Here is the current draft for the latest plan. It's elegantly simple. The three key provisions: (1) The Treasury Secretary is authorized to buy up to $700 billion of any mortgage-related assets (so he can just transfer that amount to any corporations in exchange for their worthless or severely crippled "assets") [Sec. 6]; (2) The ceiling on the national debt is raised to $11.3 trillion to accommodate this scheme [Sec. 10]; and (3) best of all: "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" [Sec. 8].
Put another way, this authorizes Hank Paulson to transfer $700 billion of taxpayer money to private industry in his sole discretion, and nobody has the right or ability to review or challenge any decision he makes.
THESE PEOPLE ARE CLEVER
ReplyDeletethey worked up to this, diligently, because only in the current climate - obedient media, precarity on ever level - would this be imaginable
ReplyDeleteand if in January 2002 you said this was the goal, you would have been called paranoid wearer of tin foil hat, though it was obvious already
ReplyDeletegreenwald says: "The people who did this have no fear of anything -- they completely lack the kind of healthy fear that impedes reckless behavior -- because they know how our Government works and that they control it and thus believe that their capacity to suffer is limited in the extreme. And they're right about that.
ReplyDeleteWhat's most vital to underscore is that the beneficiaries of this week's extraordinary Government schemes aren't just the coincidental recipients of largesse due to some random stroke of good luck. The people on whose behalf these schemes are being implemented -- the true beneficiaries -- are the very same people who have been running and owning our Government -- both parties -- for decades, which is why they have been able to do what they've been doing without interference. They were able to gamble without limit because they control the Government, and now they're having others bear the brunt of their collapse for the same reason -- because the Government is largely run for their benefit.
If there is any "pitchfork moment" -- an episode that understandably would send people into the streets in mass outrage -- it would be this. Nobody really even seems to know how much of these losses "the Government" -- meaning working people who had no part in the profits from these transactions -- is undertaking virtually overnight but it's at least a trillion dollars, an amount so vast it's hard to comprehend, let alone analyze in terms of consequences. The transactions are way too complex even for the most sophisticated financial analysts to understand, let alone value.
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right; a lesson learned from the junk bond and insider trader scandals even more than the s and l; the prosecutions in those cases took over a month with the juries just to teach them the basics, what was legal and illegal. there was a good article in the new yorker once upon a time about it, concerning the prosecution of one of boesky's colleagues; just teaching the jury the business, so they could understand 'parking' etc, took a month.
worth reading if you know someone with the complete new yorker
ReplyDeletethe jury was never really able to understand how the system works, what's legal and what isn't. juries today would be even less capable of grasping the reality. even the sophisticated WSJ reader is baffled, and the depths of the stupidity of the liberal educted nyt reader has been proven over recent years, not only buying zizek and the dubyaemdee tales but going along with the smears of einhorn and all this outrageously blatant stufff.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/welcome-to-the-final-stag_b_127990.html
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