones, but fell back in the ranks.
When the second revision of this bill (at over 400 pages) finally made it to the Senate floor for the vote on Wednesday, October 1, there were 9 Democrats, 15 Republicans and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, voting against it. McCain again missed the opportunity for a truly bipartisan resistance to this measure. Such an act would have demonstrated genuine leadership. He could have rejoined his old buddy, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, as well as Florida Democrat Bill Nelson and rising Democratic star, Maria Cantwell from the State of Washington, all of whom voted against this measure. Such a move would have emboldened resistance to the “bailout bill” in the House of Representatives, where the term of office lasts only two years. (The short term results in greater accountability to American voters, who are believed to have notoriously short memory spans.)
Is this bill really necessary? On the October 1 edition of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, Economics Professor at Princeton University, admitted that:
… it will be relatively ineffective, although rejecting it will cause a big run on the system. Then we will come back and do it right in January or February …
When Keith Olbermann asked Krugman about the likelihood that nothing consequential would happen if this bill did not pass, Krugman responded by saying that such possibilities have “shrunk in the past week”. Krugman went on to claim that “the credit crunch has started to hit Main Street”, using, as an example, the rumor that: “McDonald’s has started to cut credit to its franchisees.” McDonald’s has issued a press release stating that this was not the case. What is really happening is that the banks are acting like spoiled children, holding their breath until the government gives them what they want, using the threat of unavailable credit as a gun to the head of Congress.
Public opposition to this bailout was best summed up by Peggy Noonan, when she appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on October 1:
But we are in a real economic crisis and the American political establishment said we must do A, B and C to deal with it and the American people … said: “No. We don’t trust you to handle this. We don’t trust you to do the right thing.”
John McCain had the opportunity to stand with those people, as well as the 133 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans, to do “the right thing”. He decided to forego that opportunity. Barack Obama said, on the Senate floor Wednesday, that it was not worth risking the American economy and the world economy by challenging this bill. John McCain decided that it was not worth risking his Presidential campaign on such a challenge. That’s too bad for him. The gamble probably would have paid off.
The New Welfare Queens
February 26, 2009
In 1999, UCLA Professor Franklin D. Gilliam wrote a report for Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. That paper concerned a study he had done regarding public perception of the “welfare queen” stereotype and how that perception had been shaped by the media. He discussed how the term had been introduced by Ronald Reagan during the 1976 Presidential campaign. Reagan told the story of a woman from Chicago’s South Side, who had been arrested for welfare fraud. The term became widely used in reference to a racist (and sexist) stereotype of an iconic African-American woman, enjoying a lavish lifestyle and driving a Cadillac while cheating the welfare system.
Ten years after the publication of Gilliam’s paper, we have a new group of “welfare queens”: the banks. The banks have already soaked over a trillion dollars from the federal government to remedy their self-inflicted wounds. Shortly after receiving their first $350,000,000,000 in payments under the TARP program (which had no mechanism of documenting where the money went) their collective reputation as “welfare queens” was firmly established. In the most widely-reported example of “corporate welfare” abuse by a bank, public outcry resulted in Citigroup’s refusal of delivery on its lavishly-appointed, French-made, Falcon 50 private jet. Had the sale gone through, Citi would have purchased the jet with fifty million dollars of TARP funds. Now, as they seek even more money from us, the banks chafe at the idea that American taxpayers, economists and political leaders are suggesting that insolvent (or “zombie”) banks should be placed into temporary receivership until their “toxic assets” are sold off and their balance sheets are cleaned up. This has been referred to as “nationalization” of those banks.
Despite all the bad publicity and public outrage, banks still persist in their welfare abuse. After all, they have habits to support. Their “drug” of choice seems to be the lavish golf outing at a posh resort. The most recent example of this resulted in Maureen Dowd’s amusing article in The New York Times, about a public relations misstep by Sheryl Crow.
The New Welfare Queens have their defenders. CNBC’s wildly-animated Jim Cramer has all but pulled out his remaining strands of hair during his numerous rants about how nationalization of banks “would crush America”. A number of investment advisors, such as Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Company, have also voiced objections to the idea of bank nationalization.
Another defender of these welfare queens appears to be Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In his latest explanation of Turbo Tim Geithner’s “stress test” agenda, Bernanke attempted to assure investors that the Obama administration does not consider the nationalization of banks as a viable option for improving their financial health. As Craig Torres and Bradley Keoun reported for Bloomberg News on February 25, the latest word from Bernanke suggests that nationalization is not on the table:
The only way to deal with The New Welfare Queens is to replace their directors and managers. The Obama administration appears unwilling to do that. During his February 25 appearance on MSNBC’s Countdown, Paul Krugman (recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics) expressed his dread about the Administration’s plan to rehabilitate the banks:
You can read Adam Posen’s paper: “Temporary Nationalization Is Needed to Save the U.S. Banking System” here. Another Economics professor, Matthew Richardson, wrote an excellent analysis of the pros and cons of bank nationalization for the RGE Monitor. After discussing both sides of this case, he reached the following conclusion:
As the experts report on their scrutiny of the “stress testing” methodology, I get the impression that it’s all a big farce. Eric Falkenstein received a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. His analysis of Geithner’s testing regimen (posted on the Seeking Alpha website) revealed it to be nothing more than what is often referred to as “junk science”:
On a similar note, Ari Levy wrote an illuminating piece for Bloomberg News, wherein he discussed the stress testing with Nancy Bush, bank analyst and founder of Annandale, New Jersey-based NAB Research LLC and Richard Bove of Rochdale Securities. Here’s what Mr. Levy learned:
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Will Turbo Tim’s “stress tests” simply turn out to be a stamp of approval, helping insolvent banks avoid any responsible degree of reorganization, allowing them to continue their “welfare queen” existence, thus requiring continuous infusions of cash at the expense of the taxpayers? Will the Obama administration’s “failure of nerve” — by avoiding bank nationalization — send us into a ten-year, “Japan-style” recession? It’s beginning to look that way.