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The Big Bite

March 12th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Mar, 12 2009
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March 12, 2009

As President Obama’s “big bang” agenda gets underway (wherein the government is simultaneously tackling the problems of the economy, health care, education and energy) criticism of this strategy is beginning to mount.  Commentators from the conservative end of the spectrum are, not surprisingly, the most vocal in their admonitions that these other issues are detracting attention from the most pressing issue facing America and the world:  the economy.  As William Galston pointed out in The New Republic, Obama’s “big bang” strategy runs the risk of repeating Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to push a far-reaching agenda at the beginning of his term:

It is time for President Obama to focus his considerable leadership and communication skills on the financial crisis–to speak candidly with the people about the magnitude of pthe roblem, to embrace a solution commensurate with the problem, and to do whatever it takes to persuade Congress and the people to accept it.  If he does not, he could end up where another highly intelligent, self-disciplined, and upright president did three decades ago.

Conservative pundit, Tony Blankley, expressed similar dismay that not enough thought and effort have been dedicated to this urgent problem.  He added that this sentiment is not limited to those on the “far right”:

Obama not only is failing to focus more or less exclusively on protecting the financial system and the economy that depend on it but also is letting his ideological ardor drive him to expend both his own and his administration’s attention, along with the vast new tax dollars, on those programs rather than on the financial and economic crises.

Thus — and here is his political danger — if the financial system fails (and much of the economy along with it), it will be a fair, true and politically lethal charge against Obama that he didn’t do all he could as soon as he could to protect us from the catastrophe.  It was this decision that shocked even some of his moderate supporters, such as David Gergen, David Brooks and others, who are muttering in private.

And this misjudgment is only compounded by the slow and inept start of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the man who has the line responsibility to fix it and who only this past weekend got around to nominating some of his vital sub-Cabinet officials.  The failure of both Obama and Geithner, in the five months since the election, to come up with a plan to deal with the toxic assets and insolvency of major financial institutions may well look even more irresponsible than it already does if the derivatives crisis in fact hits the world.

Most of the anxiety over the Obama administration’s economic plan (or lack thereof) concerns its lack of disclosed details and the administration’s apparent decision to ignore the warnings of prominent economists about the urgency of taking the only logical action:  put the “zombie” banks through receivership to purge them of their “toxic assets” (most notably mortgage-backed securities).  The scant information disclosed about Treasury Secretary, “Turbo” Tim Geithner’s Financial Stability Plan is that it involves “stress testing” the banks to determine their true financial condition and creating some sort of investment fund by which private investors would be enticed to purchase the toxic assets with taxpayer money being used to guarantee the value of those assets.

Turbo Tim has repeatedly stated that he is opposed to “nationalization” of the functionally insolvent banks.  This position is in direct opposition to the warnings of two Nobel laureates and countless other Economics professors, including Dr. Nouriel Roubini, who predicted the economic crisis back on September 7, 2006.  As Steve Coll discussed on The New Yorker‘s Think Tank blog:

To compound all this, Geithner, Bernanke, and the President seem to have organized themselves as a determined minority in resistance to the gathering view among mainstream economists, even Alan Greenspan, that the best solution to the bank problem, at this point, is, in fact, temporary receivership — on the model of the Resolution Trust Corporation that cleaned up the savings-and-loans industry in the early nineteen-nineties, or the more routine receivership processes of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  Is this resistance by Geithner, Bernanke, and the President genuine and fully determined, or is it part of the political and confidence equation above, and therefore susceptible to change?  In the President’s case, it’s hard to be sure.  In Geithner’s case, he seems to be saying what he means. Where is Larry Summers, the top White House economic adviser, on this critical question?  Also hard to tell.  Perhaps, like Alan Greenspan, he is privately leaning toward receivership; if so, his position would be complicated by the fact that his younger, former protege, Geithner, who now holds a more visible position than his own, thinks otherwise.  Anyway, the facts about the health of the banks are not yet officially in hand — that is the purpose of the “stress tests” that are now being administered, to analyze which of the country’s largest nineteen banks are in the strongest positions, and which are in the weakest.  Policy options are still being developed. The likelihood of various economic forecasts is still being debated.  And so we endure more Kremlin-like opacity.

