Journal ak3ldama's Journal: Section 8 of bailout!? 1
So Bush wants congress to act quickly on the housing market "fixup."
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.
I agree with others, we should let these idiots clean up their own pile of shit, re-instate Glass-Steagall, and let the markets recover eventually. I, as an American tax payer, don't want to pay for this trillion dollar loss especially when (unlike the past) there is no proper decision making for where this money goes and how we are to go about getting paid back. Fucking idiot republicans and democrats. If the Democrats let this through I will once again have lost hope.
Quoting the article now:
The deal proposed by Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations. It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc. He plans to retain Wall Street firms as advisors to decide just how to cut deals to value and mop up Wall Street's dubious paper. There are to be no limits on executive compensation for the firms that get relief, and no equity share for the government in exchange for this massive infusion of capital. Both Obama and McCain have opposed the provision denying any judicial review of decisions made by Paulson -- a provision that evokes the Bush administration's suspension of normal constitutional safeguards in its conduct of foreign policy and national security. [...]
The differences between this proposed bailout and the three closest historical equivalents are immense. When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s pumped a total of $35 billion into U.S. corporations and financial institutions, there was close government supervision and quid pro quos at every step of the way. Much of the time, the RFC became a preferred shareholder, and often appointed board members. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, which eventually refinanced one in five mortgage loans, did not operate to bail out banks but to save homeowners. And the Resolution Trust Corporation of the 1980s, created to mop up the damage of the first speculative mortgage meltdown, the S&L collapse, did not pump in money to rescue bad investments; it sorted out good assets from bad after the fact, and made sure to purge bad executives as well as bad loans. And all three of these historic cases of public recapitalization were done without suspending judicial review.
This is like the "PATRIOT" act (Score:2)
They wrote it well in advance, rubbing their hands, waiting for the day...
The pins were pulled on the economic 9/11 for the final days of Bush II - that way the stink wouldn't land on them. This one will build to a peak around, I'm guessing at February.
Didn't you always want to be the helpless, pro-freedom protagonist in a dystopian, corporate-totalitaruian society? It's like all that brave, romantic scientifiction, really.
Aquarela do Brasil