In his Playbook this morning, Politico’s Mike Allen relays “a Bush insider[base ']Äôs prescription” for how Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) can change the dynamics of presidential race. The McCain campaign needs to drive “out the range of contrast that makes McCain different from Obama,” said the insider, whom Allen refers to as “one of the smartest Bushies.” Giving examples of those contrasts, the Bushie then used the racially-load term “uppity” to describe Obama:
The tactics that got them to mid-September in a tie are not going to get them to 50 percent plus one in November. They need [base ']Ķ an eye toward driving out the range of contrast that makes McCain different from Obama (action-oriented rhetoric v. grand prose; accessible v. uppity; humble servant of country v. arrogant).[base ']Äù
This isn’t the first time a Republican insider has used the racial epithet to refer to Obama. Last month, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) told reporters that Obama and wife, Michelle, were part of “an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity.”
For years, as a member of the House Banking Committee and now as a member of the Senate Budget Committee, I have heard the Bush Administration tell us how "robust" our economy was and how strong the "fundamentals" were. That was until a few days ago. Now, we are being told that if Congress does not act immediately and approve the $700 billion Wall Street bailout proposal these "free marketers" have just written up, there will be an unprecedented economic meltdown in the United States and an unraveling of the global economy.
This proposal as presented is an unacceptable attempt to force middle income families (and our children) to pick up the cost of fixing the horrendous economic mess that is the product of the Bush Administration's deregulatory fever and Wall Street's insatiable greed. If the potential danger to our economy was not so dire, this blatant effort to essentially transfer $700 billion up the income ladder to those at the top would be laughable.
Let us be clear. If the economy is on the edge of collapse we need to act. But rescuing the economy does not mean we have to just give away $700 billion of taxpayer money to the banks. (In truth, it could be much more than $700 billion. The bill only says the government is limited to having $700 billion outstanding at any time. By selling the mortgage backed assets it acquires -- even at staggering losses -- the government will be able to buy even more resulting is a virtually limitless financial exposure on the part of taxpayers.) Any proposal must protect middle income and working families from bearing the burden of this bailout.
I have proposed a three part plan to accomplish that goal which includes a five-year, 10% surtax on the income of individuals above $500,000 a year, and $1 million a year for couples; a requirement that the price the government pays for any mortgage assets are discounted appropriately so that government can recover the amount it paid for them; and, finally, the government should receive equity in the companies it bails out so that when the stock of these companies rises after the bailout, taxpayers also have the opportunity to share in the resulting windfall. Taken together, these measures would provide the best guarantee that at the end of five years, the government will have gotten back the money it put out.
Second, in addition to protecting the average American from being saddled with the cost, any serious proposal has to include reforms so that we end the type of behavior that led to this crisis in the first place. Much of this activity can be traced to specific legislation that broke down regulatory safety walls in the financial sector and allowed banks and others to engage in new types of risky transactions that are at the heart of this crisis. That deregulation needs to repealed. Wall Street has shown it cannot be trusted to police itself. We need to reinstate a strong regulatory system that protects our economy.
Third, we need to address the needs of working families in this country who are today facing very difficult times. If we can bail out Wall Street, we need to respond with equal vigor to their plight. That means, for example, creating millions of jobs through major investments in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and creating a new renewable energy system. We must also make certain that the most vulnerable Americans don't freeze in the winter or die because they lack access to primary health care.
Finally, we need to protect ourselves from being at the mercy of giant companies that are "too big to fail," that is, companies who are so large that their failure would cause systemic harm to the economy. We need to assess which companies fall into this category and insist they are broken up. Otherwise, the American taxpayer will continue to be on the financial hook for the risky behavior, the mismanagement, and even the illegal conduct of these companies' executives.
These are the last days of the Bush Administration, the most dishonest and incompetent in modern American history. It is imperative that, at this important moment, Congress stand up for the middle class and for fiscal integrity. The future of our country is at stake.