Is Turbo Tim simply “playing it close to the chest” by holding off on announcing any plans to put zombie banks into receivership, so as to prevent a “run” on more healthy institutions and the destruction of what is left of their stock value?  Although I would like to believe that, those more knowledgeable than myself are quite skeptical.  Columbia University Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz (2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics) pointed out in the March 29 issue of The Nation, that placing the insolvent banks into receivership must be done immediately.  The process of endless bailouts for these banks is a waste of money that appears to be solely for the benefit of the banks’ shareholders:

It has been obvious for some time that a government takeover of our banking system–perhaps along the lines of what Norway and Sweden did in the ’90s–is the only solution.  It should be done, and done quickly, before even more bailout money is wasted.
*    *    *
The politicians responsible for the bailout keep saying, “We had no choice. We had a gun pointed at our heads.  Without the bailout, things would have been even worse.”  This may or may not be true, but in any case the argument misses a critical distinction between saving the banks and saving the bankers and shareholders.  We could have saved the banks but let the bankers and shareholders go.  The more we leave in the pockets of the shareholders and the bankers, the more that has to come out of the taxpayers’ pockets.
*    *    *
By these standards, the TARP bailout has so far been a dismal failure. Unbelievably expensive, it has failed to rekindle lending.  Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave the banks a big handout; what taxpayers got in return was worth less than two-thirds of what we gave the big banks–and the value of what we got has dropped precipitously since.

Since TARP facilitated the consolidation of banks, the problem of “too big to fail” has become worse, and therefore the excessive risk-taking that it engenders has grown worse.  The banks carried on paying out dividends and bonuses and didn’t even pretend to resume lending.

The most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman, has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to this problem:

A real fix for the troubles of the banking system might help make up for the inadequate size of the stimulus plan, so it was good to hear that Mr. Obama spends at least an hour each day with his economic advisors, “talking through how we are approaching the financial markets.”  But he went on to dismiss calls for decisive action as coming from “blogs” (actually, they’re coming from many other places, including at least one president of a Federal Reserve bank), and suggested that critics want to “nationalize all the banks” (something nobody is proposing).

As I read it, this dismissal — together with the continuing failure to announce any broad plans for bank restructuring — means that the White House has decided to muddle through on the financial front, relying on economic recovery to rescue the banks rather than the other way around.  And with the stimulus plan too small to deliver an economic recovery … well, you get the picture.

Is the administration’s approach to the financial crisis being handicapped by an over-extension of resources because of the overwhelming demands of the “big bang” strategy?  Whether or not that is the case, the administration’s current solution to the bank problem is drawing criticism from both the left and the right.  If President Obama stays with the course charted by “Turbo” Tim Geithner, odds are that our new President will be restricted to a single term in The White House.

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Money Falling From The Sky

November 17th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized
Nov, 17 2008
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November 17, 2008

The debate concerning a possible bailout of the “big three” automakers (General Motors, Ford and Daimler Chrysler) has now reached the House of Representatives.  House Minority Leader, John Boehner (Republican from Ohio) has voiced his opposition to this latest bailout, indicating that it will not receive much support from Congressional Republicans.

In the words of Yogi Berra, we are experiencing “déjà vu all over again”.  This process started with the plan of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, to bail out banks and other financial intuitions holding mortgages of questionable value, at a price to the taxpayers in excess of $700 billion.  Back on September 22, when that bailout bill (now known as TARP) was being considered, Jackie Kucinich and Alexander Bolton wrote an article for TheHill.com, discussing Republican opposition to this measure.  Their article included a prophetic remark by Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns of Florida:

“Bailout after bailout is not a strategy,” said Stearns, who said that taxpayers could be left with a huge bill.

