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Barack Obama talks a lot about bipartisanship - but the question is whether he's talking about bipartisanship or Bush-style buypartisanship? It seems like the latter, as he makes history issuing his first veto threat - one that demands Congress continue handing billions of taxpayer dollars over to the same Wall Street financiers who underwrote his campaign and the same financiers now showering him with cash for his inaugural celebration. As I told David Shuster on MSNBC last night, it's time for some real bipartisanship to stop this atrocious bailout, not more buypartisanship that lets the financial industry continuing robbing the treasury. Watch the clip here:
Freshman Rep. Alan Grayson's (D-FL) scathing inquisition yesterday of Federal Reserve officials signals that there's a rising populist anger in the House against giving more money to Wall Street. Likewise, rank-and-file Republicans are lining up to vote against the Bush-Obama request for the next $350 billion in bailout money. Add this to polls showing continued public opposition to this bailout, and it looks like the same bipartisan coalition that initially voted down the bailout is coming back together, despite the best efforts of the Washington Establishment to ram this bailout through, no strings attached. |
| Obviously, I don't trust conservatives' motives on this. The best of them - the principled ones - are ideologically against all government spending. I say they are the "best" because at least they are honest, and that honesty allows progressives to work with them on issues where we agree (like, say, repealing the most odious parts of the Patriot Act). The worst of them - the ultrapartisans like Boehner, who voted for the original bailout - are against this because they want to damage Obama.
But motives don't matter right now - what matters is that progressives have a real chance to forge a powerful bipartisan coalition - a bipartisan coalition against continued Establishment buypartisanship.
It's undeniable that with Obama issuing his Wall Street-backed veto threat, the deck is stacked against bipartisanship and for buypartisanship (and I should say that there's something deeply ominous about Obama making his very first veto threat not for something progressive, but to demand Congress continue Bush's policy of dumping cash on Wall Street). But that doesn't means the odds are impossible, as that original rejection in the House showed.
As I've written, there are four clear reasons why this bailout request is absurd on its face, not the least of which is that nobody, not Obama, not Bush, nobody - has explained how giving financial industry fat-cats another $350 billion is a better way to fix the economy than using that money for public infrastructure spending, expanded health care or any other proven way to stimulate the economy.
With Obama saying he's worried about deficits - and potentially tying deficit reduction to cuts in Social Security and Medicare - shouldn't we expect that, at the absolute minimum, he explain why giving this money to Wall Street, instead of spending it on more pressing priorities, is the appropriate "pragmatic" course of action? For asking that kind of question, Shuster labeled me the "muckraker of the day" - which I very much appreciate. But it doesn't take a muckraker to want the most basic questions answered before taxpayers get robbed again.
Get in touch with your House members and senators and tell them to either fix this bailout, or vote no on it. We need a Congress that does it's job - not one that runs away cowering in a corner telling us, as Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did, to just "take Obama's word" that he'll spend the money appropriately. In other words, we need a Congress that doesn't outsource its job to the executive branch and doesn't keep authorizing more kleptocracy. |