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
Here’s a sound bite for the ages: The Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein was one of the panelists on the Sept. 19 episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and when the conversation inevitably turned to GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin, whom Klein pronounced to be “basically Bush in drag.”
In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department's mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.
The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.
TV SoundOff: Sunday Talking Heads Good morning and welcome once again to this weekly exercise of laughing in the face of utter futility known as the Sunday Morning Liveblog. Who'd ever think it? Such a squalid little ending! Watching the Dow descending, just as far as it could go. Now we are going to learn things that you didn't want to know, mainly from the King of the Sunday Morning Bonershrinkers, Hank Paulson, who's going to be all over the programs today.
This stuff, sad to say, just isn't my forte, so you particularly astute and savvy commenters should settle in and help provide the sort of insight I cannot. I can say that over the past week, I've gone from being uninformed to more informed about things like Credit Default Swaps, but my opinion on how truly FUBAR our financial system seems has only grown in inverse proportion to the increase of penetrating awareness. It's like an onion, where the more you peel it, the more you cry.
Anyway, please bring your A-game to the commenting. And feel free to send emails (Ana Marie Cox and I will be shooting a vlog later, so if you have questions, this is a good time to send them our way.) And there's a musical theater reference buried within the first paragraph. Can you guess it before my colleague Rachel Sklar? Probably not!
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
Ahh, the tyranny of television programming that forces me to begin every Sunday staring the pinch-faced goober known as Chris Wallace. It's no wonder that a twinge of panic-slash-depression settles in to my soul every Saturday night! Next week, I might do myself the favor and sleep in.
All right. Gonna get right into it with Paulson. How dire is the situation, Wallace asks? Paulson says that there are clogs, and farmers can't get loans, and OH NO retirement income could be threatened! He makes up a word 'illiquid" and says "I can't say there won't be more financial systems that won't have problems."
"We're not doing this to protect the financial institutions, in and of themselves...we're protecting the American taxpayer." By giving billions of dollars to financial institutions. Paulson says that the administration is going to be listening to "experts," which remind one of the many "expert" generals who became "retired" generals because it was no fun listening to their expertise.
"What guarantees are there that Americans won't end up holding billions of dollars of bad paper?" Paulson says there are no guarantees. I think the problem with the question is the use of the phrase "end up." "End up?" Aren't Americans holding billions of dollars of bad paper RIGHT NOW?
Do you limit executive salaries? OF COURSE YOU DO! Big salaries go to people who know what they are doing, right? Who don't cause financial armageddon?
What if the Democrats add relief for mortgage "forecloshah" as Wallace pronounces it, will the President veto it? Paulson says there should be a mortgage relief component! Interesting.
Fannie and Freddie are examples where the government owned up to its responsibilities, Paulson says of two programs offloaded years ago because the Johnson administration wanted to balance its budget on the cheap. Now we own it again - and I mean "we," the people. Hooray for our new responsibilities! And hey, AIG, too! I don't know how much of AIG we bought, by the way, but it's been pointed out to me that we probably bought just enough to get in WAY DEEP but not so much that we are required to place that debt on the balance sheet at the moment.
Now Wallace pulls a Russert: MISTER PAULSON! YOU ONCE SAID THE FINANCIAL MARKETS WERE STABLE! What do you think about that? The answer is he doesn't think much about it! We couldn't have gotten Congress to buy illiquid assets unless something urgent happens.
Paulson then "guarantees" that anyone in an FDIC backed bank are going to keep their money! Everyone's savings are safe! We can have confidence! Until the peeple who manage the Social Security "trust fund" walk over to the Treasury with a stack of bonds to say, "Hello! We'd like this money, now, please!"
Time for Kyl and Schumer to do battle over how much partisan hoo-hah they can add to the problem. Schumer, right off the bat, says mortgage relief is going to be in the bailout bill. He and John Kyl are working on the weekends! They are that serious! But they are not going to "CHRISTMAS TREE" this bill! WHY WON'T CHARLES SCHUMER SUPPORT CHRISTMAS TREES?
