| Just adding to Matt and Paul's earlier posts, the Associated Press's big headline this morning is "Paulson: Don't Add Households to Financial Bailout Bill." The story reports that Paulson is opposing efforts to add any aid for foreclosed families to the $700 billion bailout for his Wall Street cronies. The one thing Paulson has changed is the scope of the bailout - while opposing help for American homeowners, the Politico reports he now wants to give American taxpayer cash not just to domestic banks, but foreign ones too.
In other news, the Washington Post takes a look at how both Obama and McCain have largely surrounded themselves with the same kinds of people who created the environment for the meltdown. The story mentions that Obama specifically did not invite his only labor-affiliated economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, to his emergency meeting. The most telling passage is this:
"Winning the hearts of serious economic policy guys is not necessarily the path to electoral votes," one adviser fretted, "but I'm not sure. When things are serious enough, people want their leaders to be serious."
That's right, when things are Serious, America supposedly wants its leaders to only take advice from Serious People - that is, the people who got us into the crisis, not those who had been warning about it for years. When it comes to Iraq, the only Serious People are those who supported the war, not those who opposed it. And now, when it comes to the economic meltdown, the Serious People who need to be "won" are the Wall Streeters and Washington insiders who drove us off the cliff.
Oh, and in case anyone is still claiming that the Republican Congress passed bad deregulatory laws that the supposed saints in the Clinton administration (who are now advising Obama) supposedly opposed, think again:
Former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, both Obama advisers, supported and helped negotiate the bill [repealing Depression-era financial safeguards]. At the November 1999 signing of the legislation, Summers praised it as "a major step forward to the 21st century."
Indeed, the foxes in the henhouse are the ones who we are expected to believe will "save" America...after having destroyed it. Fantastic. |
