The Mother of all Jewelry Store Heists

…is currently underway in our nation’s capital. 

The folks who’ve so badly bungled the Iraq and Afghan Wars, neglected Climate Change, stiff-armed any sensible energy policy, and generally presided over the most incompetent, negligent, and morally bankrupt presidential tenure in our lifetimes, are now offering up a $700 Billion bill to “stabilize the financial markets.”  And boy, are they in a hurry.  At this hour it appears, however, that Congress isn’t quite ready for the bum’s rush and may yet stand up and negotiate on behalf of sanity and common sense.  Time will tell, but everyone should read for themselves Treasury Secretary Paulson’s and George W. Bush’s proposed legislation.  It won’t take long - it’s only 82 lines and 860 words.  Here’s the link.

Reasonable people may disagree as to the proper course of action, but two things are universally acknowledged:  that the financial services industry developed and traded complex securities based on home mortgages that were poorly understood, and that this administration believed that the less government regulation and oversight the better as “the market” was the best arbiter of the value of those securities and could, and would, regulate itself.

The bedrock principle of the modern Republican Party, from Barry Goldwater, to Ronald Reagan, to George W. Bush and now to John McCain and Sarah Palin, is supposedly that the best role government can play is to simply get out of the way.  We now have 700 billion reasons, by their own admission, for how badly they got it wrong.

Two of the most intelligent economists/commentators in public life today, Former Labor Secretary and UC-Berkeley Professor of Public Policy Robert Reich and New York Times Columnist and Princeton Professor of Economics and International Affairs Paul Krugman, have been weighing in on this calamity, and their views are informative. You can find their work here – Robert Reich’s Blog & Recent Columns by Paul Krugman.  More detailed analysis can be found at the always-excellent Think Progress website as well.

Then you might wish to write your public servants in Congress…

Senator Richard Shelby - .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Senator Jeff Sessions - standard e-mail form here

Congressman Spencer Bachus -  https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml

Congressman Artur Davis -  .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Your own words are always most effective, but key words you might wish to include are: accountability, independent oversight, reform, “taxpayer equity stake”, executive salary & bonus cap - you get the picture…

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