I Hope You're Happy

It would go like this:

Harry Reid: This Bill eliminates Too Big to Fail and Taxpayer Bailouts.

Barack Obama: It sure does, and it’s just what we need, right, Mitch McConnell?

Mitch McConnell: This bill guarantees Taxpayer bailouts.

Harry Reid: Um, no it doesn’t.

Mitch McConnell: What we don’t need to do right now is to overburden the financial industry with regulations.

Harry Reid: But then we’d be open to this happening again. We’d have solved nothing.

Mitch McConnell: Neener Neener.

Harry Reid: Well, let’s just get it out of committee.

Mitch McConnell: That bill was made behind closed doors with no input from Republicans.

Harry Reid: Um, there’s Republicans on that panel, and we took out provisions they didn’t like.

Mitch McConnell:This bill is unpopular.

Harry Reid: The polls say 66% of Americans support tough reforms so that this doesn’t happen again.

Mitch McConnell:The Senate is designed by our forefathers to be a body of great debate.

Harry Reid: Fine, let’s vote on cloture and then debate it on the full floor.

Mitch McConnell: We’ll philibuster.

Harry Reid: We’ll show the public how obstructionist you are.

Mitch McConnell: Uh, Uh…..(runs out of excuses)

Obama cuts funding for abstinence only education

More common sense returns to the world with this move. Or course, Sarah “Pregnant teenage daughter” Palin may have something blindly ironic and irrelevant to say about this. Abstinence education is the favorite sex-ed device for people whose religion tells them teenagers won’t involve themselves in sex if their sexually repressed teachers and parents tell them not to. Good luck on that one.

Jim Inhofe is the odd man out in climate committee

Sen. Jim Inhofe (remember him from Religulous? “There’s no IQ test to be a Congressman”) is the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment Committee, and yet, he’s a climate change denier. I guess there’s one in every crowd. Now it seems like he’s the only Republican on the committee who doesn’t believe, and he’s starting to get a little edgy. This should end well, probably with a brilliant anti-science God will save us all rant.

Rep. Alan Grayson apologizes for one of his many remarks

While calling a lobbyist a “whore” may be fairly accurate, it isn’t necessarily polite public discourse. Cum gargling gutter Trollup is probably the term he should have used. Really, Grayson is as sharp as Al Franken at this public discourse thing, and I don’t think he’s shooting his mouth off. I think he’s calculating his words for their impact and accuracy. Whether this one crossed the line to me is even questionable. He’s at least willing to stand up to lobbyists.

Too Big to Fail

FDIC Merges 9 new failed banks with US Bank

And the big banks grow bigger. Meanwhile…

Meanwhile Congress and Obama begin to look at more regulations and systems to break apart failing too big to fail companies.

Seems like they may have been better served by coming up with this idea a little earlier.

More Economy

Chris Dodd introduces bill to freeze credit card rates before his other bill takes effect

While both of these are pro-consumer bills, it just seems to me too little too late. We’ve already been screwed. It would be nice to have a congress that can anticipate what we need, rather than react when it’s already too late.

Even Fox News viewers blame Bush for the economy

58% of them, in fact.

Joe Lieberman, Democrats, WTF?

Joe Lieberman, who left the Democrats, campaigned for McCain in the last cycle and then had to beg for his chairmanship when McCain lost is now defying the Democrats on, of all things, health care.

What he’s thinking

Basically he’s thinking like a Republican.

Chairmanships ain’t free

While I dislike this element of politics, Lieberman was perfectly clear about the cost of retaining his seat, and that was voting with the Democrats when they needed it. I’d hate to mention this to the Dems, but I told you so. Lieberman is a Republican except when he sucks enough people off, and we just need to get him out of the Senate.

And yet, he’s planning on campaigning for Republicans in 2010

Why is this not a surprise? I knew the bleeding hearts would get broken this way.

Lieberman was against the filibuster in ‘94, but he’s all for it now

As a Freshman Senator, he introduced a bill to do away with the arcane procedure. Now he’s embracing it as a big “fuck you” to the Democrats.

The net result of the big bailouts of AIG and other “too big to fail” financial institutions is they’ve become larger and more “too big to fail.” The debate as the bailout happened was whether we should allow these companies to fail or should we bail them out. We were assured the institutions were strong enough to survive, that we’d see the money back with interest, that our investments were safe and necessary. A highly publicized stress test helped reassure us this was the case. Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner told is it was necessary.

Now the auditor general of the bailout is telling us we were misled, that these institutions are not sound.
I have a thing against big business at times, and this is one of those times. AIG and the rest of these banks got greedy, and a little too big for their britches. If you want to trace the origin of these troubling times, you can find it in hubris and greed. When hubris and greed take over, people and the rest of the world ceases to be relevant. The result is the disaster we are currently enjoying, these desperate for revenues but won’t tax more except for these little fee increases here and here, highly unemployed, desperate times.

Every time a bank fails, it gets bought out, and another bank becomes larger, at least in terms of its deposits and customer base are concerned. AIG and some of its brethren are fairly unchanged, and the financial derivative products that caused all this mess are now the same products that are being looked upon to bring us out of this mess. Used to be history would run in long, slow cycles, but these cycles have picked up so much, we could practically hook them up to a turbine and call them a green energy source. We’ve completely lost our collective short term memory. We’ve reached the point in the Jumping Jesus Phenomena that the poor guy is on a pogo stick.

There is a phenomena in Hollywood where people who make bad movies get more chances (Joel Schumacher is a good example), and so they fail upwards. Is AIG going to be the same thing, or can we stop it before it makes the financial industry version of “Batman and Robin?”

Might it not have been a more constructive path to split these companies into smaller companies that could compete for available business, hire more people, and each pursue their own fortunes and expansion?

Similar things have happened before, but more often for anti-trust actions. Remember when we split  Ma Bell into the babybells? What if we had made baby AIG’s? We’d have created a lot of that competition we talk about in the Health Care debate. As we did this, the companies would have needed a whole new infrastructure of people, IT departments, HR departments, marketing and printing and advertising, sales forces, too. We’d lick that whole unemployment problem a bit faster.

Of course, if the bailout isn’t enough, there’s still time to do this, or just let them fail. Instead of making too big to fail companies bigger so that we can await the next bailout, why not punish them so they are small enough that they could be allowed to fail on their own merit. I’m just saying.