I'm in Cleveland preparing for a speech tomorrow morning, and still recovering from a 2 hour public debate with Dennis Prager in front of 1,500 people in Denver last night. I just wanted to stop and take a moment to reiterate to everyone what most of us probably already know, but is nonetheless worth repeating - the debate this week over the bailout truly is the most important economic debate we've seen in the last decade, if not the entire last generation. What happens this week will be written about in history books for the rest of our lives. In terms of its size, scope, reach and constitutional implications, the Bush proposal probably surpasses any single measure - good or bad - for the last 30 or 40 years, except, perhaps, for the bill authorizing the Iraq War, and even compared to that, it's very close.
I say this as someone who worked on the Hill for 5 years during the passage of the Bush tax cuts, the Patriot Act and the Iraq War authorization: I have never seen a bill as monarchic as the bill Henry Paulson submitted to the Congress, I have never heard as absurd an explanation as Paulson gave for his proposal, and if we let it pass in even vaguely the same shape as it is in, we will watch a tectonic shift in how the fundamentals (to use a McCain term) of our democracy work, and do not work. During a recession and a foreclosure crisis, if the U.S. Congress cannot stop a lame-duck president with a 19 percent approval rating from using an economic crisis Wall Street speculators manufactured to give away almost a trillion dollars of taxpayer cash to those same speculators, then we no longer live in anything even close to a democracy.
Again, I know most OpenLeft readers know this - and I also know I can be prone to passion in my writing. But spending the day in Cleveland and seeing some of the economic devastation firsthand and thinking about what Bush actually proposed on the flight over here, I felt it was just worth repeating. So whether you sign Sen. Bernie Sanders' letter, or make an angry call to your legislator, put aside the presidential election for a second, and do what you can do, right now, to stop this. This is way more important than any election. I don't care if John McCain or House Republicans are opposing it for bad reasons, or as a political trap - this is way more important than that petty B.S. We're talking about $700 billion to Wall Street millionaires - more than it would cost to provide health care to everyone for the next five to ten years, and more than enough to destroy whatever small chance we have to enact a progressive agenda for the next generation. So this is about taking action right now, and getting anyone we can - Republican or Democrat - to oppose this.
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