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Watching Treasury’s Paulson on Meet the Press Sunday made me sick. That pitiful, pleading look, the bizarre non-logic, the reversion to fear, fear, fear… the guy’s a cheap crook in an expensive suit and no, the whole world isn’t going to self-detonate if we let the greedheads take their lumps for being so damned greedy. Let ‘em fail.
Meanwhile, I’ve a fine plan to salvage the housing market as well as the business and jobs outlook. Instead of giving up to $3 trillion dollars (the price goes up hourly) to the crooks who got us into this mess, why not give every citizen $3,000 dollars? They’ll catch up on their mortgages, then FHA (the receiver for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) can refinance at lower rates and more realistic selling prices. Voila! the mortgage market is no longer “bad debt.” And if we’ve got an extra couple of trillion laying around to spend on these greedheads, why don’t we spend it on something useful – like universal health care?
That price tag is less than a third of the price tag the Fed, Treasury or Wall Street has come up with to bail themselves out of the hole they dug, and it would completely solve the asset valuation problem for regular Americans who don’t earn $5 million a year. And it lets the Wall Street failures fail. They earned it, they deserve it. Screw ‘em. The rest of us will be fine with our dividend.
But if you really want to try and understand what they’re all so boogedy-scared of right now, here are some links to excellent overviews that will tell you more than anybody wants to know about how we got to where we are today, and why.
Daily Kos front pager ‘Devilstower’ published a spectacular overview of how we got here in his Three Times is Enemy Action. It’s clear and concise, easy to understand, and will make you furious. His piece is so good that it was picked up by The Nation, which also offers an article by William Greider that’s worth reading, Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle.
Trading insider bonddad offers his usual excellent analysis of the bailout plan being pushed by BushCo (with further links) with Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles, beginning with the relevant observation…
“There’s a plan afoot to screw the US taxpayer.”
Yeah, well. Seems to me that instead of ‘trust’ in the very people who have screwed things up so thoroughly, we should see if trusting We the People might not work better.
If indeed we must in the wake of the failure of the only valuation we’ve had in recent years (real property) find some other means of valuation, giving the “bailout” money to those of us who DO consider our homes and businesses to be valuable would do more to dig us out of this mess than giving it to crooks.
Links:
Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles
Three Times is Enemy Action
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