Yet, “bailout after bailout” is exactly where we are now.  On November 15, T-Bone Pickings appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press.  Tom Brokaw asked T-Bone Pickings for his opinion on the proposed “Big Three Bailout”.  The response was:

I wonder what you’re going to do about the next industry.  Is it going to be the airlines or what if Toyota and Honda want some help, too?  I don’t know.  I don’t know where it stops.

Once again, we are presented with the need to bail out yet another American industry considered “too big to fail”.  However, this time, we are not being asked to save an entire industry, just a few players who fought like hell, resisting every change from rear-view mirrors, to fuel injection, seat belts, catalytic converters, air bags and most recently, hybrid technology.  Later on Meet the Press, we heard the BBC’s Katty Kay quote a rhetorical question from unidentified “smart economists” that included the magic word:

Can it withstand the shock to the economy if GM were to go?

Later on the CBS program, Face The Nation, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, used similar logic to that expressed by Katty Kay, when he stated:

When you talk about the negative shock that would result from bankruptcies of these companies, right now  …

The magic word “shock” is once again playing an important role for the advocates of this newest rescue package. I was immediately compelled to re-read my posting from September 22, concerning the introduction of the Paulson bailout plan, entitled:  “Here We Go Again”.  At that time, I discussed Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  Klein’s book explained how unpopular laws were enacted in a number of countries around the world, as a result of shock from disasters or upheavals.  She went on to suggest that some of these events were deliberately orchestrated with the intent of passing repugnant laws in the wake of crisis.  She made an analogy to shock therapy, wherein the patient’s mind is electrically reformatted to become a “blank slate”.  Klein described how advocates of “the shock doctrine” seek a cataclysmic destruction of economic order to create their own “blank slate” upon which to create their vision of a “free market economy”.  She described the 2003 Iraq war as the most thorough utilization of the shock doctrine in history.  Remember that this book was released a year before the crises we are going through now.

Ms. Klein’s article, “In Praise of a Rocky Transition” appeared in the December 1, 2008 issue of The Nation.  She discussed Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout, characterizing it as “borderline criminal”.  Would the financial rescue legislation (TARP) have passed if Congress and the public had been advised that the Federal Reserve had already fed a number of unnamed financial institutions two trillion dollars in emergency loans?  Naomi Klein expressed the need for the Obama Administration to stick with its mantra of “Change You Can Believe In” as opposed to any perceived need to soothe the financial markets:

There is no way to reconcile the public’s vote for change with the market’s foot-stomping for more of the same.  Any and all moves to change course will be met with short-term market shocks.  The good news is that once it is clear that the new rules will be applied across the board and with fairness, the market will stabilize and adjust.  Furthermore, the timing for this turbulence has never been better.  Over the past three months, we’ve been shocked so frequently that market stability would come as more of a surprise.  That gives Obama a window to disregard the calls for a seamless transition and do the hard stuff first.  Few will be able to blame him for a crisis that clearly predates him, or fault him for honoring the clearly expressed wishes of the electorate.  The longer he waits, however, the more memories fade.

When transferring power from a functional, trustworthy regime, everyone favors a smooth transition.  When exiting an era marked by criminality and bankrupt ideology, a little rockiness at the start would be a very good sign.

The Obama Administration would be wise to heed Ms. Klein’s suggestions.  It would also help to seriously consider the concerns of Republicans such as John Boehner, who is apparently not anxious to feed America another “crap sandwich”.

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McCain Loses His Chance

October 2nd, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized
Oct, 02 2008
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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.

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Will It Work?

September 29th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized
Sep, 29 2008
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September 29, 2008

This is the question on everyone’s mind as they ponder the new “bailout bill”, officially known as the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.  It is available for everyone to read on the Internet (all 110 pages of it), but most people are looking for answers to the most important questions:  Will it pass and will it work?

Just after midnight on Monday morning, David Rogers, of Politico.com, reported that the bill (which goes to the House floor on Monday and the Senate floor on Wednesday) was still facing resistance from both the right and the left, despite the support voiced by both Presidential candidates.  Republican Congressman Chris Shays of Connecticut was quoted in the article as saying that:  “For this to pass, a lot of people are going to have to change their minds”.  The following passage provided more light on the view of this bill from those House Republicans providing resistance to the measure:

Yet a closed-door party meeting Sunday night illustrated all the problems anew.  The session ran for hours, and while Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he would vote for the bill, he could not predict the number of votes he would have for it, and he famously referred to the measure as a “crap sandwich” before his rank and file.

