|
| |
Interesting Times
Busy enough for you?
I’m trying to remember a news day where there was so much going on at once,
and I really can’t think of any. There’s the economic crisis or whatever it is.
There are the hearings in Congress on what to do about the economic crisis.
There is debate in the campaigns over doing something about the economic crisis,
including whether to keep campaigning.
Let’s see. North Korea, claiming the US reneged on its promise to remove NK from
the axis of terror list, threw the inspectors out and announced it would begin
processing plutonium tomorrow. Just how they were going to go about it wasn’t
clear. Pakistan staggers on the brink of either a complete national meltdown or
an armed revolution or both. Shocked residents are returning to what’s left of
Galveston, and it ain’t very much. A major scandal hit the McCain campaign as it
turned out that McCain was flat-out lying about his campaign aide’s fees, which
were paid by Freddy Mac. And documents today showed Rice, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld
discussing various methods of torture in the days following 9/11, and how to
sell it to the public as not being torture.
You know. Just a typical ho-hum day in what is the quietest time of the year as
far as politics go.
Word is the admin proposal on the bailout is in trouble. Conservatives don’t
like the idea of socializing all that free market debt, and liberals are
appalled at the idea of rewarding the very people who robbed us all blind. All
sides are upset about the lack of controls on CEO remuneration, the utter lack
of mention of reform, and most of all over the fact that Paulson would be free
to dispense all that money as he pleased, and would answer to nobody.
Christopher Dodd has a proposal circulating that DOES address all those issues,
and it’s gaining traction.
Except, of course, among the growing contingent in Congress who are questioning
if the bailout is needed, or even a good idea. A lot of people mistrust this
administration, and with good reason. They have a tendency to take major traumas
to the nation and turn them into cash cows.
George gave the nation a pep talk tonight, less than 15 minutes, and for a
presidential address given during a supposed grave national crisis, it got
little attention. NPR didn’t cover it, and neither did some of the network
affiliates. I caught the tail end on CBS, having looked in vain on BBC America
and Cspan, and I suspect that the only reason they broadcast it here in the west
was because it was the news slot, and Katie Couric is such a ratings dog that
substituting an address by Putsch could hardly do any damage. I flipped around
after catching the tail end of the speech, and was flabbergasted to see CNN go
straight back without comment to Larry King, and even Faux News, never at a loss
for reasons to adore a Republican president, also went back to their regular
program with no comment. I went back to CBS, where Kouric was telling her
audience that CBS would probably talk about it on the Morning Show tomorrow. If
you needed any evidence of just how irrelevant George has become, there it is.
The posturing and gaming over how the respective campaigns should react hit a
crescendo when McCain said he would suspend campaigning and asked Obama to delay
the debates. Obama refused to delay the debate, but he issued a joint statement
with McCain voting to work together to avoid disaster. The final paragraph, the
summation, read, “This is a time to rise above politics for the good of the
country. We cannot risk an economic catastrophe. Now is our chance to come
together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this
country.” Both men will meet at the White House Thursday to discuss options with
Putsch.
It was a risky set of moves for both. McCain, faced with bad news in the polls
and the increasing awareness that Sarah Palin was a mistake, risked looking like
he was running away. Obama risked looking like he was putting personal ambition
ahead of the country. But the joint statement, combined with the Presidential
request to attend, took both men off the hook.
As for the crisis itself: It looks like Congress is leaning toward the Chris
Dodd proposal, although of course any real prediction at this point is
foolishness. Party lines have all but evaporated, and the main division breaks
along the lines of “Can this administration be trusted?” and “If the situation
is so bad it needs a huge bailout, will the huge bailout even work?” A lot of
Republicans oppose the bailout. A lot of Democrats believe it’s necessary to
save the country from a Great Depression.
I have my own thoughts on that. Give the bailout to the home owners who are on
the hook with the mortgages. Pay the mortgages off for them. It’s probably less
than $700 billion, and not only will it instantly end the mortgage crisis, but
it will make the notes based on those mortgages good, and end the credit crunch.
Then resolve that the first order of business for Congress is a vast reform of
the entire derivatives complex, banning most of them, and such things as “pay
CEOs minimum wage plus an annual performance basis, and severance pay to be
based on the health of the company upon departure. The news that Lehman will pay
$2.5 billion in severance bonuses to the people who ran it into the ground
infuriated millions. Abolish investment banks, and sharply curtail what banks
can declare to be assets.
But that’s just the death of America and the end of the world stuff. There’s
other things going on.
North Korea claims they got screwed by the Americans, and they might have a
point. The US promised to take them off the terror watch if they decommissioned
their processing facility, which they did, and the US reneged, seeking further
guarantees. One big problem is that we don’t even know for sure if Kim Jong-Il
is even alive; he was a no-show at his recent national birthday celebration, and
there are strong rumors that he was severely incapacitated or even killed by a
stroke. So we don’t even know who we’re dealing with over there, if anybody.
Pakistan is about to erupt into civil war, brought about in large measure by
public fury over the new government’s inability to stop Americans from lobbing
missiles over the border into the al-Qaida held regions of Pakistan. The
American command doesn’t seem to understand that, irritating as the infestation
in Waziristan is, it’s not nearly as bad as a revolutionary Islamic republic
with Nukes across all of Pakistan will be. It’s unlikely the Indians would be
amused, and they are probably considering their own nuclear options if the new
government of Pakistan – a pro-western Bhutto-based regime – should fall.
Oh, I nearly forgot to mention Afghanistan itself. The US and NATO have combined
the two commands into one under American aegis, which is bound to make the NATO
people very nervous. America has done a poor job of occupying Afghanistan, to
the point where even Karzai, the Afghani leader loyal to America, admits the
Taliban is gaining significant ground among the population the Americans have so
effectively alienated.
Maybe we can get back to plain old politics by the weekend. I would never have
thought that, six weeks before a major election, I would be wondering when I
would get a chance to just talk about domestic politics, but here we are.
Hold on to your hats. We’re living in interesting times!
|