Kyl hasn't got it in him to fight back on this with heat, probably because he, like everyone else, is trying to lead with calm. Wallace admonishes Kyl for getting "in the weeds," but Schumer backs Kyl out, "It's hard not too." Schumer makes an analogy that there are arteries clogged, and they need to prevent a heart attack. Uhm...so, eat better? Avoid fatty derivatives? NO TAXPAYER FUNDED BALLOON ANGIOPLASTIES FOR EVERYONE!
OOOH. Big tiff over Joe Biden's "paying taxes is patriotic" remark. "Joe Biden put it in his way," Schumer says. TRANSLATION: Joe Biden says some stuff! Kyl runs McCain's countering talking points, but these two are really working hard to present as united a front as possible. Is that an after-effect of this economic meltdown? A softening of surrogacy? Well, Schumer amps up his support a little bit more?
In responding to McCain's "unbridled greed" remark, Kyl seems to be coming out in favor of, uhm...bridles. Democrats were unwilling to participate in regulation! Dogs are sleeping with cats!
Great line from Schumer, "McCain, in one week, went from sounding like Milton Friedman to sounding like Huey Long." Kyl continues to paint his party as the party of regulation.
In honor of Bank Of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch, we present you with the song stylings of the Bank Of America Merger Douchebag:
Wallace ties events to the poll shift, with Obama garnering an uptick that Mara Liasson attributes not to Obama's skill, but to McCain's gaffes and the traditional advantage Dems receive during times of financial crisis. I agree! Much of the certain economic trends favor Obama going forward, but what have we be learning? It's not good enough to expect to win the White House by default. Obama and McCain are both captives to events. The economic worries aren't going away, but you know what could come back? Foreign policy concerns! You just KNOW bin Laden's prepping another one of his mixtapes, what happens when it drops? Is David Axelrod going to be October Surprised? He'd better take the opportunity, while events suit it, to get some strong McCain foreign policy critiques readied, because you have got to fight McCain where he's strongest (even if that strength is based more on perception than good sense). But I've been saying that for months!
Well, let's talk about the upcoming presidential debate! Fred Barnes says John McCain needs to look like a "peacemaker." Liasson says that McCain basically, cannot lose his mind and go all crazyfaced. Kristol says he needs to invoke Hillary Clinton, all the time, as well as "Surge." And Juan Williams says he needs to hit hard on foreign policy, and tie "the surge to the economy." WHICH IS THE ONE THING I WOULD NOT ATTEMPT.
On Obama's side, Barnes says he needs to "look like a Commander-in-Chief." Which Barnes, of course, thinks he won't do. Barnes basically thinks the military voters need a bunch of shibboleths, because they aren't already donating six dollars to every one they give McCain! Liasson says, "Be crisp, not professorial." Kristol says Obama needs to talk about all the Republicans who back him - because God knows there aren't any Democrats who know a blessed thing about foreign policy! Juan Williams says tie McCain to Bush, blah blah blah.
The plan is bad. But bad policies get enacted all the time. But we're at a point now where congress is, allegedly, in the hands of progressive leadership. Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone's going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core libertarian.
It'd be one thing for a bunch of conservative politicians to ram a terrible policy through. Then we could say "well, if some progressives win the next election things will be different." But if this comes through an allegedly progressive congress then the whole enterprise starts looking pretty hollow.
Pretty hollow? Consider the text of Section 8 of this plan!
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
This is how Congressional oversight of the Federal purse ends: not with a bang, with a whimper.
Commenter "jetfueler" forces me to make a correction. "Illiquid" is, indeed, a word. Paulson did not make it up. It was probably, like "tintinnabulation," invented by Edgar Allan Poe, since he specialized in doom. I'm a little prone to prevailing against words that sound jargon-y this week, in the wake of "verbage" and "oversighting."
Also: you musical theatre buffs wake up WAY TOO EARLY. Is it because Rent finally closed?