Jackie Kucinich reported for TheHill.com that earlier in the day, Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana had sent out a letter to his fellow Republicans in opposition to this bill:

The decision to give the federal government the ability to nationalize almost every bad mortgage in America interrupts this basic truth of our free market economy …  Republicans improved this bill but it remains the largest corporate bailout in American history, forever changes the relationship between government and the financial sector, and passes the cost along to the American people.  I cannot support it.

The opposition to the bill from the Democratic side was discussed in another Politico.com article:  this one by Ryan Grimm.  Grimm’s article discussed an “intense” Democratic Caucus meeting.  He quoted Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar as describing resistance to the bill coming from across the complete spectrum of Democratic opinion, from liberal to conservative.  California Congressman Brad Sherman had met with Republican Darrell Issa before the meeting.  Sherman’s contribution to the Caucus discussion was described this way by Ryan Grimm:

Sherman spoke out against the bill during the caucus meeting, arguing that billions of dollars would flow to foreign investors, that oversight was lax and that limits on executive compensation were too weak.   Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.) said he was leaning toward a no vote, too.

The House vote on the bill is scheduled to take place after a four-hour debate, beginning at 8 a.m. on Monday.

Whether or not this bill will ultimately “work” is another question.  Paul Krugman, Economics Professor at Princeton University, wrote in the Sunday New York Times:

The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out — sufficiently so to be worth passing.  But it’s not what you’d actually call a good plan, and it won’t end the crisis.  The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.

Steve Lohr’s report from the Sunday New York Times, discussed the outlook for this plan, as voiced by Robert E. Hall, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative research group at Stanford.  Lohr observed:

There was no assurance that the bailout plan would work as intended to ease financial turmoil and economic uncertainty.

Lohr’s article then focused on the opinion of Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University:

The $350 billion to $400 billion in bad credit reported by the banks so far could eventually exceed $1.5 trillion, he estimated, as banks are forced to write off more bad loans, not only on more housing-related debt, but also for corporate lending, consumer loans, credit cards and student loans.

The rescue package, if successful, would make the recognition of losses and the inevitable winnowing of the banking system more an orderly retreat than a collapse. Yet that pruning of the banking industry must take place, economists say, and it is the government’s role to move it along instead of coddling the banks if the financial system is going to return to health.

A more unpleasant perspective appeared in an editorial published in the September 25 edition of The Economist:

If the economics of Mr Paulson’s plan are broadly correct, the politics are fiendish.  You are lavishing money on the people who got you into this mess. Sensible intervention cannot even buy long-term relief:  the plan cannot stop house prices falling and the bloated financial sector shrinking. Although the economic risk is that the plan fails, the political risk is that the plan succeeds.  Voters will scarcely notice a depression that never happened.  But even as they lose their houses and their jobs, they will see Wall Street once again making millions.

Whatever your definition of “success” might be for this plan, the experts agree that things aren’t going to return to “normal” for a long time, if ever.

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Here We Go Again

September 22nd, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized
Sep, 22 2008
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September 22, 2008

Exactly one year ago, we saw the release of Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  Klein’s book explained how unpopular laws were enacted in a number of countries around the world, as a result of shock from disasters or upheavals.  She went on to suggest that some of these events were deliberately orchestrated with the intent of passing repugnant laws in the wake of crisis.  She made an analogy to shock therapy, wherein the patient’s mind is electrically reformatted to become a “blank slate”.  Klein described how advocates of “the shock doctrine” seek a cataclysmic destruction of economic order to create their own “blank slate” upon which to create their vision of a “free market economy”.   She described the 2003 Iraq war as the most thorough utilization of the shock doctrine in history.  Remember that this book was released a year before the crisis we are going through now.

