Bailing Out or Selling Out?

I am no economist but it looks like if you are Congress, you can do both of those things at the same time. I truly have to say that I have never found myself with a lower opinion of our elected representatives than I do today (and that is saying something). Is this what you call draining the swamp, Mr. McCain?

What else can they devise to transfer the wealth of the middle class to the wealthy of this country? When the congressional mafia stands up before the world and tells us that they are doing it for us, the middle class, main street as they like to call us, I still find it hard to believe their incredible hypocrisy. Why it still shocks me, after all that has come before it, I really don't know and I really should be desensitized by now.

The congress should think about just handing out ATM cards so that their friends and corporate constituents can just drain the treasury directly. Why bother with trying to make it look like they care about the middle class, their actions speak louder than their words. When the public can mount no real opposition, how easy is that? No, I am no economist, but if even I can see it is yet another tool to transfer the wealth of the nation, it must be pretty obvious.

I came across a great interview of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz over at Democracy Now! The interview is a good summary from a very astute observer. Mr. Stiglitz gives us a look at who the bailout is really going to work for.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, I think it remains a very bad bill. It is a disappointment, but not a surprise, that the administration came up with a bill that is again based on trickle-down economics. You throw enough money at Wall Street, and some of it will trickle down to the rest of the economy. It’s like a patient suffering from giving a massive blood transfusion while there’s internal bleeding; it doesn’t do anything about the basic source of the hemorrhaging, the foreclosure problem. But that having been said, it is better than doing nothing, and hopefully after the election, we can repair the very many mistakes in it.
But this particular way of getting it through, I have to say, really smells. They added—you know, the cost was already $700 billion. They added $150 billion of tax benefits. Some of these are really quite, quite amazing, the kinds of things that they put in: tax credit to American Samoan businesses—you mentioned a couple already in your talk—50 percent tax credit for some expenditures or maintaining railroad tracks, motor sports racetrack property given a seven-year recovery period. You can go down the list. What they did was basically old-fashioned, corrupt bribery. They found out—I was joking that they talked about a reverse auction for the—for buying the distressed assets; they had a reverse auction for buying congressmen, and they put in anything they needed to do to get the congressional support for a basically flawed bill.

Read the rest of the interview here or watch the whole show here.

You can enjoy some light reading this weekend of the official Bailout Bill signed into law by our very own Liar In Chief, George W. Bush.

Peace Y'all