Felix Salmon can’t find any economists enthusiastic about the bailout plan:
…this is not the kind of unanimity from the blogosphere which one finds in cases of clear-cut idiocy like John McCain’s proposal during the primaries to temporarily abolish gasoline taxes. No one’s saying that Paulson is stupid or that an argument can’t be made for his plan. It’s just that no one seems to be making that argument.
Frampton Mansell, Gloucestershire, England, 8 am.
The WaPo notes the historically unprecedented attempt by a vice-presidential nominee to hide from press accountability:
Mr. McCain is entitled to choose the person he thinks would be best for the job. He is not entitled to keep the public from being able to make an informed assessment of that judgment. Ms. Palin’s speech-making skills are impressive, but the more she repeats the same stump speech lines, the queasier we get. Nor have her answers to the gentle questioning she has encountered provided any confidence that Ms. Palin has a grasp of the issues.
There are only a few weeks to go before the United States may pick a potential president who has never given a press conference as a candidate for national office. This is not a functioning democracy.
Hilzoy on the bailout:
Deciding what to do about the present financial crisis is beyond anything remotely resembling my expertise. However, like Steve Benen, I’ve been reading around, and I can’t find a single decent economist who likes the plan. That scares me, since I expect that the political dynamics will go something like this: Paulson has proposed a plan; not to accept it would deeply damage confidence in the markets and make things much worse, regardless of whether it’s a good plan or not; therefore, it will be passed. I hope the Democrats try to get some decent regulation and structural reform for all that money.
From the NYT:
At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates.
McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.
Are you fucking kidding me? We are now rigging the debate formats to compensate for a know-nothing, mendacious Manchurian candidate drilled in meaningless talking points? And the Obama team agreed to this? And so did the press?
Yes, she believes in them. Of course she believes in them. Her former pastor believes that Alaska will be the refuge for the faithful in the lower 48 states when the Rapture comes. She is a Biblical literalist who denies evolution – who has to deny evolution – to remain in her church. She believes – because she has to believe – that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. And she believes that the Apocalypse will start in the Middle East. Sam Harris sees it clearly, as usual:
Palin’s spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?
It is now 24 days since she was announced as a potential president of the United States next January and she still hasn’t given a news conference or has any plans to hold one. This black-out of all serious press access has never happened in modern American political history before.
If that doesn’t concern you, what will?
A reader writes:
It is not often we (my husband and I) find ourselves hearing real logic and human concern from a conservative these days. Though we know you all are out there, few examples seem to make it to the political shows or within sight of the media. We also found ourselves listening intently to your, and the young musician’s feelings and thoughts on faith. As religious skeptics who believe in a higher power (yet reject organized religion) we are often appalled by our country’s religious right. But we understood and empathized with both your views. It was a great moment – we found ourselves, as Democrats in our early 40’s, having common beliefs with a conservative and a Rapper. We are desperately hoping to have more of these moments in the near future.
We will be voting for Senator Obama.
I’m more than a little queasy about this bail-out and this reader sums up my feelings almost perfectly:
After nearly eight years, the phrase "trust us" no longer works. Now we’re presented with a historically unprecedented bailout proposal for the nation’s financial institutions. I have a jumble of differing reactions to this. First, for years the Republicans have sold us a deregulation mantra and suggested that any form of regulation is "socialism." But anyone who’s actually read Adam Smith knows that he and other philosophers of free markets made plain from the outset that the state needs to guard the integrity of the marketplace. Smith says that there is a dark side to the entrepreneurial spirit that the state must guard against. This is not a rejection of market economics–it’s a protection of the market place against those who abuse the freedoms it offers.
Second, we are as usual placed in a position in which great pressure is brought to bear to quickly accept a deal which will reverberate for decades without close inspection.
We are again told that things are vastly complicated and we should trust Treasury and the Fed to do the right thing. My trust reservoir is exhausted. I actually respect Paulson, but I also believe he is "playing the hand he’s been dealt," as he said. This is not the way decisions should be taken that have long-term consequences for the nation’s future. If in fact all of this bubbled to the surface quickly, without being anticipated, then the folks at Treasury are incompetent. However, I don’t believe that for a second–I am convinced that in this case, again, the Bush Administration knew what was up and calculated that it could just muddle through until after the elections. We should all be apprehensive about what is coming after election day.
Third, the administration’s proposals continue a process of socializing loss and preserving profits and distributions, many of which were made with full knowledge of the pending losses. When management distributes illusory profits to insiders in full knowledge of a massive loss, this is called a fraudulent conveyance, and in equity proceedings such distributions are routinely recovered for the creditor mass. There should therefore be a careful scrutiny of distributions of profits and bonuses by failed firms. The bailout we now see may mean effectively that taxpayer money is subsidizing the purchase of macmansions and Bentleys by investment managers who behaved irresponsibly. How can that happen? Only in the age of Bush.
Fourth, I really started steaming this morning reading the NYT article about the participation of foreign banks in the bailout. Granted that the US has an interest in protecting financial markets, but why should the US be bailing out German and UK firms? At least this should be a burden shared with their own governments. This really needs to be subject to some probing questions. What’s going on here?
(Photo: Hank Paulson by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)
This is no longer debatable. Whatever the caliber of their enemies, these people aided and abetted one of the most evil political systems in human history – and betrayed their country to do so.
Yglesias, drunk-blogging the bailout proposal:
…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.
The Dish 