You may recall former Senator Phil Gramm’s recent appearance in the news for calling the United States a “nation of whiners” and positing that the only recession going on in the United States these days is a “mental recession”.  Gramm is a longtime buddy and mentor to a certain individual named John McCain.  Gramm is the architect of the so called “Enron Loophole” allowing speculators to drive the price of oil to absurd heights.  (Gramm’s wife, Wendy, was a former member of Enron’s Board of Directors.)  Gramm was most notorious for his successes in the deregulation of Wall Street (with the help of McCain) that facilitated the “mortgage crisis” as well as the current economic meltdown.  He sponsored the 1999 bill that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act.  The repeal of that law allowed “commercial” and “investment” banks to consolidate.  Gramm’s face appears in many campaign videos with McCain, taken earlier this year.  As a result of the outrage generated by Gramm’s remarks, McCain formally dismissed Gramm as his campaign’s economic advisor.  Despite the fact that Gramm no longer has a formal role in the McCain campaign, many believe that he would be McCain’s choice for Secretary of the Treasury in the event that McCain should win the Presidential election.  On September 21, MSNBC’s David Shuster grilled McCain campaign spokesman, Tucker Bounds, about the possibility that McCain is planning to appoint Phil Gramm as his Secretary of the Treasury, should McCain win.  Tucker Bounds squirmed all over the place, employing his usual tactic of deflecting the subject of the current economic crisis back to the Obama campaign.  Most noticeably, Mr. Bounds never made any attempt to deny that McCain plans to put Gramm in charge of the Treasury.

Our current Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is on the covers of this week’s newsmagazines, pushing for uncritical acceptance of his (and hence, the Bush Administration’s) solution to the current economic crisis.  This basically amounts to a three-page “bailout” plan for banks and other financial intuitions holding mortgages of questionable value, at a price to the taxpayers of anywhere from $700 billion to One Trillion Dollars.  The Democrats are providing some “pushback” to this plan.  Barack Obama was quoted by Carrie Brown of Politico.com as saying that the Bush Administration has “offered a concept with a staggering price tag, not a plan”.  Obama went on to insist that the “American people must be assured that the deal reflects the basic principles of transparency, fairness and reform”.

As reported by Stephen Labaton in the September 21 New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi complained that:

… the administration’s proposal did “not include the necessary safeguards. Democrats believe a responsible solution should include independent oversight, protections for homeowners and constraints on excessive executive compensation.

Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut was quoted in that article as saying:  “We need to offer some assurance to the American taxpayer that Congress is watching.”  Dodd went on to explain:

One of the things that got us into this mess was the lack of accountability and the lack of oversight that was occurring, and I don’t think we want to repeat those mistakes with a program of this magnitude.

The Times article then focused on the point emphasized by Republican Senator Arlen Specter:

I realize there is considerable pressure for the Congress to adjourn by the end of next week  . . .   But I think we must take the necessary time to conduct hearings, analyze the administration’s proposed legislation, and demonstrate to the American people that any response is thoughtful, thoroughly considered and appropriate.

Nevertheless, Treasury Secretary Paulson made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to advocate pushing this bailout through quickly, without the safeguards and deliberation suggested by the Democrats and Senator Specter.  As Zachary Goldfarb reported in the September 21 Washington Post:

Paulson urged Congress not to load up the legislation with controversial provisions. “We need this to be clean and quick,” he said.

“Clean and quick”  . . .   Is that anything like “Shock and Awe”?  As usual, there is concern about whether Congressional Democrats will have the spine to resist the “full court press” by the Bush Administration to get this plan approved by Congress and on the President’s desk for signature.  As Robert Kuttner reported in The Huffington Post:

One senior Congressional Democrat told me, “They have a gun to our heads.” Paulson behaved as if he held all the cards, but in fact the Democrats have a lot of cards, too. The question is whether they have the nerve to challenge major flaws in Paulson’s plan as a condition of enacting it.

Here we go again.  Will the Democrats “grow a pair” in time to prevent “the shock doctrine” from being implemented once again?  If not, will we eventually see the day when Treasury Secretary Phil Gramm basks in glory, while presiding over his own manifestation of economic utopia?

