We are witnessing the third daring, broad-daylight heist by the bush administration. This one is the most audacious, the most daring of all. This is The Apotheosis of The Shock Doctrine. After kicking a cool TRILLION to "contractors" in no-bid contracts and "cost plus" contracts in Iraq, and after eagerly jumping at the opportunity to rebuild New Orleans at a cost of hundreds of billions that never seem to find their way to the victims, the bush administration could not resist one more chance to exploit a national disaster. Welcome to BUST OUT III - The Wall Street Caper.
There is something very familiar about the eagerness and urgency with which republicans - free market fetishists, all - have lunged at the opportunity to come to the aid of Wall Street with up to one trillion taxpayer dollars. As with Iraq, and as with Hurricane Katrina, this NEOconservative version of republicanism is delighted to increase government spending, as long as it gets spent in the right direction. Every time there's a disaster - Iraq, Katrina, Wall Street - the bush administration and their republican pimps start throwing around money like confetti, and it always ends up in the hands of their friends.
KBR and Blackwater walk away with billions. Our troops get electrocuted in the shower.
New Orleans is choked with trailers, trucks parked with supplies, and contractors with exclusive contracts and no apparent purpose, while New Orleans is left to rot.
And now we have the bush administration getting ready to rain a trillion dollars on Wall Street under the guise of a national emergency. Hank Paulson wants an agreement by the end of next week! Meanwhile, no one has even proposed any kind of plan, other than "let's lavish a trillion dollars on Wall Street."
After running through the $85 billion AIG bailout without so much as even consulting Congress (how do Paulson and Treasury justify a special $40 billion Treasury auction to fund an expenditure not authorized by Congress?), the bush administration wants to grab another cool TRILLION DOLLARS within a matter of days, and within 7 weeks of an election that could remove them from power. And Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi stand there with dazed looks on their faces while Paulson asks them to endorse a check for a THIRTEEN FIGURE sum.
Are we about to let the bush administration pull a ONE TRILLION DOLLAR HEIST in the very last days of its reign of error? Will democrats really be stampeded, afraid to be accused by republicans of failing to respond to The Crisis?
If this crisis requires a trillion dollars, then let's spend a trillion dollars. But let's make sure the party that takes control of the executive branch in January is the party that controls that trillion dollars. Only a small part of that trillion dollars will be expended in the next seven weeks. Let's make sure that there are not contracts signed, and commitments made, in the next seven weeks that tie the hands of the government that assumes power in January. Because as sure as Iraq and New Orleans, the bush administration will want to steer as much of that trillion as they can to well-connected cronies in the form of no-bid contracts to provide, well, nothing.
The democrats must make it clear right now that they will not be stampeded, that they will appropriate funds as they are required to address the near-term consequences of this republican-made catastrophe, but they will not be bumrushed into a vague and spectacularly expensive scheme that authorizes the government to commit hundreds of billions of dollars between now and January 20, 2009.
If Congress gets rolled by bush and Paulson, you can be sure that billions spent between now and Inauguration Day will find their way back to republican coffers in the next few years, and will fund the republican's war to achieve the next "permanent republican majority", which is itself a war on democracy.
We've seen this movie before - a "crisis" that could have been averted but for republican incompetence and deceit, hundreds of billions appropriated to respond to the crisis, and hundreds of billions that are subsequently unaccounted for, appropriated through "supplemental budget measures and "off-budget" expenditures, lost to unprosecuted fraud, no-bid contracts, and even plane loads of billions in cash flying off to Iraq.
Democrats, don't get rolled by bush again. Tell Hank Paulson this bailout of Wall Street will be a pay-as-you-go arrangement, without a single dollar more committed to be spent before January 20, 2009 than is absolutely necessary to address this problem.