That was a hideously abused and strained metaphor.

//she has the same weirdly clipped diction and punched emphasis points as Olberman. huh.

NPR had a lengthy report about what we should fear more than the crippling debt:

Jon Macey, a professor and deputy dean of Yale Law School, says the bill contains the largest transfer of power from Congress to the administration that he has ever seen. Macey says Congress is handing over more power than it did in granting the executive branch leeway in the Patriot Act, more than when authorizing combat through the War Powers clause.

The article is at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94921462

<3 Rachel

I may be a lunatic, but does this whole thing not pass the ‘smell’ test? What did everyone learn this week that no one knew say, 2 weeks ago? When did the sky fall? And I just can’t believe that it has happened so close to the election. My conspiracy nut side of myself sees this as a true gift to the rich friends of Bush (his base, remember?) before he gets booted out of office. Are we that freakin’ stupid that we really think that the economic world will END THIS WEEK if we don’t give these greedy m-fers a trillion dollars.

Something jes’ ain’t right, ladies and fellas…

Damn, she’s good. It’s really more like a 6-year-old running a candy factory that makes candy out of air, but in terms of the interpersonal dynamics it’s right on.

I still don’t understand this whole thing about Paulson arguing that adding such things as limits on executive pay are deal-killers. Not only is he personally holding the economy hostage (and reportedly ignoring the orders of his commander-in-chief), but he’s saying that all of his former colleagues on Wall Street would rather see their companies go down and the economy go into the tank than give up a penny of their ill-gotten (and yes, when you earn bonuses based on clearly fallacious accounting, that’s ill-gotten) gains. At the very least, that’s a blatant breach of their fiduciary responsibility, making them personally responsible for subsequent losses, and at its worst, it’s criminal extortion.

So basically Paulson is saying that Wall Street is run by either tortfeasors or criminals, and that’s why we’ve got to give him $700 billion of unreviewable money. Oh, and he’s willing to resort to extortion to make sure we understand how worthy he is of our trust.

The AIG takeover is not a money giveaway program.  It is a big credit commitment to keep it afloat so it can be broken up and sold in a semi-orderly manner.  The loans might even be paid off with the sell-off of the profitable units.  More likely the entity left, which the government will own 80% of, will end up having to liquidate at a fraction of even the low value it has now.  The final taxpayer cost won’t be anywhere near $700 billion.

But having no oversight is insane, even though it might be intended to keep the gold-digging, money-diverting congressmen’s hands off the money.  Also, no way should executive compensation be anywhere near what they’ve been getting.  If there was a way to make the AIG execs and board members forfeit all their income from AIG for the past five years, it should be done. 

There is lots of blame to go around; not just on the fat cats of Wall Street.  So much easy money went into the housing market, to lots of our friends and acquaintances who really couldn’t afford to buy the houses, when the bubble burst a lot of folks found themselves over-extended.  And AIG got stuck with paying out insurance policies on all those bad loans. 

Yeah, yeah, those Wall Street fat cat bankers MADE us take the loans to buy houses instead of rent them.  Not OUR fault.

I’ve started speculating in torches and pitchforks futures…

Hey, that’s one part of the economy I don’t see tanking anytime soon!

Middleageliberal, the $700B isn’t for the AIG takeover/loan. That’s a totally separate $80B. The $700B is to buy up a bunch of bad debt from other companies, like Morgan Stanley and WaMu, apparently regardless of whether they need to lose that debt to stay afloat (Paulson’s worry about oversight is that ‘only failing banks would take the offer’, which I…thought was the point) and with no oversight or reviewability of the decisions made by the treasury.

Lisa,
OK, I did get confused re AIG.  The last three paragraphs of what I wrote apply to the bank bailout too.  The tulip, er, housing bubble bursting is the root of them both. 

Kate, to the extent that is true then there shouldn’t be an expectation of those folks that they would own anything if and when the balloon hit or when the adjustable rate boosted the monthly nut higher than their paychecks.  They would just have to go back to a rental, probably smaller than they have.  Re the ice cream—those guys might have been trying to calm their nervous stomachs.

Rachel Maddow is amazing.

She said something on Tucker Carlson’s now-cancelled show that gave me serious pause.  Perhaps I’m reading too much in to this,  bit it would be SO interesting if it happened the way my evil mind spins this:

Tucker, June 6, 2006:

CARLSON:  Welcome back. 

CARLSON:  News flash.  It turns out no everyone agrees with Ann Coulter.  Joining us now, someone who most likely falls into that category, Air America radio host Rachel Maddow.

Rachel, welcome. 

RACHEL MADDOW, AIR AMERICA RADIO TALK SHOW HOST:  She‘s actually an ex-girlfriend of mine.  Little known fact.  So it‘s a lot—it‘s very personal.  A lot of our disagreements are personal.  But I can see her politics, too.