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The Secret Candidate

September 8th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized
Sep, 08 2008
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September 8, 2008

They’re out there … all around you.  You just don’t know who they are yet.  Right now, all across America, they’re out shopping for those Kawasaki eyeglass frames … trying to re-style their hair into that half-beehive/half-mullet look.  They’re the Sarah Palin wanna-bes — forcing their sons to join hockey teams – each hoping to earn that coveted title for herself:  “Hockey Mom” — a ticket to success in today’s America.  There is no question that Sarah Palin will be the most popular Halloween costume subject for 2008.  Beyond that, there are many thousands of American women, currently adapting their lives to accommodate Sarah Palin as their new role model.

The rest of us just aren’t sure we know who Sarah Palin is yet.  The McCain campaign is obviously training her on the difficult subject of interviews with journalists.  As of this time, there are no Palin interviews scheduled, other than the rumored possibility of an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson.  As I write this, McCain campaign CEO, Rick Davis, is holding out for “ground rules”.  I suspect that if the campaign’s senior strategist, Steve Schmidt, were to have his way, any such interviews would be tightly scripted and choreographed, with all questions and answers written in advance by Schmidt.  Meanwhile, Joe Biden appeared on the September 6 edition of Meet The Press.  Biden had to answer at least one question with:

I don’t know what Governor Palin’s position on this issue is, because I haven’t heard it yet.  I have to assume that her position will be the same as Senator McCain’s.

When asked about the impending federal government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Biden pointed out that he had just discussed the subject with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on the previous evening.  I could not help but wonder what the hell Sarah Palin would have said in answer to that question   …  “Freddie Mac cracked a lot of sexist jokes at an Obama rally.  Didn’t he die recently?”

Nevertheless, we are beginning to obtain information about Palin for ourselves by using our computers over the Internet.  The mainstream media have nothing for us, other than the superficial biography offered by the Republican National Committee.  What we have initially learned is that Sarah Palin spent six years working toward her Bachelor’s Degree, while attending five different schools in that effort.  Many consider this as evidence that she may be significantly dumber than our current President.  Although I refer to Governor Palin as “The Gumball”, I don’t consider her six-year college tour as a justifiable basis for criticizing her.  Many of us who attended college either made school transfers ourselves, or had friends who did so  — at the cost of lost course credits.  For someone to change colleges five different times, yet graduate in only six years, is quite an accomplishment!  Congratulations, Sarah!

Additional information about Palin has been provided by David Hullen in the September 4 edition of the Anchorage Daily News.  Hullen quoted an e-mail written by Anne Kilkenny of Wasilla, Alaska, where Palin was formerly mayor.  Ms. Kilkenny was described by Hullen as a “stay-at-home mom, letter-to-the-editor writer and longtime watcher of Valley politics.”  This article and e-mail are essential reading for anyone with more than a nanobyte of curiosity about who Sarah Palin really is.  Before I quote a passage from Ms. Kilkenny’s e-mail … let’s revisit The Gumball’s quip about Barack Obama, included in her acceptance speech, as written by Matt Scully:

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.

Ms. Kilkenny of Wasilla informed us about the consequences for Sarah Palin’s failure to fulfill those responsibilities:

During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She (Palin) had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.

In other words, Palin’s duties as “mayor of a small town” had to be “outsourced” to someone else, because Palin was in over her head and on the verge of being recalled.  Was this administrator from Bangalore, India, by any chance?

As we learn more about The Gumball, we are repeatedly reminded of our current President.  Here’s another remark about Palin, from Ms. Kilkenny’s e-mail:

She’s not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise.  As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren’t generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren’t evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them.

If you thought that John McCain was becoming a lot more like President Bush, Sarah Palin appears to have a head start.  No wonder she is being kept under wraps!

Many have criticized the mainstream media for “not doing their job” during the run-up to the Iraq war.  Those same news sources appear to be well on the way toward repeating that performance, as we enter the run-up to the Presidential election.

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