The real scandal of AIG isn't just that American taxpayers have so far committed $170 billion to the giant insurer because it is thought to be too big to fail -- the most money ever funneled to a single company by a government since the dawn of capitalism -- nor even that AIG's notoriously failing executives, at the very unit responsible for the catastrophic credit-default swaps at the very center of the debacle -- are planning to give themselves $100 million in bonuses. It's that even at this late date, even in a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently, Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money.
David Sirota just said on the frontpage here that he doesn't care if it's called bank "nationalization" or not, as long as it gets done.
Well, if we call it "nationalization," it may not get done, or it may not get done in the most effective way.
We need a different term to start promoting in all of our blog posts, interviews, YouTube clips, everything.
Call it bank rehab. And for the process of dealing with all the bad loans, call it bank detox. Why? It places the emphasis on the illness of the banks -- and the irresponsibility of the bankers -- rather than on the authority the government is exercising. It replaces a 15-letter word that most people can't define too well with two 5-letter words that everyone knows. (Safe to say there's never been a #1 R&B hit called "Nationalization.") It makes the concept approachable instead of wonky. And as a bonus, newspapers and magazines and the tickers on the TV news channels will gladly embrace the shorter words to save space. (So if you talk to any mass media types, make sure to say "rehab" and "detox" as much as possible.)
Plus, it sidesteps a word and a concept that smacks of old-style central planning, a word that's most commonly used today to describe a dictator's seizure of privately held assets. It sounds European, and in the annals of American political rhetoric, sounding European can be fatal (which is why we should also ban "the Swedish model" from our vocabulary, unless it's to make a joke).
If we want to maximize the support for a policy, then we need to make sure that the name for that policy is a good one. This should no longer be a controversial approach; we just need to follow through.
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
Last week's passage of the economic stimulus bill marked the first major win for progressives on economic policy under President Barack Obama, but the hardest economic battles have yet to come. The fight against entrenched corporate interests and a global order that ignores the needy will likely be as long and arduous as the recession itself.
by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire Blogger
In this week's Audit, we're examining Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's thoroughly uninspiring bank bailout plan, which fails on almost every level. What's more, some of the most insightful (and stinging) critiques of the proposal are coming from progressive media
I want to draw more attention to Geithner's justification for not simply nationalizing the insolvent banks and liquidating shareholder equity as quoted in the NY Times:
He discouraged speculation that the plan would include the nationalization of some banks.
"We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we'd like to do our best to preserve that system," he said.
This is a flat out ideological statement. One might even call Treasury Secretary Geithner an ideologue for this stance.
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