CARLSON:  You got the video, I‘ll pay cash.  No, excuse me.

Yeah, yeah, those Wall Street fat cat bankers MADE us take the loans to buy houses instead of rent them.  Not OUR fault.

Yeah, it’s not like lenders change the loan terms right before the closing or anything.  If you didn’t like the loan terms that the bank sprang on you the day you were going to sign the closing agreement, you should have walked out of the closing!

You really need to get up to speed on what’s been going on in the mortgage world.  The FBI has seen mortgage fraud cases double.  And Washington Mutual is in major financial trouble because they didn’t care if the loans they were giving were fraudulent.  There was way more malfeasance by corporations than you’re willing to admit.

This headline on Yahoo! News made me happy:

Dire warnings fail to sway senators on big bailout

Could they possibly have finally learned something from the past 8 years?

I think they are just hogging all the ice cream until the bailout.  No office birthday parties for YOU!  We have all the ice cream.  We aren’t sharing.

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Isn’t this a moderated forum?

Maddow!!

I disagree with the idea that we need a babysitter to “watch” mortgage investment bankers.  We have contract law, and mortgages are signed with contracts.  If one party behaves in bad faith, they can be sued.  The terms of a mortgage are between the lender and the starry eyed, status-obsessed would-be home buyer (who, besides, never did consider whether he could repay the damn loan from the beginning).  Rather than an army of government babysitters getting paid with taxpayer candy to do a job that is unnecessary (and get paid in taxpayer candy to do so), why not just let people reap the consequences of their own decisions?  You know, responsibility and all that?

Also, I found it quite telling that she says that if you believe that government messes things up most of the time, democracy and any influence over the government should be inaccessible to you.  Yeah…  We need babysitters to watch and nanny us, and if we disagree with that, well, we shouldn’t have a say.

I can’t understand why the feminist blogosphere is giving high fives and having orgasms about this chick.  What a total snarky bitch.

Thanks for that! Wish we were back in the Robert Reich days!

better name for Paulson is “Prince Henry the Navigator”

I wonder why you never see pictures of him and Uncle Fester together?
or Michael Chertoff and Nosferatu?

INTPagan wrote:

“If you think that government is the problem, why do you want anything to do with it?  Why not let someone who actually wants it to exist run it so that it will be taken care of?”

News flash…  The government is a coercive entity.  A law-abiding adult who wants to be left alone in peace cannot rest assured that he can live freely, unless he keeps the do-gooders and ideological utopians off his back.  Get it?

Yeah, yeah, those Wall Street fat cat bankers MADE us take the loans to buy houses instead of rent them.

I guess they spend all that money on marketing just because they like wasting money, huh? It’s not like it works or anything, because we’re all perfectly rational actors. Except for all those flakes spending vast sums of money on marketing, which is obviously irrational because we’re all perfectly rational actors.

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I disagree with the idea that we need a babysitter to “watch” mortgage investment bankers.  We have contract law, and mortgages are signed with contracts.  If one party behaves in bad faith, they can be sued.>

Good luck suing Washington Mutual or Bank of America on your own.  Unless you’re a multi-millionaire with money to burn, you’re better off taking the hit and slinking away.

News flash… The government is a coercive entity.  A law-abiding adult who wants to be left alone in peace cannot rest assured that he can live freely, unless he keeps the do-gooders and ideological utopians off his back.

Have fun living in your Unabomber cabin in the backwoods.  As with all Libertarians, you want to leech off everyone’s else’s tax money for things like roads and the internet without having to pay a dime yourself.

Mnemosyne wrote:

“Have fun living in your Unabomber cabin in the backwoods.  As with all Libertarians, you want to leech off everyone’s else’s tax money for things like roads and the internet without having to pay a dime yourself. “

I suppose by that logic you should just let pro-lifers like me have our way.

John: Boo hoo, you can’t do whatever you want, cry me a fucking river.

Fucking losertarians do nothing but complain.

I suppose by that logic you should just let pro-lifers like me have our way.

I notice that you “forgot” to address my point that an individual who tries to sue a large bank may as well take all of their money out of the bank and burn it in a huge bonfire—it would be exactly as productive as a non-millionaire suing Bank of America.

But, hey, if you would rather do that than allow the government to intervene on your behalf, go right ahead.  No one’s going to stop you from hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, either.

Sue the bank?  For what?  If you defaulted on the loan, what basis would you have for retaining your home?  Should you sue the bank for forcing you to sign a contract?  The best that you can do as a consumer is to show a judge that a large corporation with lots of money to lose that they committed legal fraud.  If you think that a federal babysitter will ever do that for you, you’re dreaming, Sister.